The "O-Man" claims that 95 per cent of his clients have multiple orgasms under his guidance. Photo / Getty Images
Warning: This article contains graphic content of a sexual nature which may not be suitable for all readers.
The O-Man claims he can improve women’s sex lives, even from 8,000km away in California. Jane Mulkerrins fires up her laptop, but does the earth move for her?
It’s a drizzly Monday afternoon in Brighton and I’m lying on the floor of my flat, naked from the waist down with one leg up against the wall, while a bearded man in his thirties whom I have never met issues instructions at me, via Zoom, from 8,000km away.
First, he tells me to “stab” myself in the upper thigh with the business end of a large blue vibrator, then repeat the action on my other thigh, then my rib cage on either side, then my jaw. Eventually, he directs me to apply it to the more traditional, time-honoured region, watching me closely as his directions - and the large blue vibrator - audibly achieve the intended result. I am grateful that my positioning means while he can see me, I cannot see him right now. And that Carole, my 83-year-old upstairs neighbour, is slightly deaf.
The self-styled, Los Angeles-based “O-Man” claims to be able to make women orgasm more times, more intensely and for longer than ever - even (especially) those who have never been able to reach orgasm before. He estimates that he has worked with more than 500 women in the past four years - some, like me, remotely, but others in person at his apartment in North Hollywood - with prices starting at US$800 ($1300) an hour, and that satisfied clients include “New Jersey housewives”, “the ex-wives of people who have made the most influential people in the world list” and even, he says, “somebody on vacation here who was a British MP who pretended she wasn’t a British MP”.
Breathless reviews on internet chatrooms report double-digit, earth-shattering orgasms, both during and following appointments. And yet their technician is conflicted about his growing reputation. Fearing a backlash against his mission and methods - the idiosyncratic and self-taught “O-System” - from myriad sources, including the wellness community (“In spaces like wellness where you’re saying something that could ruin a lot of people’s narratives, I would rather prove that what I’m saying is right first”), this climax Jedi asks that his clients don’t reveal his name (although he accepts that if a television show about him, which he says is mooted, comes off, his cover will be blown). We’ll just call him M.
He works with couples, but mostly with individual women, and is robustly confident about his technique. He claims that 95 per cent of clients have multiple orgasms under his guidance.
Certainly, M appears to be doing more than his fair share to close the “orgasm gap”, the purported disparity in rates of orgasm between men and women. Research this summer from a survey of 24,000 single Americans aged 18 to 100 found that men reported orgasms between 70 and 85 per cent of the time during sex, while women reported orgasms just 46 to 58 per cent of the time.
Given this gap, it is little wonder that the orgasm industry - or, to use the more coy, contemporary lingo, “sexual wellness” market, which is valued at an estimated £64 billion ($138b) in 2023 - is booming. Billions of dollars of Silicon Valley start-up money is pouring into sex tech and developing products such as the world’s first “smart vibrator”, the £165 ($355) Lioness, which records and transposes data from pelvic floor contractions to create graphs of women’s orgasms (I tested it and proudly discovered that, while most women’s are either a wave or a waterfall, mine resembles a tsunami), and more holistic offerings, such as the US$45 ($75) Libido gummies, “formulated to enhance sexual arousal and stimulation (female) or function (male) through natural ingredients that increase blood flow, naturally boost testosterone and alleviate stress”, by the Brooklyn-based company Maude.
Meanwhile, explicit sexual instruction has gone mainstream. The California-based sex educator Emily Morse offers “mindful masturbation” masterclasses on the same platform as Hillary Clinton teaches the Power of Resilience and George W Bush imparts wisdom on Authentic Leadership.
Such classes, while proliferating and growing in popularity, are not new. The late and gloriously ribald sex educator Betty Dodson, who flashed me, aged 90, when I interviewed her in 2020, began her radical Bodysex classes, in which she taught groups of women to masturbate to orgasm in her Midtown Manhattan apartment, in the early Seventies.
