Can You Orgasm Your Way To Your Dream Life?
TikTokers claim the O Method has brought them health, wealth, and happiness. But what are the consequences of eroticizing your ambition?
Happy Friday! Here’s an excerpt from my latest piece in Bustle: an article on orgasmic manifestation, and how sex magick found a second life on the internet.
You can read the full piece HERE, and I’ll be back to you next week with a new essay.
Picture yourself in a penthouse apartment, calling to pay off your student loans in one large lump sum. Or on a beach in Morocco, face to face with your handsome lover. Or playing a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, a cheering crowd chanting your name.
Such fantasies aren’t idle daydreams; they’re central to “the O Method,” a masturbation-cum-manifestation technique that centers on visualizing your goals the moment you climax. At its core, the practice embraces sexual pleasure as a generative force — an idea that’s central to tantra, and has appeared in texts on sex magick dating back to the 19th century. But these days, you’re most likely to come across it on TikTok, where droves of women share videos about how the technique helped them “level up” their finances, careers, and relationships. This kind of content racks up millions of views, with creators promising “instant results” and women comparing notes in the comments.
“A lot of people are talking about orgasm manifestation online,” says content creator Venus O’Hara, “but I’m not sure they know what it actually is.”
O’Hara came upon the concept in 2018 when she was working as a freelance sex writer in Barcelona. At the time, she was struggling to make ends meet. “I lived in a tiny walk-up apartment, with no heat, no pillow, no table, no sofa,” she says. “And 300 sex toys.”
One particularly dreary night, O’Hara was forced to walk home in a downpour, not having money for a cab or umbrella. It was a rock bottom moment — and the next day she decided something had to change. She started looking into self-help and picked up a copy of Think and Grow Rich, a 2007 bestseller by Napoleon Hill (who, I later learn, was accused of numerous counts of financial fraud). His book introduced O’Hara to the concept of channeling sexual energy, leading her down an Internet rabbit hole that culminated in a YouTube video titled “How to Manifest With Orgasm.”
Galvanized, O’Hara put those sex toys to work. “At first, I was just thinking about graphs going up, exponential growth, and emails with collaboration proposals,” she says. Then she started merging sexual fantasies with visions of her ideal lifestyle: “Imagining being in my dream apartment, but also receiving cunnilingus in that apartment. Any type of desire that I had, I made it erotic.”
Read the rest of the article on Bustle’s website.
Thank you to the Pleasure-Seeking readers who shared their stories, and to my lovely editor Chloe Joe. Have a great weekend!
XOXO
Camille