I stood on the side of a large rectangular plastic mat with 40 others, men and women of various ages with a general high standard of physical beauty. We were all utterly naked, about to be blindfolded and slathered in coconut oil, then sent to writhe together without knowing whose body or body part we would rub up against as we crawled, flailed, and squirmed across the tarp. Among those ready for this hour-long exploration of “Liquid Love”—we had won an in-house lottery to participate—were a cadre of Berlin nightlife habitués, somatic bodyworkers, former South African bank presidents, crypto millionaires, yogis, and others of unknown provenance, accompanied by a live DJ and tuba player.

The blond Ukrainian woman facilitator warned us—insisted, almost sternly—this was not a sexual experience. We were instructed not to engage with genitalia, not to plunge our fingers or toes into any accidentally available bodily orifices. The Liquid Love workshop was meant to bring us back to the innocent freedom of childhood, she reminded us.

Suddenly, it was time to put on our blindfolds and enter the ring. Like a sightless protozoa, I plunged forward, trying to avoid impure thoughts or kinky misdeeds as I met and crawled through a pulsing tangle of torsos, hands, calves, stomachs, and fingers, noting my automatic preference for feminine softness over masculine hairiness, feeling like an amoeba squirming together with its just-hatched pack.

It was Friday afternoon at the chateau hosting Hedoné, a 16th-century manor nestled in the French countryside, an hour from Paris by train. Some 400 people had gathered here this weekend for Hedoné, a woman-led movement aimed at sexual liberation, based on a philosophy of “ethical hedonism,” with shades of Burning Man and dollops of hippie idealism. Hedoné was born in 2015 at a birthday party in the form of a modern bacchanal and art performance, led by Lola Toscano and her friends in Berlin. Since then, the collective has grown into a thriving movement, regularly occupying German castles, French chateaus, Berlin nightclubs, and Mexican haciendas, assembling a global community for orgiastic celebrations of pleasure, beauty, and excess.

For Lola Toscano, 43, Hedoné’s founder, the movement began with her burden of childhood sexual repression and Catholic body shame. “Tiny village, big hell,” she says of growing up in southern Spain, where her mother was the first to divorce in her village and gossip ruled every interaction. When, as a child, she was caught exploring her sexuality with a local boy, she was meant to feel ashamed. At the precocious age of nine, she discovered Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and struggled through it with a dictionary: “That book showed me I was a normal human being. It healed me.” The insight became the seed for Hedoné—a space where sex is not hidden in basement dungeons but celebrated openly with flowers, vibrant colors, and feminine aesthetics and consent protocols.

Toscano is unapologetic about Hedoné as both laboratory and sanctuary: “You can be doing all the right things, be conscious, and be sexy at the same time.” She and her team carefully curate the events with application forms and dress codes, not just to maintain atmosphere but to build trust and inclusivity. Hedoné is now seeking a permanent locale with negotiations underway to buy a castle on the French-Italian border near Monaco as its home. Funds will come from a combination of wealthy benefactors and by selling annual memberships. Membership will offer access not only to events and residencies at the castle but also to a digital platform with music, educational content, and erotic media. For Toscano, the stakes go far beyond spectacle: “Many women never have an orgasm because they don’t dare to explore. What we create here is a laboratory for the mind—to find your kink, to find yourself.”

Earlier that afternoon, in my interminable efforts to find my kink as well as myself, I joined a tantra workshop, led by a bearded warlock in Persian robes who called himself a “magician of discovery.” He guided participants through a long meditation about roots going through rocks and golden light shooting up the spine, insisting we were “living bridges” between earth and heaven. Soon everyone was eye-gazing in silence, then whispering, “I see you, I hear you, I love you, I trust you,” to whatever stranger sat across from them. The climax was a sorting game based on “love languages” with people grouping themselves as if auditioning for roles in a relationship self-help video. The rhetoric was all about authenticity—”not even love, but authenticity is the strongest force.” I found the effect close to an amateur theater workshop given a New Age overlay.

But I didn’t rush to make a judgment. At the event, I spoke with many people who said their first Hedoné marked a sharp dividing line in their lives. Shantih, a 32-year-old sexological bodyworker from Ireland, described her initiation as nothing less than a turning point: “I felt this huge permission—to be free, to luxuriate in beauty without guilt, to live the full spectrum of myself.” Coming from Ireland, she realized she carried a scarcity mindset, but the festival helped her break that spell: “When I came home, I started valuing myself differently. That permission was very healing.”