But M, 39, is not a sex educator or therapist or any sort of doctor but a former joke-writer for Joan Rivers turned personal trainer. And he believes, contrary to much popular messaging, that what is holding women back from brain-melting orgasms is not psychological, social or societal, is probably not stress, or tiredness or trauma, or shame or the patriarchy (well, not entirely), but simply our posture.
Our spines and pelvises are misaligned from modern life, he says, and our hips, hands and shoulders are tight, which means the muscles that control our orgasms are not “firing” properly. By rapidly realigning our joints - even remotely - he claims that he can make the earth move for us all.
Unlike many of his clients, I’ve never struggled in this department - I’m not bragging, that’s just not my cross to bear - but I believe everyone can do better.
So, here I am, on my back on a Monday afternoon for the sake of science. “It’s not an established science - yet,” says M. “But it always works.”
A couple of days before our scheduled session, and after some logistics-based WhatsApping (“Monday I’ll be getting you off remotely”), we have a preliminary consultation over Zoom. M’s apartment appears to be mostly an extensive home gym, where he trains people - in your standard strength stuff as well as all the sex. He has dark, wavy hair, a slightly nerdy manner and a beard, which he pulls at absentmindedly as he goes through the science of his O-System with me.
Orgasms are an involuntary muscle response, he says. I already know this, thanks to a very involuntary one I had once while sitting on a Power Plate to stretch out my glutes and hamstrings after a run.
For that involuntary muscle response to happen properly in the pelvic floor, he says, the other muscles have to be engaged, or “firing”, too. He explains about tonic and phasic muscles (the ones attached to your skeleton that hold you together, versus the smaller ones geared towards mobility; crucially, the pelvic floor is mostly phasic) and how phasic muscle imitates tonic muscle, so if the tonic muscle is stable, the phasic will be too.
He points out that men’s quads and glutes (both phasic muscles) are generally stretched and worked during sex, whereas - unless they are on top - women’s often are not. In a passive, supine position - your basic missionary - our phasic and core muscles are just not firing.
Then, he says, there are all the other negative forces exerted upon women: our shoes (“High heels are the greatest enemy to a misaligned body imaginable”) and our bras, which strangle our rib cages and “push you into extension”, both of which give us tight lower backs and legs; our handbags, which cause our shoulders to creep up and crick our necks; and our desk jobs thoroughly wreck our backs, necks, shoulders, hips and legs.
We are all out of whack, posture-wise, and our wonky pelvises mean our pelvic floors can’t fire on all cylinders. M asks me to position my laptop so he can take a screenshot of me standing, side-on, facing two different directions. He then uses software to analyse the position of my shoulders and hips. He deduces that, on top of all the usual wreckage inflicted by sitting at a desk all day, wearing shoes and carrying bags, thanks to breaking my left shoulder several years ago, my right shoulder is compensating and is internally rotated, as is my right hip, while my left hip is externally rotated.
He logs off to go and plan the exercises we will be doing to correct my posture, loosen and extend my tight spots and “give you a bunch of the best orgasms you’ve ever had”.
M grew up in rural Illinois, where, he says, his early relationship with sex and sexuality “wasn’t good, because the first sexual experiences I had weren’t things that I chose”. He was subjected to abuse (he doesn’t want to go into details), but he believes it has informed his work now. “I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t hurting anybody,” he says.
He is neurodivergent. “I [have] ADHD, and there might be a little bit of autism too,” he says. “I’m not sure because they didn’t have tests for that then. And I have to be sure that somebody is having a good experience, and the easiest way for me to do that was to make sure that they wouldn’t stop moaning.”
He first discovered his O-System by happy accident when, in 2019, a woman he was dating complained that her hips hurt. As a personal trainer who also dabbled in a bit of recreational BDSM, “I was like, well, I think if I tie you to my ceiling and put you in a kneeling chair and then use a vibrator, I can release your back. And then I did that and her hips didn’t hurt, her back didn’t hurt and she came 20 times.”
He admits that even he doubted the implications of his discovery. “I’m like, it can’t be,” he says. “Is that it? Is it really just body positioning and muscles? And then I just thought, how am I going to get people to believe this?”
