Can You Orgasm Your Way To Your Dream Life?

Picture yourself in a penthouse apartment, calling to pay off your student loans in one large lump sum. Or on a beach in Morocco, face to face with your handsome lover. Or playing a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, a cheering crowd chanting your name.

Such fantasies aren’t idle daydreams; they’re central to “the O Method,” a masturbation-cum-manifestation technique that centers on visualizing your goals the moment you climax. At its core, the practice embraces sexual pleasure as a generative force — an idea that’s central to tantra, and has appeared in texts on sex magick dating back to the 19th century. But these days, you’re most likely to come across it on TikTok, where droves of women share videos about how the technique helped them “level up” their finances, careers, and relationships. This kind of content racks up millions of views, with creators promising “instant results” and women comparing notes in the comments.

“A lot of people are talking about orgasm manifestation online,” says content creator Venus O’Hara, “but I’m not sure they know what it actually is.”

O’Hara came upon the concept in 2018 when she was working as a freelance sex writer in Barcelona. At the time, she was struggling to make ends meet. “I lived in a tiny walk-up apartment, with no heat, no pillow, no table, no sofa,” she says. “And 300 sex toys.”

One particularly dreary night, O’Hara was forced to walk home in a downpour, not having money for a cab or umbrella. It was a rock bottom moment — and the next day she decided something had to change. She started looking into self-help and picked up a copy of Think and Grow Rich, a 2007 bestseller by Napoleon Hill (who, I later learn, was accused of numerous counts of financial fraud). His book introduced O’Hara to the concept of channeling sexual energy, leading her down an Internet rabbit hole that culminated in a YouTube video titled “How to Manifest With Orgasm.”

Galvanized, O’Hara put those sex toys to work. “At first, I was just thinking about graphs going up, exponential growth, and emails with collaboration proposals,” she says. Then she started merging sexual fantasies with visions of her ideal lifestyle: “Imagining being in my dream apartment, but also receiving cunnilingus in that apartment. Any type of desire that I had, I made it erotic.”

Suddenly, her YouTube channel — which focuses on female empowerment, orgasm, and relationships — started growing, and with it came more collaborations, opportunities, and money. “I’ve achieved a level of comfort I never thought possible,” she says, adding that she was able to pay off her student loans, get a bigger apartment, and hire people to help run her business. Her YouTube channel has grown to 140,000 subscribers, and as she happily points out on Zoom, her bed is now equipped with no fewer than five pillows.

The experience was so life-changing O’Hara decided to write her own book on the topic. In Orgasmic Manifestation: Transform Your Life With Your Sexual Energy, she walks readers through various methods and principles, from partnered play to the importance of developing “orgasmic independence.” “I always encourage women to prioritize their pleasure, and I think being in charge of your pleasure can help you make better life decisions,” she says, alluding to how when women rely solely on their partners for sexual satisfaction, they can find themselves stuck in toxic dynamics. “People often talk about the orgasm gap, about women and men. But I’m more interested in the gap between women’s reality and women’s potential.”

O’Hara believes in two types of manifestation: one about specific goals and another about being receptive and open to what the universe can offer. Nonspecific goals are good, she says, because they give you an opportunity to be surprised. She offers a personal example: Once, she was touching herself to thoughts of the Eiffel Tower (the building, not the sex position) to manifest a sojourn to Paris. But after hearing about riots, she pivoted to visualizing herself in an airport, and soon after, she was offered a trip to Scotland.

People often talk about the orgasm gap, about women and men. But I’m more interested in the gap between women’s reality and women’s potential.

Others choose to focus on clear-cut goals. A somatic sex coach and tantra practitioner who goes by the moniker “Pleasurelit Patricia” credits targeted visualization with helping her secure her Australian permanent residency. “When practicing my pleasure magick, I made sure I could feel it, see it, visualize it, smell it. I saw myself jumping up and down when I got the good news. And when I finished, I was like, ‘I’m sure I’m going to get it,’” the 37-year-old says. Three days later, she received the email.

Catherine Candor — a reader of my newsletter, Pleasure-Seeking, who wrote in to share her story — attempted a similar hat trick, but with different results. “My friend told me about manifesting during orgasm. So in peak form, I replaced the usual words ‘oh f*ck’ with ‘green card!’” she says. “The next day, I was wandering through a tourist shop, and stumbled upon a green card — but it was just a green slip of paper with the words ‘green card’ on it.” She saw it as a sort of cosmic wink at her words and resolved that next time she would be more specific.

Regardless of how particular a manifester’s goal, it’s important to be careful what you wish for, says Elise Tudor, a 35-year-old creator in New Orleans. Tudor once used the O Method to manifest financial stability with her then-husband, successfully buying a house together. But in focusing on material goals, she overlooked the emotional rifts in their relationship — issues that deepened over time and ultimately led to divorce. “The shadow work is as important as the spell,” Tudor says. “There’s a big difference between saying what you want to feel and what you want to heal.”