In a women’s temple, she watched half the room “evoke the sensual goddess, total feminine embodiment—beauty, sexiness, playfulness” and said it catalyzed a deeper exploration of eroticism: “Our erotic energy is vital to our overall well-being. Having a conscious, loving, shame-free relationship with [that energy] is essential for our evolutionary journey.” She sees these festivals as laboratories for the future, where people explore new ways of being that can ripple outward, changing more repressive cultures back home.

One of the striking things about Hedoné, many participants noted, is that it is run by women. Feminine mastery shapes the event’s ambience, as well as its particular vision of fully consensual sexual liberation. An Israeli woman I spoke with, who left a career in the military and high-level corporate life to pursue art and sensual community after attending her first Hedoné, put it bluntly: “In tantra worlds run by men, there is always a power game—they want control. They want access to women’s bodies. Here it feels safer, lighter, playful, but also more serious somehow. There is no pressure. That’s because the founders are women.”

An older Italian woman who runs a healing center framed it in political terms. For her, Hedoné was not just about intimacy but about who holds power in a collapsing world: “There needs to be more women in power. I’m sorry, but men keep doing the same shit over and over again.… Hedoné is important because it opens people’s minds, it gives alternatives, it breaks with the system. It feels different because it comes from women.”

One participant noted that Hedoné sometimes felt like a “flashback to the ’80s” but with less aggression and anguish, more art and acceptance. David, a French-Algerian jeweler and chef, who has cooked for the gatherings, said he took the community “seriously” in a way he never did with similar projects, praising the “vibes” even while critiquing the plastic decor. What’s clear is that Hedoné’s trust-based social architecture is not a happy accident but a consequence of female leadership.

AT 59, I don’t have much left on my bucket list, but I confess that fully participating in a series of orgies as part of a loving community remains something I seek—as ardently as a medieval nun might yearn for communion with the divine. I tend to agree with Allen Ginsberg, who told Playboy in 1969: “Life should be ecstasy. We need lifestyles of ecstasy and social forms appropriate to whatever ecstasy is available for whoever wants it. Beyond man’s natural ecstasy is total serenity and tranquility: cessation of desire, which the Buddhists talk of, which is liberation from grasping and craving.” Before I can reach that serenity, however, I first need to experience the ecstasy to its fullest.

My journey to this point has been circuitous. I was a nerdy teenager with scoliosis who felt underappreciated by women into my 20s, then had conventional monogamous relationships before discovering polyamory at Burning Man in my late 30s. After becoming something of a counterculture celebrity through best-selling books on psychedelic shamanism and prophecies, I temporarily became the scene’s alpha male with women wanting to connect with me after my talks and readings. What seemed at first like a wondrous gift soon became an addiction.

I came of age in the 1990s New York media world, where the bad behavior of powerful men like Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose was common knowledge in my circles—and almost expected. Unfortunately, I carried some old patterns into the psychedelic world, where people were supposedly becoming more conscious. In my efforts to face my shadow, I made a public Facebook confession in 2017, naively seeking redemption. Instead I got canceled by the unforgiving “outrage machine” of social media.

Since then, I’ve been experientially and philosophically investigating the riddle of human sexuality, intimacy, and Eros. At Tamera, a Portuguese community founded by Germans who tried to correct the flaws of the utopian 1960s counterculture that led to failure, I explored their radical redesign of relationship models through transparent “love networks” and exhaustive Forum circles where members recount every intimate interaction.

I’ve also attended three workshops with the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA), the controversial neo-tantra school influenced by Osho’s teachings. Osho, also known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, was an Indian spiritual teacher and controversial guru who combined Eastern mysticism with Western ideas of freedom, meditation, and sexuality, founding a global movement in the 1970s and ’80s that eventually collapsed in scandal, as depicted in the Netflix series Wild Wild Country. ISTA’s intense weeklong experiences—featuring nakedness, group practices, sacred spot massage, and spins of the “wheel of consent”—aim to break down inhibitions and support sexual as well as personal coherence. ISTA recently underwent a restructuring and updated its accountability protocols after scandals involving teacher-student sexual dynamics and alleged sexual assault. Essentially, ISTA had no formal rules around facilitators and participants having sex, believing in the sovereign choices of all adults. But a number of participants spoke up about their experiences, testifying to intense power dynamics that supported male patterns of abuse. ISTA states that they are currently in an experimental phase where its protocol is no sexual interaction between facilitators and participants.

