The Men Behind "Sexual Polarity" Have a Lot to Answer For

If you've ever left a sacred sexuality workshop feeling worse about yourself than when you walked in — or heard a friend blame herself for not being "receptive enough" — this episode is for you.

Sexual polarity teachings are everywhere right now. They promise to unlock your feminine energy, reignite desire, and deepen connection. Sounds great. The reality is different. They're built on a foundation of made-up science, cultural theft, and a paper trail that leads somewhere deeply problematic. They are also actively causing harm. 

In this episode I'm mapping exactly where this ideology came from, who's profiting from it, and what it's actually doing to women's desire, relationships, and sense of self — because I see the damage in my practice every single day.

In this episode:

• Why "sexual polarity" isn't ancient wisdom or real science — and how it borrows language from physics to sound legitimate
• David Deida, Tony Robbins, and Deepak Chopra — the men profiting and what their paper trail actually shows
• The Osho/neo-tantra origins: why the history of this ideology goes back to documented child sexual abuse in cult communes
• Why the OneTaste sentencing matters — and what Nicole Daedone's case tells us about who enforces patriarchal ideology
• What women are actually hungry for that polarity coaching hijacks and exploits
• The difference between genuine erotic power play and a grooming script dressed as spirituality
• How to recognize a genuinely qualified practitioner — and what red flags look like in these spaces

This is part one of a two-part series. Next episode I'm joined by journalist and cult researcher Anke Richter, author of Cult Trip, for a conversation on sex cults, ISTA, and the darker end of this spectrum.

Resources mentioned:

• Full article with sources and resources: https://open.substack.com/pub/laurajurgens/p/have-you-been-sold-the-patriarchys?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
• Barbara Carrellas' Urban Tantra: barbaracarrellas.com
• Midori on consent-forward BDSM: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaxv6fBRPDep5NIrLfjEUNzmPtY4Ax5CN

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

Transcript

Welcome to Pleasure Uprising. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens, intimacy coach, somatic practitioner, and your guide to getting out of your head and into your body, your desire, and your real capacity for connection. This show is for people who are done performing and ready to actually feel it. Let's go.

Welcome, everyone. I'm going to start today with a story.

I was at my gym in Asheville, North Carolina, and there was this guy in his late twenties talking about facilitating a Tantra Speed Date event. I recognized the name immediately, because I'd actually been to one when I was an invited speaker at a festival. I went to see whether it might be useful for my single clients, and it was led by the founder — a guy named Guy Shahar. I got uncomfortable pretty fast, stayed out of curiosity, and left deeply disturbed.

So I kind of knew what this was about from that experience. But I wanted to give this new gym acquaintance the benefit of the doubt. I asked him whether he'd considered that the sexual polarity framework his organization uses is embedded with a lot of gender stereotypes and could be harmful. I got the standard line back that all these people always say: "Well, everyone has both energies."

They always say this. But do the men in practice ever actually step into the feminine energy as they've defined it? No.

So I asked him whether he'd considered flipping the script and having the men be in the feminine energy. He got this horrified look on his face and said, "I'd be fired."

Here is this young man with a script. And it is a minor-league version of something that goes all the way up into cults — but it also does real damage to people who don't expect it, because these are smart people who are going looking for sexual empowerment, looking for a spiritual connection to their erotic self. That is incredibly legitimate. But instead, they get pulled into this deeply patriarchal system that can wind up doing a lot of harm.

That system is called sexual polarity, and it has a paper trail. We're going to talk about it today.

I also want to mention: I wrote a whole piece on Substack on this. If you want to go deeper and get resources, the link is in the show notes.

This is part one of a two-part series. Next time, I'm bringing in the wonderful Anke Richter, who is a journalist specializing in cults. She's going to talk about the even darker side of this. So today is the introduction and background — some of what seems like the milder end — before we get into the actual cult dynamics. Though honestly, a lot of it comes from cults.

So where did this actually come from?

