How to Decolonize Your Pleasure (Part One: Perfectionism)

How to Decolonize Your Pleasure (Part One)

Rule Number One: Stop Striving for Perfection

Hey beautiful souls,

Can I share a story with you?

Before the launch of this wonderful Pleasure Oasis, I was in what you would call a state of perfection paralysis.

I felt like I needed to learn every last thing there was to know about sex and pleasure before I could announce that the Oasis was officially ready for viewing. I had soft launch, after soft launch and each one was left with the taste of “but wait… there’s gonna be more.”

This was a mix of my struggles with perfectionism (from colonization) and not-enoughness (from my own personal traumas).

The problem was that there was no ceiling I was ever going to reach. I never set any kind of limit for what “the end” actually would be. When would enough finally be enough?

While doing my studies for my holistic sexology certification, I was assigned to read an article about white supremacy and perfectionism.

This article titled White Supremacy Culture - Still Here by Tema Okun, which I’ll tag HERE, was a 32-page document that was about to completely change the way I viewed my life, my relationship with pleasure, and my relationship with the Oasis. 

Note: To access the article you can find the link to “White Supremacy Culture - Still Here” on their website tagged above.

But let me backtrack a little bit.

I’d actually already had a similar epiphany a week earlier when I watched a documentary Orgasm Inc about the sex cult OneTaste.

This documentary is very sick and extremely twisted, and I have so many insights to share regarding it which I’ll make note of at the end, but I want to start with my biggest epiphany (part one of the perfectionism epiphany) that I ironically learned, once again, through witnessing the effects of white supremacy.

Nicole Daedone was the creator of OneTaste and allegedly used manipulation, coercion, and exploitation against people who were simply looking to build connections and explore their relationship with pleasure and intimacy in what participants believed was a safe space.

Nicole is far from the only person like this in the wellness industry and, just in case it’s not clear, teaching through exploitation is NOT ethical and is NOT true wellness.

By the end of the documentary, though, I felt like I’d learned exactly what made me and The Ethereal Pleasure Oasis different from the rest.

I’m not sure if many of you know this, but originally the Oasis was called The Ethereal Pleasure Academy.

Shortly after I announced the upcoming launch of my Pleasure Academy, it suddenly felt like every white woman and her mother were creating an online “pleasure academy” with this EXACT wording.

Was I the first person to ever come up with the idea of a pleasure academy? Absolutely not. There have been many extraordinary people who have created online programs for shame free learning! But the uptick of similar ventures by white women was something I noticed, and I absolutely refuse to gaslight myself or be gaslit about that.

Thankfully, after a conversation with my mom about my original logo (yes, the same woman who brought me a vibrator) which was giving a more “governmental”/”state official” university look and after reflecting on the etymology of the word academy, I was gently guided to the realization that the word simply didn’t feel aligned anymore.

I’ll share more about that in a different blog.

Back to the Perfectionism…

When I first started posting pleasure education content on TikTok, the thing that made my content special was that I was learning with my audience.

I wasn’t a pleasure educator pretending to know everything. I wasn’t talking at people. It was something we were all growing through together.

After watching this documentary about yet another “all-knowing white woman” who actually knew very little beyond trauma and manipulation, I realized my magic was in my humility.

I knew that I didn’t know everything.

And ironically, I was waiting until I thought I did before fully stepping into my work confidently.

But true teachers understand that learning never ends. It’s similar to healing.

A few months prior to this epiphany, I had a four hour long one-sided conversation with someone where I was only able to speak for maybe twenty minutes total, and I kept wondering why I had been placed in that situation.

Within the first five minutes of meeting me, this person told me they were a “master in tantra” and immediately began listing their many accolades as we walked across my property to find a spot to sit.

But based on my understanding, tantra has a lot to do with energy, and if he was such a master, I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t read that my energy was exhausted by him within the first 10 minutes of us meeting up.

When it was finally time for me to take the floor, after I shared a bit about what I did with my Oasis and a few of the things I was very proud of within my life as a whole, he interrupted me 10 minutes into my share by asking me what my “money maker” was, followed by him saying HE TOO had a pleasure academy. 

You get a pleasure academy, you get a pleasure academy! (Please read that in your best Oprah Winfrey impersonation.) Everyone had a got damn academy yet this world was still stuck in being an uneducated patriarchal hell.

My money maker? At the time I wasn’t making any money from any of the pleasure related things I was working on. Of course I knew I needed to sustain a living, hell I’d just needed major financial help the month before but I also knew that focusing on the money would further exhaust me & wouldn’t help me achieve what I was trying to achieve spiritually.

Again, it’s totally okay and BEAUTIFUL to make money from what you love doing but his question made it seem as though the work we were doing was FOR the money and anything outside of that in which I wanted to share about the fulfillment from my self made job was irrelevant to him. 

He talked openly about taking advantage of people in his sub/dom relationships. He described clear power imbalances and boundary violations while still calling himself a “master.”

