Evil sex cults are on the rise.

Among them are the leaders of Orgasmic Meditation (OM) — group workshops of intense clitoral stimulation.

Orgasmic Meditation was once a fun-hearted, therapeutic way for women to climax with a room full strangers. But the leadership of the Orgasmic Meditation movement has turned down a dark road. Reports are now surfacing of the movement’s manipulative ways, which have pushed members into sexual servitude and five-figure debts.

The source of the problem is the source of Orgasmic Meditation itself, a company called OneTaste, and its charismatic leader, Nicole Daedone.

OneTaste is a sexuality-focused wellness education company based out of San Francisco. The business made it big on its trademarked procedure, the now-famous “orgasmic meditation,” in which a man vigorously strokes a woman’s clitoris.

The practice is structured — the exact same every single time — where the “stroker” wears a glove, applies a generous amount of lube to one fingertip, and rubs at the “one o'clock position” for exactly 15 minutes. No kissing, no foreplay, and no penetration.

Practitioners will tell you: this is powerful stuff.

Amy McBain believed so strongly in the power of Orgasmic Meditation that she started her own company to practice it. She called it Intentional Orgasm. During Intentional Orgasm sessions, McBain gives clients a couple hours of guided meditation, and then concludes each session with an orgasm. She brings clients to climax with her own two hands.

“Orgasm is the most powerful energetic experience a person can have,” she tells Rooster Magazine. “Everyone deserves to receive pleasure just for the sake of receiving pleasure — knowing they don’t owe anything back to me or have to take care of my pleasure.”

Despite Orgasmic Meditation’s incredible potential, McBain believes the movement’s figurehead is taking the practice in a destructive direction.

“I really don’t like what the founder did with Orgasmic Meditation. Her name is Nicole Daedone, and her ego got wrapped up into it,” McBain says. “She actually tried to patent the term ‘Orgasmic Meditation’ so nobody else could use it. To me, that is the antithesis of what we want to bring to these types of practices. Then, she created a multi-level marketing model where you have to climber higher and higher in the echelons of the company to really be a part of it.”

It’s true. As 16 former members of OneTaste explained to Bloomberg, they were pushed to violate their own financial, emotional, and physical boundaries, just to get closer to the center of the company, where OM experts could provide them sexual and spiritual enlightenment.

To climb the ranks, members had to join the sales team, where they were pressured to engage in predatory sales practices. They preyed on people’s weakness — desires to overcome anxiety or resolve a sexual trauma, for example — to sell the company’s overpriced “wellness” courses.

Currently, students pay $499 for a weekend course, $4,000 for a retreat, $12,000 for the coaching program, and $16,000 for an “intensive.” There’s also the year-long $60,000 membership, which grants students access to all the courses they want.

To make paying for these courses easier, OneTaste taught members that “money is just an emotional obstacle.” It taught employees to work for free or cheap to show devotion. It encouraged them to take out multiple credit cards to buy more courses.

The cherry on top of OneTaste’s sketchy practices is its use of sex and flirtation to lure in emotionally vulnerable targets. Leaders would frequently order employees to OM with or have sex with customers to sell them on a new course. Many former employees agree that while they worked there, the company started to resemble a prostitution ring.

However, McBain believes that she can take Orgasmic Meditation in a much more healthy direction than OneTaste ever did. She’s broadened its strict set of rules to create a practice she calls “Yoni Whispering.”

“Orgasmic Meditation is literally just rubbing the right upper quadrant of a woman’s clit for 15 minutes. I had it done, but it felt very lacking to me,” McBain says. “So I took that, and expanded on it. Why does it have to be just the clit? Yoni whispering is a more expansive free form of the idea of Orgasmic Meditation. It activates the internal clit and external clit and vagina and integrates all of it as meditative practice.”

It’s impossible to know if McBain’s new-and-improved version of Orgasmic Meditation will grow to the massive scale that OneTaste’s practice has. If it does, it’s impossible to know if McBain will be a more ethically-aligned leader of sexual enlightenment than the last one was.

Could McBain avoid the pitfalls of previous sex cults? Like NXIVM, a self-help organization that recruited members to have sex with its leader and branded them like cattle. Or the Rajneeshpuram, the community featured in Wild Wild Country, which resulted in a historic bioterror attack of hundreds of innocent Americans?

Ultimately, it’s become abundantly clear that we’re starving for more understanding around sexuality. Until we meet those unfulfilled needs, predators will continue to prey on them.