She emphasized that for more meaningful results, it’s important to carry the practice beyond the bedroom. “On TikTok, a lot of people treat this like it’s this make-a-wish and blow-a-load concept,” Tudor says. “But with orgasm manifestation, you are taking all these components of sex magick and using them as a vehicle to change yourself. Your body is the temple, and your life is the laboratory.”

Patricia seconds this sentiment. “When you tell people who don’t love themselves to stand in front of the mirror and say ‘I’m beautiful,’ it doesn’t work, because people don’t believe it,” she says. “You’re going to have to warm up your mind and your body to open yourself up to the experience.”

For some, orgasmic manifestation is part of a larger personal journey toward self-acceptance. That’s the case for pop singer Madison Rose, who encountered the O Method on TikTok. “It was a process of getting in touch with a part of myself that’s very powerful, that’s very tapped into the universe,” she says. “It was a way of healing my relationship with sex and what sex meant to me. And of having ownership over my body and my pleasure — all these things that, as women, we were told not to do.”

At first, Rose practiced orgasm manifestation solo and leveraged it toward one goal: increasing her success as a pop star. She’s seen a meaningful shift, not just in streaming numbers, but in how people perceive her work — leading her to undertake a joint ritual with her partner, the Broadway actor PJ Adzima. He had never experimented with sex magick, but the concept felt intuitive. “It’s a scary and vulnerable thing to make your desires known to another person, just as it’s a scary and vulnerable thing to look into someone else’s eyes and really engage sexually with them,” he says, framing their ritual as sex with an “elevated sense of purpose” that extends beyond physical gratification.

For their first foray, the pair focused on manifesting creative success. “The next day, we both got this onslaught of opportunities,” says Rose. Adzima agrees: “I’ve had some major career opportunities that have come to me. And it’s like, is it the results of years of work, or is this divine timing only possible because of this new ritual?”

“To me, sex magick is a deeply personal act of co-creation between you and the universe,” Rose says. For this reason, successful practitioners emphasize that it’s important to only manifest what’s actually good for you — rather than, say, using the O Method to get your ex back. She encourages people to exercise good judgment when it comes to learning about these practices on the Internet: “There’s such a beautiful side to spirituality, but there’s also a dark side. A lot of people are trying to make money on this, and not every TikTok tarot reader is going to have your best interests at heart.”

In those viral TikTok videos, you’ll encounter people framing the O Method as a way to make yourself irresistible to men. Most of them promise overnight results but have different explanations for why it works: “This is not witchcraft; this is not spiritual; this is just pure science,” insists one dating influencer, using a phrase parroted in multiple viral videos. (To be clear: It is not just pure science.) Others cite the law of attraction, claim it’s backed by quantum physics, or draw a connection between physical reproduction and spiritual creation: “The very fact that this energy is capable of creating life means that it is more than capable of bringing [your manifestations] to life,” says Soma, an influencer who bills herself as “your manifestation bestie” and offers love spells for $22.

Not every TikTok tarot reader is going to have your best interests at heart.

There will always be people trying to make a quick buck by selling the secret to success. And in a time of economic instability, it makes sense that many would be eager to believe their promises. But it’s worth questioning whether even our most intimate moments should be utilized to achieve enhanced productivity, wealth, or success. Sex is a powerful form of connection, and orgasm a brief moment of ego death. What happens when this moment of ecstasy is channeled, then, toward capitalist goals? And if we’re eroticizing our ambitions — jerking it to fantasies of infinite wealth, individual success, and irresistible sex appeal — do we risk transforming sex into yet another means to an end?

“Personally, I don’t do it all the time — because I know I’d start to feel weird if I was [manifesting during orgasm] back to back,” Rose says, “as though I was making my body do something for this specific result.”

On TikTok, creators are quick to promise overnight success. But longtime practitioners insist that orgasmic manifestation isn’t just a shortcut to achieving material goals; it’s part of a broader array of sensory and somatic practices aimed at deepening the mind-body connection. For many, the practice can also be a tool for self-knowledge, helping to uncover desires that can stay buried due to shame, socialization, or self-doubt. As the wisdom goes, half the work of manifesting is simply getting honest about what you actually want — and you don’t have to believe in witchcraft to grasp the benefits of that.

I began looking into the O Method with a healthy dose of doubt. Though some studies on visualization, which is crucial to the practice, suggest that focusing on positive mental imagery can improve outcomes, there’s little scientific research on orgasmic manifestation itself. Still, in the spirit of gonzo journalism, I’ve been dabbling in sex magick for the duration of reporting this story. (It felt only natural, since the assignment email popped up on my phone when I was — and I cannot make this up — masturbating.) So far, no major windfall — but maybe that’s because, as I’ve been told by one source after another, manifestation requires more than just desire. It asks for belief.

“It all comes down to self-concept and self-worth,” says O’Hara. “You have to believe you’re worthy of what you desire but still have a healthy level of detachment. To let go, and trust that what’s meant for you will come.”

Or, at the very least, you will.