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“deliberate orgasm,” as the practice was called, was neither sex nor masturbation. It unlinked sexual experience from love and romance in the way that casual sex never had. “Rather than actually feeling the sex I would feel the relationship,” Daedone said. “I was very sneaky about never confronting my genitals as genitals.” She meant, I think, that her former sex encounters were not satisfying because she was focusing on the relationship/intimacy, and diluting the physical. Deliberate orgasm was a sexual technique that allowed for an intimate connection but preserved an emotional distance, a sexual practice that allowed one to be close to another person while remaining autonomous. Her partner needed only to know what he was doing and respect the boundaries of the process. She did not have to love or even like him. I saw the appeal: if this strange method of sexual communication between friends could be available to everyone, then a feeling of sexual connection need not be such a rare thing, but as common as friendship itself. It could happen abundantly, with people who failed every ideal of perfection.

Daedone began to hypothesize was that love and relationships in an era of sexual freedom followed an obsolete system of “crossed wires.” She described it as a difference between the map and the territory. Men and women believed that certain sexual behaviors would reward them with certain results: fidelity would be recognized with long and happy marriages, or honesty would be met with honesty. When these ideas of sexual propriety failed to deliver the expected results, people mistakenly blamed personal deficiencies rather than systemic ones.

As many have before her, Daedone suspected the problem lay not in people, but in the network of rules and expectations that govern adult life. In particular, the tendency of women to link sexual desire with so many arbitrary expectations and consequences that they cannot focus on the sexual experience itself. Orgasmic meditation, she concluded, would be the neutral space in which focus on the body could happen without the interference of romantic stories or behavioral conditioning.

“A Pleasurable Place for Your Body to Be.” Their stated mission was “to bring orgasm back into the world conversation and back into our bodies.” The warehouse had a space that could be rented for private events. It had a store. They offered yoga and meditation classes, workshops, massages, and books about sexuality. A 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle described their naked yoga classes as “transforming, not titillating.” The residents of the warehouse also experimented among themselves. Daedone does not speak in great detail about this, other than calling it the phase of “research and development.” The rooms in the warehouse had no doors. At its most active, fifty people lived communally in the space, essentially volunteer human research subjects inhabiting a petri dish. They would rise each morning early, at 7:00 a.m, then they would undergo a group session called Withholds, a discussion technique where communal residents voiced suppressed thoughts or feelings about one another. Then they wrote in journals or practiced yoga.

The sexual research of the house’s residents went beyond the practice of orgasmic meditation, although residents would OM two or three times a day. A person with whom one shared a bed was called a “research partner,” and research partners would invite each other over for “sleepovers.” Through sex and discussion about sex they pushed the boundaries of jealousy: an awareness of being near a partner, for example, while he slept with someone new, or forcing people to continue to communicate with each other even in the middle of the worst emotional upheavals. They explored the particularities of sexual responses by women who had experienced trauma or had eating disorders. They looked at how a woman’s sexual experience might evolve with age. They discussed how a man should respond when a woman starts crying during sex, or how a man can discern a woman’s sexual satisfaction if she does not vocalize her enjoyment. The communal nature of the experience was essential. If a difficulty arose, the resident would have the rest of the group there to discuss the problem. If the world at large condemned their sexuality, the numbers of the group would reinforce the worth of the experimentation.

According to one former resident, who spent three or four months in the warehouse in 2008 when he was in his mid-twenties, “there wasn’t that much sex happening,” despite “the sounds of orgasm rippling through the warehouse through the day”. “We teach men not to ask and women not to offer for at least a year, or six months,”. The idea is to eliminate the notion of sex as a reciprocal servicing contract, and to encourage women who consider the needs of others before their own to learn how to receive rather than give.) The former warehouse resident found his experience living there beneficial, especially the work to eradicate gender-based preconceptions about sexuality.

During a workshop,

Daedone lamented that we had all returned to our usual, comfortable state of sexual repression. This was true. I felt much more relaxed. She said this was a mistake. “A group of people gets very uncomfortable when things get hot,” she said. “This practice is necessarily uncomfortable.” So before we proceeded, she asked us to go around the room and talk about our feelings some more. “The whole thing is for each person in this room to become who they are,”