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The most sex I’ve ever had in a single day was nine times with three different men. It wasn’t necessarily my goal to break records or anything, and the whole thing started innocently enough. I woke up in Seattle with a guy I met on Tinder a few weeks earlier when he was visiting me in Portland. At the end of our brunch in the Rose City, he told me to look him up if I were ever in his neck of the woods.

That wildly informal offer (an obligatory nicety if we’re being honest) turned into me inviting myself to his apartment for the weekend. This could have been a complete disaster, but the trip was wonderful and solidified in my brain as one of my first memories of really falling in love with the West Coast. We fucked twice before I left. Once before breakfast and once more before I left to drive home.

From there, I had plans to meet up with my friends-with-benefits person, another gentleman from the Tindersphere, to Netflix and chill. We chilled three times before breaking for dinner. We chilled thrice more after having refueled. Now, don’t get me wrong. These were not mutually satisfying gourmet sex experiences. It was junk-food fucking. It promised a sugar-high kind of fun at a time when I was addicted to the rush of simply being wanted.

The ninth romp took place when I finally made my way back to the apartment I shared with the adult-child I dumped months prior. The one perk of stubbornly refusing to break the lease was that I had someone to watch my dog while I explored Portland’s sister city to the north. I’d made up some ridiculous story about Seattle guy being “just a friend” who also happened to have a girlfriend and that we would all be crashing together at “their” apartment. Unbelievably, he bought it. Unfortunately, that meant I felt I wasn’t in a position to turn down sex when he initiated a few hours later. I mean, he did watch my dog. What was one more sexcapade after a day filled with them?

At this point, you’re probably wondering: “Is this a story about cults or not?” It is. The confessional introduction—winding as it is—was not designed to bury the lede but to support it. As someone who once was so desperate for love and acknowledgement that she almost hit double digit-levels of fucking with three suitors in a single day, I was in prime condition to be seduced by a charismatic cult leader. I had the one characteristic these so-called leaders target: a desperate need for outside validation. A little bit of flattery, and I would have been a full-blown fangirl of anyone offering the promise of a fix.

I’ve watched enough cult documentaries to know this is exactly how these things tend to go. Self-assured people do not brand their peers, battle the Feds or sign over their homes to a church before holing up at a compound in Guyana. The confident among us do not join cults. It is almost exclusively the path of the seekers, those who believe something is missing. They are the people who look for someone to give them answers and lead them to a cure—one that they cannot access alone. One that inevitably exists outside of themselves.

Far from being stupid, gullible or outright insane, most cult members don’t have an intelligence problem. We like to think otherwise because it insulates us from believing that we could ever fall victim to someone like Charles Manson’s charms. Instead, cult members almost universally seem to have a self-worth problem. They believe there is something within them that needs fixing, and they’re all too happy to have someone point out what it is. Conveniently for those in charge, that “fix” often involves sex.

Take, for example, the women who joined a sect of the NXIVM (pronounced Nexium…yes, it is both dumb and a spelling nightmare) cult called Dominus Obsequious Sororium, aka DOS. This so-called “elite society” within NXIVM operated like a multi-level marketing scheme in that women were invited to join by another woman who would become their “master.” Those under master became slaves. Slaves who brought other women into the society became the master to those slaves.

Apparently, everyone had a master, even the founding members. Those gals supposedly reported to actress Allison Mack, who then reported to NXIVM leader Keith Raniere (aka Vanguard), a squirrelly little man who coerced tons of female cult members above his attractiveness level to sleep with him on a dirty mattress (which is, apparently, a theme with these guys).

And where did all this sexually charged “women empowerment group” nonsense lead? To women starving themselves, depriving one another of sleep, sending nudes as collateral so they’d never be tempted to leave the group, and (eventually) branding one another with an image that turned out to be Allison and Keith’s initials. Oh yea, and sex trafficking.

So, how did we get here? It’s a long and twisted story, of course, but I think it’s best exemplified by one woman who worked her way into the upper echelons of the cult, bringing loads of women into its folds along the way, before quitting and speaking out. The branding was kind of a last straw deal breaker for her. Long before that, however, Sarah joined NXIVM after a man named Mark, who was already involved in the organization and a close confidante of leader-slash-“forever student” Keith, called her out on her obnoxious cough at their first meeting.