The woman in question posted about him on a sex-positive Facebook group and urged other women to go and see him too. Then, during the pandemic in 2020, with Covid-ravaged Los Angeles in lockdown and nobody coming to see him, M used the time productively and formally developed his programme, the O-System, spinning his hobby into a paid-for service.
When he told his family about his new job, they didn’t speak to him for two years. “It would be easier to lean into OnlyFans because it’s an established career and you’re not spitting in the face of established science,” he says. His romantic life has not suffered though. “I date a lot of people,” he says.
M’s confidence, which can sometimes veer quite close to smugness, is tempered by a rebellious, revolutionary streak. “If everybody knew how to align their bodies and get themselves out of pain, which is a goal that I have overall, guess what happens to all these people that are charging women for all these different things that don’t work,” he says.
I like the notion that my much promised orgasms will not only be in the pursuit of science, but will also be striking a blow to the patriarchy and the capitalist machine.
On Monday afternoon, after watching one of M’s webinars that explains the positions I will be trying, I head home, close the curtains, charge up my largest vibrator — M has told me that in addition to its advertised purpose, we will be using it to loosen my joints and muscles — and Zoom in, trying not to think too hard about the fact that he will be watching my every, er, move.
We begin with me lying on the sofa, with my right leg bent up and pushing against the back of the sofa and my left leg down. This, I understand, is to correct my right hip’s internal rotation and create a more neutral position. M instructs me to use the vibrator to “stab” the front of my hip bone on my right, then my left side, then the tight band of muscle on the inside of my thighs, the outside of my quads, then my rib cage on each side and my jaw, to help relax my neck.
Eventually, he tells me to “get to it”, as if he is my running coach, not a stranger watching me masturbate over the internet. While I get off to a decent jog and soon break into a sprint, I am struggling to, er, finish, and ask Coach if it’s OK for me to take a break. I’m concerned that I am doing something wrong. Or maybe I am the unicorn who is impenetrable to his methods?
No, says M, I’m not doing anything wrong, but my pelvis and hips are not stable enough on the sofa, so my deep core isn’t engaged.
He suggests I move to the floor and lie down with my legs bent up on the sofa, and a pillow under my bum to tuck my glutes in. This position, he says, makes my hips and pelvis much more stable, while lifting my glutes to engage them. Then there is more stabbing at my thighs and even my kneecaps with the vibrator before I am again instructed to “get to it”.
I am having a perfectly nice time, but still not producing the results I know Coach M is after. He tells me to hook my right hand under my right leg and pull it towards me. Rather than helping, this throws me off my stride, so we go back to my having both legs up on the sofa. As a writer, my hands, wrists and shoulders will be particularly tight, he says. Instead of moving the vibrator around, I should hold it still, between the palms of my hands and squeeze my glutes up into it. This tip does the trick - quickly, powerfully and for a very long time.
In the ever so slightly awkward moment afterwards, M asks for my review: was that orgasm harder and/or longer than usual for me? I sense he wants me to scream an overwhelming, rhapsodic “YES!” but I have to be honest. It was certainly intense and long, but I am happy to report that I have enjoyed similarly intense and long orgasms before, and recently. I didn’t hallucinate, as M claims some women do, start speaking in tongues or pass out, but yes, I assure him, it is definitely up there, in my top five for 2024. If he is miffed with my moderation, he is gracious enough not to let on.
We move on to me lying on my back, with my left leg up against the wall and my right leg “butterflied” on the floor, with my knee bent out. This position, M says, counteracts the internal and external rotation of my hips and creates a neutral position. That one works too. Very well indeed, in fact.
Afterwards, along with the usual sense of calm and benevolence that comes with a giant dopamine dump, my body feels looser and lighter, as if I’ve just had a good, hard massage. “It’s like physio, with a vibrator,” I say, cheerily.
“Some people legitimately ask: what’s the point of the female orgasm?” says M. “The point is that orgasm stimulates all the recovery systems in your body. You sleep better, it’s a mood-booster and a natural painkiller. It’s a superpower.”
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London
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