The belief in sexual polarity isn't random or foolish. It's been manufactured to be believable and sellable — manufactured with a lot of care to be profitable, not to be real. It's absolutely made up. But it has intentionally been given the feeling of ancient wisdom. Some of the words used are pulled from Sanskrit — that's cultural appropriation, and it's done intentionally to infuse it with a sense of historical legitimacy. They also use language stolen from modern science and physics to create a veneer of credibility that hides the fact that this is all invented. When they use science words, it sounds more believable to the human brain. And all of this is very profitable.

The original book where sexual polarity ideology was popularized was by a man named David Deida, called The Way of the Superior Man. I've had a lot of clients who've read this book — they usually come to me after experiencing dysfunction from following this kind of framework, to unwind the damage. But many people have been recommended this book. Over a million copies sold. It's the book that underlies most of the sexual polarity ideology worldwide.

Another man named Tony Robbins — who you may know as a famous motivational speaker and life coach — endorsed Deida's book on the cover. Robbins was also the subject of a BuzzFeed News investigation documenting allegations of groping followers, berating rape victims in seminars, and instructing staff to find attractive women in audiences. At least eight women have come forward with sexual misconduct allegations. He has zero training in sexuality, zero credentials in sexuality. These are self-proclaimed gurus who prop each other up and sell each other's frameworks to help each other make money.

The sales tactic is to make a made-up idea sound both spiritual and scientific.

The word "polarity" is stolen directly from physics, where it describes a real electromagnetic phenomenon. They use the term "law" — which in science earns that status only when something is completely universal, quantifiable, and massively backed by evidence. There are only a handful of actual scientific laws. Deida claimed in his book that masculine and feminine energies are governed by some kind of "law of conservation" — a phrase borrowed from physics, from the conservation of mass or energy. Those are physical laws. They have absolutely nothing to do with human relationship dynamics or gender.

That deliberate strategy of taking words with real credibility and attaching them to ideas that have none is designed to override people's critical thinking. There is no basis whatsoever for the concept of masculine or feminine energies as Deida defines them. No studies. No data. Just a man selling books and seminars, and a framework that other people can pick up and monetize.

When you read what the book actually says, stripped of the spiritual vocabulary, he instructs men to learn to take and ravish their woman. He asks men when they last really ravished her, and says that if it's been too long, they might find themselves turned on by rape scenes on TV. He literally writes that a good woman's gift is to test her man with her darkest moods over and over until he's unperturbed by feminine challenge. And he says men should learn to find humor in the unending emotional drama the feminine enjoys.

All the gender stereotypes are baked right in. Strip away the spiritual vocabulary and what he's actually saying is: a woman's emotional needs are inconveniences to be transcended, and her resistance to sex is an obstacle to be overcome.

I also want to name the cultural theft. Neo-tantra strips the Sanskrit vocabulary and historical context from South Asian Hindu and Buddhist traditions, removes the ethical structures, ramps up the sexual content massively, and repackages it for Western consumption. This is not ancient wisdom. Neo-tantra, in most of these spaces, is cultural appropriation in service of a male-serving sexual agenda.

There are exceptions. Some people in the West have taken the actual Hindu and Buddhist traditions and preserved them, teaching them in their original cultural context as body-centered meditation practices. And some people have taken neo-tantra, flipped it on its head, removed the gender stereotypes, and teach it as a genuinely empowering path to embodied eroticism. There are very few people doing that well. I'll link some of them at the end. If you're interested in tantra, please watch out for cultural appropriation and gender stereotypes. Barbara Carrellas' Urban Tantra is an example of work that has removed the gender essentialism and teaches an empowered, queer-friendly, open approach to connecting with your inner erotic self.

And importantly — this didn't start with Deida. Neo-tantra traces back to Osho, whose ashrams in India and later in Oregon in the 1970s and 80s became notorious for the documented exploitation of women and children. There is a well-documented film about the child sexual abuse that occurred in those Oregon communes. Osho has since been identified by researchers as a rapist. Deida just made the ideology more sellable. But the original framework came from cult communes with documented child sexual abuse. Keep that in mind when you're considering a Tantra Speed Date or a neo-tantra workshop — the ideological lineage of how this is typically taught traces back there.

None of these men got rich asking whether their ideologies harmed anyone. That's why I'm doing it. Somebody has to.