He even shared stories about manipulating energy during group Reiki sessions without people’s consent, essentially treating people like experiments so he could test how “powerful” he was.

I kept wondering why I didn’t just get up and leave.

But I think my spirit needed me to understand that exploitation and irresponsibility in the wellness space can also come from people who look like me brown, queer and systemically marginalized.

And although I did challenge some of his contradictions and inappropriate behavior, it was never truly received because… narcissists will narcissist.

This man considered himself a master just as Nicole Daedone considered herself an orgasm guru, but in reality, these people were far from the image they wanted to project.

So if you’re looking for truth, authenticity and transparency, it’s nice to know that you can find that here at the Oasis and it’s also a wonderful opportunity for me to practice having grace with myself while also living by my code of ethics for the Oasis.

The scary thing about white supremacy is that it feels like it’s everywhere and it’s embedded within so many of our societal ideals that we didn’t even know we were subconsciously subscribing to and perfectionism is one of those insidious ideals.

At the Oasis I am fully committed to providing the ever evolving information and lessons that there are to learn as I learn them. I understand that there are very few generalized statements that can be made about pleasure and that everything is constantly changing as new discoveries arise.

Here at the Oasis it’s okay for us to get messy, share transparently and enjoy every part of the journey instead of trying to act as though the journey is DONE and that I’ll have all of the answers to help you reach the end of your pleasure journey…because your truest journey with pleasure SHOULDN’T end. It should feel like a new beginning every single day.

What I Need You to Remember

1. Perfectionism is deeply tied to white supremacy culture.

(Please don’t forget to check out the article White Supremacy Culture - Still Here by Tema Okun that I mentioned earlier to learn more.)

2. Not-enoughness can show up everywhere.

The best way to combat it is to stop moving the goalpost every single time you get close to your goals.

Your pleasure journey is exactly that: a journey.

We’re all on a train headed toward Pleasure Station, but plot twist? Every single stop on the train is Pleasure Station.

3. Humility is safer than false mastery.

Anyone who positions themselves as an all-knowing guru, especially in wellness, spirituality, sex, or healing, deserves discernment, not blind trust.

4. Small goals are healthy.

But constantly adding more and more expectations onto yourself until you collapse from exhaustion is not.

You are allowed to arrive where you already are.

My Extra Notes + Reflections While Rewatching Orgasm Inc.

Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste

• I observed the craving for human connection being commodified and sold back to extremely lonely people

• I observed the energetic, physical and financial exploitation of people searching for intimacy, healing, and belonging

• One taste was known for their expensive memberships and “exclusive” spiritual access that went all the way up to $60,000 a membership 

• There was a lot of mention of celebrity involvement and the use of status to build credibility (as seen with certain mainstream religions)

• I noticed them borrowing language and practices from spirituality creating a mix of buddhism, cult structures, and self-help spaces

• The mental manipulation and coercion of consent under the disguise of healing

• They had no tools for what would come after a “Trauma release” and this release being activated irresponsibly and sometimes dangerously

• They believed in the idea that sex or orgasm alone can “fix” trauma without any further therapeutic work of any form

• The romanticization of predatory behavior under the label of liberation

• A mass amount of victim blaming and Nicole defending her pedophilic father and sharing stories of his assaults of her and other young girls like it was a gospel

• The weaponization of vulnerability and emotional breakdowns used to condone further manipulation

• The performance of enlightenment instead of actual accountability

If you plan on watching this documentary I do want to give a HUGE trigger warning as it touched on A LOT of sensitive topics. Please listen to your body and take breaks if you need to.

One thing that stood out to me deeply was how often pleasure was framed as something to achieve, master, or weaponize rather than something for us to experience safely, honestly and consensually.

And that’s exactly why I needed to decolonize my own relationship with pleasure, education, leadership, and perfectionism.

True liberation is not domination or something to conquest. It’s not something to be manipulated, it’s definitely not something to be performed and there’s no pretending to know everything.

True liberation allows room for curiosity, boundaries, accountability, softness, learning, and consent.

And that’s the kind of space that I want The Ethereal Pleasure Oasis to be for you.

Thank you so much for joining me along this beautiful never-ending pleasure journey my lovely.

If all of this is inspiring you to begin or continue the decolonization of your pleasure or is making you curious regarding your own journey, I’d love to invite you to dive deeper with me inside my Pleasure Library and sign up to become a member of The Ethereal Pleasure Oasis. The Oasis is a cozy online sanctuary that I created just for women like you. 

It’s a sacred, playful space filled with videos, guided audios, and practical tools to help you explore breathwork, expand your pleasure, and reconnect with your body on a whole new level.

Think of it as your personal treasure chest for pleasure, where science meets sensuality

Ready to explore? Come join the Pleasure Library and let’s breathe, play and feel pleasure together.

I love you to the moon 

Love & Lube

Love Atiya

Founder Of The Ethereal Pleasure Oasis