The conference was at least half full of men, young and old. During the training session, a young man named Eli, a One Taste coach from Brooklyn, told us what he takes from the experience.

One man asked him: Why bother? What does a man get from sitting there stroking a woman and not receiving hands-on pleasure in return? “As a stroker I am learning to feel,” Eli said, “to put my finger on this incredibly sensational spot on a living breathing organism, to come into contact with so much life in one particular place.” He also spoke about his white middle class male privilege and how he had to really check it at the door. “For me this is one thing that is not going according to my ride.” What he does: “Feel where the sensation is and meet it on its terms. I have to actually be willing to sit down and feel what’s right. I have a felt sense that I didn’t have before this.”

OM, they said in the training, “is a practice. It follows a very specific set of guidelines. It is a specific container. It is its own sovereign thing. No offers or expectations.” It is separate from sex, from foreplay, from what happens in the bedroom. It is a meditation, an isolated and contained practice meant to bring the “stroker” and the “strokee” to a deeper sense of awareness. Daedone explained in the keynote: “For me it is the same if I am on my back or I’m stroking. I am surrendering more to her orgasm than she is surrendering to me, but we are both surrendering to the same thing.”

OM-ing is essentially a 15 minute partnered exercise. The stroker strokes the upper left hand quadrant of the clitoris without a finite goal. “There is no trying to get enlightened,” they explained at our demo, “Climax doesn’t mean [you’ve done it] right or wrong. If you get into the position you have already done it right.” Their message is that women should be climaxing more and this comes through feeling, trusting, undoing subconscious patriarchal conditioning, and letting go.

“The clitoris alone has two times as many nerve endings as the entire penis,” explained one instructor. The kind of touch they suggest: “A slow, light, feel-every-ridge-on-your-fingertip kind of stroke.” The idea is that the woman learns to feel more nuanced elements of pleasure and the stroker, through observing and exploring the strokee's experience and what it elicits in his own body, then comes into closer contact with himself.

The practice, as they preach it, is maybe 10 percent technique, 90 percent feeling. “If you are looking for technique,” they warned, “you are in the wrong place.”

Still, the practice is more complicated than I realized. The conference seemed peppy, silly, cultish and irritating until I bought into it. A guy in a top hat was my partner and it worked, the whole scary thing worked. I was in a room with a whole bunch of strangers and all we cisgendered women took our pants off. We let the strangers do this thing to us that felt, really, like an extreme version of going to the gynecologist. Yes, 15 minutes is a long time. Yes, I learned to ask for what I wanted. And yes, the results were amazing. By the third day of the conference I was a convert. I was touching people too much, and attentively listening to the benefits of orgasm.