Now I want to talk about why women get pulled into this — because it is not because they're stupid or naive. The hunger underneath is completely legitimate.

We want better sex. We want desire that actually feels like it's ours. We're surrounded by a culture that has been built around men's arousal patterns, men's orgasm, men's pornography preferences — a culture that tells women our desire takes too long, asks too much, exists to serve someone else's pleasure. We carry a lot of sexual shame. We've been taught since childhood to override our body's signals, to be available, to not be difficult. So of course women are looking for something. I love that women are looking. I'm just furious at what they're finding, and who is being platformed as having the answers.

So when someone offers to unlock your feminine energy, you're interested. That makes complete sense.

The problem is who's been doing the teaching.

Deepak Chopra co-launched a 21-day Activating the Divine Feminine program with Alicia Keys, promising women connection to their gentle, giving, nurturing feminine energy. DOJ documents released this year show that Chopra maintained a close documented relationship with Jeffrey Epstein for years after Epstein's 2008 conviction. He invited Epstein to events asking him to "bring your girls." He responded "Good" when a victim dropped a civil lawsuit.

This is a man who has been defining the divine feminine for millions of women, writing "Good" when one of Epstein's victims goes away.

He is not an outlier. He is a pattern.

This is a pattern of uninformed, exploitative men defining what the divine feminine should look like — receptive, submissive, gentle, giving — so that women will override their own boundaries. It is a grooming script. It is not a spiritual mandate.

Sexual polarity teachings are, at their core, dominant-submissive role play mapped onto gender stereotypes, dressed in spiritual language with scientific-sounding words layered over the top. The teachers say it's not about gender. But in practice, it is always about gender. Women are assigned the receptive or giving role, men the initiating or protective role. And this is rooted in a heteronormativity so deep it doesn't even notice itself. Queer relationships, non-binary people, anyone whose erotic life doesn't fit the man-leads-woman-receives template are simply not in the picture.

You can do a test for yourself: ask one of the men in these frameworks to play the feminine, receptive role. If it feels beneath him — that tells you everything about the hierarchy baked into the model. The feminine isn't a neutral energy in these systems. It's a subordinate position being sold as a spiritual destiny.

The contrast is real BDSM culture, where explicit contracts, negotiated consent, and safety protocols are built in — because power play requires guardrails. In genuine BDSM practice, the person in the submissive role leads the negotiation. They name what they want, what they won't do, what stops everything. The dominant partner serves that vision. That requires trust, training, and real communication. Real BDSM is actually an excellent place to learn deep consent culture.

What is damaging is a spiritual ideology telling you to drop your boundaries to access your feminine essence. Sexual polarity strips out every one of those guardrails, wraps it in spiritual language, and tells women their receptivity — their borderlessness — is their natural feminine essence. It isn't. It's a grooming script for exploitation. The message underneath is unambiguous: if you have boundaries, you're not spiritual enough.

And it makes things worse, not better.

I know what women are actually hungry for — and it's not this. There are two things I see in my practice that polarity coaching hijacks and exploits.

The first is genuine interest in erotic power play — the electricity of role dynamics, maybe surrendering into a partner's deep attention and attunement. That is real and beautiful. Real BDSM culture has built the consent-forward frameworks you actually need to do this well. You don't need a spiritual ideology. You need communication, trust, and a concrete negotiation with a partner who's capable of that. FetLife is a good starting point — you can find casual community lunches in your area, meet people, find out what their consent culture actually is. You and your partner can also take classes from legitimate, credentialed BDSM educators. I'll link one of my favorites, Midori, in the show notes.

The second thing — and this is the one I hear underneath almost everything — is the exhaustion of over-caretaking. Women are trained from birth to manage other people's feelings, especially men's. To soften our needs, to make sure he's not hurt or emasculated. We bring that into the bedroom. We worry more about a partner's reaction to our no than whether we need to say the no. We fake orgasms, rush our arousal, say yes before we're ready, to manage a man's feelings about himself and about us — at our own expense.

This over-caretaking in the bedroom is something women desperately want to put down. I work with women, men, and couples on this every day. Nobody is a bad person for this pattern — it's how we've all been socialized. But these patterns don't have to be permanent. If you have two well-intentioned people who care about each other, we can shift this relatively quickly. It's a major part of my work.