Both despite and because of my personal travails—and all of the chaos we see around us in the world—I remain fascinated by how we might evolve better models for love, sex, and intimacy. Traditional structures are failing us: Adults globally are having less sex, and women are furious at men, while men struggle with epidemic loneliness and reactionary rage. Neither dating apps nor organic meetings seem to work anymore. The right-wing tradwife movement seems an elaborate kayfabe. In reality, relations between the sexes are not just stagnating; they are degenerating.

Personally, I agree with Toscano that we need more, and better, erotic liberation, if this can be done in a humane and compassionate way. One of the pleasures of the festival was the profusion of naked flesh, as handsome men and gorgeous women walked around the castle and splashed in the pool wearing no, or minimal, clothing. Another pleasure was the incredible care people gave to their costumes with different days dedicated to certain colors, promoting a general vibe of psychedelic excess. When I am around a lot of nudity, I find, instead of feeling more craving, my nervous system relaxes. I remember how artificial our current urban life is, which keeps flesh covered and throws us into little rectangular concrete boxes so we will stay repressed and sublimating to function as productive units in a technofeudalist megamachine.

This iteration of Hedoné was a first collaboration with a new community, Astral Plan, launched by Damián Aratohn, the production manager for Hedoné Paris. Astral Plan incorporates sensuality but focuses more on the exploration of consciousness and altered states. This includes workshops on entity encounters in lucid dreams, dark retreats, and mantra chanting, as well as discussions around psychedelics like mushrooms, ketamine, LSD, and DMT.

One focus of the workshops was the recent discovery made by the Russian-born psychonaut Danny Goler, a former Israeli soldier now based in Los Angeles. Goler claims to have undertaken more than 7,000 DMT journeys. According to Goler, when people smoke DMT and peer into the diffraction pattern projected against a wall by a 650-nanometer red laser, they consistently report seeing coherent, matrix-like geometric symbols. Goler calls these Codes of Reality. He considers it evidence that reality is computationally rendered—that we live in a simulation, in other words. This idea has become wildly popular in tech circles, featured in the work of Nick Bostrom and parroted by Elon Musk and other tech leaders. Lasers were set up at the chateau so that participants could test Goler’s thesis for themselves with a few reporting seeing the hidden code. My personal attempts with this have so far not borne fruit.

In his talk, Goler described direct encounters with entities and futuristic technological instruments during past DMT trips. At one point, he said a capsule appeared in his living room, opening like a “space-age pod” to reveal menus, gloves, and VR-style interfaces: “Every single time I smoked DMT, this thing would appear.… It was as real as I can see you right now.” The beings he met often communicated in what he called “pure meaning”—rapid exchanges of insight rather than words—and sometimes acted like gatekeepers, refusing to answer direct questions with anything more than “not enough DMT.” Goler’s popularity represents a trend in transformational communities. People seek experiential techniques to attain immediate gnosis for themselves. They don’t want to just contemplate ideas from visionaries like Terence McKenna or Wim Hof. They want to immediately field-test them.

The “dissociadelic,” ketamine, often used as a horse tranquilizer as well as a substitute for anesthesia, seemed the favorite substance at the event. One morning, an Italian friend of mine who was in the process of exploring his bisexuality led a breathwork ceremony in which participants were encouraged to augment their rapid-fire panting with their personal stash of “vitamin K.” This breathwork is a modality for altering consciousness developed by the Czech LSD researcher Stanislav Grof, after the U.S. government made LSD illegal in the 1960s. Grof learned that certain breathing patterns—close to hyperventilating—easily lead to altered or visionary states.

I am a fan of K. I find it both highly strange and very relaxing, good for connecting with people psychically while detaching emotionally and with a manageable duration—though it causes addiction and destruction for some. As the breathwork started, I snorted an accidentally large pile of the fluffy powder. I found myself, for the first time in many years, dissolving fully into a delectable K hole. Shutting my eyes, I entered the boundaryless state of early infancy. I then sensed how toilet training—the original suppression of natural impulses for purposes of social control—led to sexual deviance as well as authoritarian personality structures. Eventually, this engendered a postindustrial civilization built on military might and power hierarchies, now death-driving toward ecosystem collapse.