His exact words were: “What do you lose when you stop coughing?” To me (and probably to you) that sounds like some psychobabble bullshit, but to Sarah, it was profound. She was immediately taken back to her childhood where she began a habit of using ailments to get attention. Sarah was now aware of a habit that needed fixing. NXIVM promised to be a space where she could work on herself and find a form of personal enlightenment in the process.

Although Sarah never slept with Keith (most likely because she married another man within NXIVM, a high-ranking member of the men’s empowerment group who goes by the name Nippy (awful)), she did participate in DOS and other seminars that promoted the misogyny that Keith used to prey on other women.

Lest this essay give you the impression that cults only use sex and sexually charged language to shame, control and exploit women, you should know that NXIVM’s elite men’s group, Society of Protectors (SOP), was designed to turn “little boys into men.” It seems to have done that in part by promoting the idea that women are “entitled, lack discipline and misuse their sexuality to gain advantage in the world.”

Another teaching centered on the (super original) concept that men are naturally polyamorous, while women prefer monogamy. There were even seminars specifically crafted to humiliate female members and shame them into submitting to their male counterparts.

But the women weren’t the only ones bearing the shame. The men often felt guilty for participating, and the SOP messaging often exploited them, too. If it was their nature to be sexually promiscuous and their duty to keep their women in line so that they could overcome their feminine weaknesses to succeed in the world, then they were right to follow Vanguard’s controlling directives.

We see this again and again in cult dynamics. While the NXIVM cult may have started out as a space for self-realization and cultivating everyday joy, it eventually became a funnel for the men to get their sexual needs met. Keith Raniere benefitted from this playbook. He didn’t invent it.

David Koresh of the Branch Davidians outside of Waco, Texas, was also known to use his position to secure sexual partners. He required the cult’s male members to be celibate and “dissolved” their marriages, so that Koresh could take the women as his own wives and sleep with them. He allegedly raped some of the children as well.

Jim Jones of Peoples Temple forbid extramarital sex but considered himself to be exempt from the ban. He also didn’t discriminate, sleeping with male and female cult members, while encouraging the women to disparage their husbands’ sexual prowess. Jones seemed to believe his extracurriculars with his followers were something of a connection-building activity.

In each case (and these are but a few well-known examples), leaders use sex as a tactic to maintain control. This isn’t surprising. Having a lot of sex is an ego boost for these guys, and it helps to reinforce their self-image as superior to those they lead. After all, if they can get away with such shamelessness, maybe they really are more enlightened than the rest of us.

The bigger and more interesting question is why their followers go along for the ride (pun intended). Those who have agreed to be interviewed for documentaries, articles and podcasts almost always reveal that, at some point, engaging in sex acts with the cult leader made them feel special. They were chosen, and it felt good to be noticed, to be on the receiving end of a respected man’s flattery and extra attention. If this enlightened leader had picked them, they had to be doing something right.

This brings me back to the initial premise of this essay: People with adequate self-worth do not join sex cults. They don’t look for love in the form of lovers. They aren’t seduced by groups that promise to fix them. Those who operate from a place of self-lack, who seek validation from others, who believe that they are inherently broken are far more susceptible to finding solace in the form of a group that perpetuates harmful rhetoric and behavior.

So, I’m begging you—do the work. Whether through therapy, yoga, meditation or something else entirely, learn to value yourself as you are, lest you become source material for the next cult-aftermath documentary. Take it from someone who allowed her insecurities to make her vulnerable for far too long. Fostering self-confidence today is your best bet to avoid falling in with the wrong crowd.

With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix

P.S. Thank you to everyone who read and reached out about my birth story. I wrote that newsletter thinking, “Is anyone even going to want to read all this?” and the response was overwhelming. I am so grateful.

P.P.S. One of the most common questions people ask me is, “How are you able to write such deeply personal stories for your newsletter and blog?” This inspired me to share my process in a workshop. Check out this post to learn more and sign up.

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