What women actually want when they describe wanting "dominance" is something more specific. They want a partner so resourced and present that they don't have to take care of him. Who can hear "not yet" without making it a problem. Who follows the body's actual pace — slow, delicious, worth every minute — and stays genuinely present throughout. That's not dominance. That's attunement. It requires actual learning, not a rebrand of entitlement.

"Be more receptive" is not liberation from over-caretaking. It is more of it, dressed as spirituality. It's telling women to caretake their man, just with a spiritual mandate attached. That's why women spiral when they get deeper into this framework — they come in hoping for relief from over-caretaking, and they get handed more of the same thing with a different label.

I want to say a word about the woman I overheard at a coffee shop here in Asheville, in serious distress, telling her friend she just couldn't get into her feminine, couldn't feel receptive when her partner touched her, felt like she was failing as a person and as a partner. That level of mental and emotional suffering, that level of self-blame — that is the mild end of what I'm describing.

This last month, Nicole Daedone — the founder of OneTaste, which was an orgasmic meditation company built on a premise of female empowerment — was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for coercing women into sex acts with the company's male clients and investors, in the name of spiritual growth. It's important to know that a woman architected and ran that system. Patriarchal ideology doesn't require men to enforce it. One victim said she had believed in what she called Daedone's "so-called feminist mission," only to find herself coerced and significantly harmed. The U.S. Attorney said it plainly: coercion disguised as wellness or empowerment is still exploitation.

Spiritual gaslighting is at the core of these systems — this idea that your resistance or your boundaries reveal a spiritual deficiency. I've spoken with women who survived years of it in neo-tantra spaces, shamed as spiritually undeveloped for feeling uncomfortable. They lacked the words for what was happening because the language they'd been given described their own resistance as the problem.

The untrained facilitator with his script who has no idea he's propagating a harmful ideology. Deida's so-called superior man who must ravish his woman. Chopra defining the divine feminine as gentle and giving while texting Epstein. Daedone's exploitative orgasmic meditation commune. These are points on the same line — a section of the wellness industry that has built infrastructure on monetizing women's receptivity with no accountability for the costs to actual human beings.

I want to say to everyone searching for the divine feminine: I love that for you. You don't need anyone besides your own body to tell you what feels good, what turns you on, where your boundaries are, or what the divine feminine looks like for you personally. You may need help learning to listen to your body — and that kind of help exists.

Here's how to recognize it: anyone genuinely qualified to support you will have real training and credentials you can look into. They will have healthy boundaries of their own, and when you express a boundary, they will be glad to celebrate and respect it. They will not shame you or imply spiritual deficiency for having a boundary or feeling uncomfortable. They will actively support you in finding your own boundaries. They should be creating safety for you to discover what you want — not telling you what you should want. There should be genuine curiosity about what's true for you, not a script about what the feminine is supposed to be.

And I want to say clearly: the divine feminine in traditions around the world was never passive. Kali is both liberator and destroyer. Athena rules over war and wisdom. Freya rides with her chariots. Pele burns entire landscapes so something new can grow. Power and sacred rage are embedded in concepts of the divine feminine across cultures. That is not a corruption of the feminine — that is one of its purest expressions.

Find the divine feminine for yourself. Claim your erotic birthright for yourself. Real sacred sexuality exists, and it doesn't use spirituality to override your body. It uses spirituality to help you honor what's true in your body.

We need to stop handing the microphone to men — or women serving men's agendas — who have a financial or personal stake in keeping women receptive and submissive to their sexual and financial interests.

If you want more on this, the Substack article is linked in the show notes. It has full sourcing, resources, and an open comment section — I'd love to hear how this lands for you. Subscribing on Substack is the best way to have a direct conversation with me.

Please share this with anyone who seems to be heading toward these spaces, or who's already in one and wondering why things feel worse instead of better. Because what happens at the far end of this spectrum is real harm — loss of connection to your body, loss of desire, loss of safety in relationship. Nobody deserves that. Okay — see you next time, where we get to talk about cults.