For the next 45 minutes, I trip-time-walked backward through the history of the earth, starting with today’s psychopathic dictators, reversing the film back to cavemen, Neanderthals, and primates. Favoring our chimpanzee ancestors instead of our bonobo heritage, Homo sapiens picked up the tendency of males to form violent coalitions—and to use those coalitions to dominate and kill. As I panted, I went back even further, to dinosaurs, primitive mammals, multicellular organisms. I saw our species standing at an evolutionary crossroads. On the one hand, we can continue the primal ape-brain strategies of domination and violence that will soon make us extinct. On the other, we can pursue planetary symbiosis based on regenerative practices, liberated Eros, collective care. From my comfy K hole, these seemed the key to stopping our doom slide.

However, even at Hedoné, I noted, we were far from attaining collective communion. There was a not-so-subtle beauty aristocracy and competition among the young, great-looking “sexual millionaires,” despite their mastery of yoga, neo-tantra, psychedelics, and a range of techniques for erotic fulfillment. One friend I made—a Polish gardener-yogi wearing a spangled captain’s hat—suggested one of the myriad half-naked dakinis come away with him for a half-hour massage. She responded with a polite no, telling him she already had five lovers at the festival. Another woman—a stunningly beautiful Danish medical technician—said that when she tripped one night, she discovered she was utterly obsessed with her appearance and deeply insecure about it. This is a woman who would have been gorgeous without any makeup and wearing a potato sack, and she was fixated on how the Hedoné community might judge her if the plastic jewels arranged on her face were millimeters out of alignment.

As the days wore on, I became increasingly aware of how the community’s hyperfocus on beauty provoked unspoken egotism, narcissism, and vanity. This was particularly the case because, as an older single man and an outsider, I found my various gentle efforts to erotically connect with women ending in abject, abrupt failure. The event provided a fantastic romp for younger athletic men and yogis who fit the ideal for a weekend tantric fling. (I watched one tall, bearded tantra man, whom I nicknamed “Narcissist Jesus,” wearing a sari and little ringlets in his beard pick up hot women in succession using the single hackneyed line “You have beautiful energy.”) For men falling outside of those parameters, it was a bit of a struggle. I had planned to bring a girlfriend with me but couldn’t make it happen in the end. Instead, I found myself suffering from that strangely familiar feeling of attending a sumptuous banquet with nothing to eat.

The teaching I personally received in erotic dissatisfaction and nonattachment culminated in the Sunday night Temple, held in the chateau’s master bedroom, under the sculpture of a “disco clitoris” covered in tiny mirrors. It has become commonplace in sex-positive communities like ISTA, Tamera, and Hedoné to use the word temple to refer to the “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ) where group erotic activities take place—what could be called the orgy room. The Temple night began with small group exercises practicing different kinds of touch—light air, grounding earth, frenetic fire, supple water. By 2 a.m., the room was quite full with some on the sidelines having friendly interactions, while others went full throttle into penetrative sex.

I find myself sitting next to a zaftig Polish tantric masseuse from Berlin wearing a complex geometrical girdle, who complained to me about not getting laid yet at the event. As I helped her remove her girdle, I tried to offer myself as a candidate for her needs. Quickly she jumped up and made a beeline for a heavily tattooed man with a multicolored beard and Berghain vibes. Soon she was sucking his sizable cock before they engaged in intercourse. After that, she went on to man no. 2. I consoled myself with ketamine bumps, sitting with my young Italian friend near the DJ. Hampered from full participation in heterosexual congress due to the deal he made with his wife before attending, my friend started making out with a handsome man, surprising himself with his first foray into bisexuality.

In a manifesto found on its website, Hedoné articulates the philosophy of ethical hedonism. This philosophy, first articulated by Aristippus and refined by Epicurus in the fourth century BCE, teaches that life’s highest good lies in pleasure—but not in excess or indulgence. Epicurus defined true happiness as tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from pain (aponia), gained through simplicity, friendship, and reflection: “He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” Later, the French moralist Nicolas Chamfort echoed this ethos with wit—”The most wasted day is that on which one has not laughed”—framing pleasure as resilience against hypocrisy. Even if, yet again, I didn’t achieve my goal of orgiastic fulfillment at Hedoné, I found I could, at least, laugh about it.