Orgasm Is a Business Strategy. Now Hear Me Out.

What Mama Gena's work taught me about desire, decision-making, and why women keep building the wrong thing

By Francesca Alexander | Hustle and Glow

I am going to lose some of you in the first line. That is fine. The ones who stay are the ones who need this.

Here is the claim. The reason so many women build businesses that exhaust them, underpay them, and quietly drain the life out of them is that they were never taught to make decisions from desire. They were taught to make decisions from obligation. From fear. From what a good woman is supposed to want. And there is a direct line between that conditioning and the work of a teacher named Regena Thomashauer, who most people know as Mama Gena.

Stay with me. This is a business conversation. It just does not look like the ones you are used to.

The Thing Nobody Taught You About Wanting

Mama Gena built a multi-million dollar company, the School of Womanly Arts, on a single uncomfortable observation. Women have learned how to sidestep their deepest truth, their source, their knowledge, and follow the guidelines of the patriarchal world culture instead. NZ Motorsports

Read that as a business problem, because it is one.

When you build from the patriarchal guidelines, you build what you think you are supposed to build. The offer that looks credible. The pricing that feels modest enough to be palatable. The business model that other people approve of. The yes you gave because saying no felt dangerous. You optimise for being acceptable instead of being alive, and then you wonder why the thing you built feels like a cage with good branding.

Men, broadly, were never trained to override their own wanting. They were trained to pursue it. To name what they want in a room and expect the room to move. Women were trained to do almost the exact opposite, to read the room, manage the room, and quietly shelve their own desire to keep the room comfortable.

That is not a personality difference. That is a competitive disadvantage that was installed on purpose.

Why Pleasure Is Actually the Data

Here is where the orgasm comes in, and here is where I need you to think like a strategist rather than a prude.

Pleasure is information. It is one of the most accurate, least corruptible signals a human being has about what is actually right for them. Your body knows what lights you up before your overthinking, over-conditioned, people-pleasing mind has finished building the case for why you cannot have it.

Mama Gena's entire framework rests on the idea that the absence of the feminine is the absence of pleasure, which is the absence of listening to our desires, our dreams, our feelings. Strip the spiritual language off it and you are left with something every good founder already knows in another context. The data you ignore is the data that sinks you.

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Women have been trained to ignore the single clearest data stream they have. The one that says this excites me and that depletes me. This client is worth it and that one is going to cost me my weekends and my joy. This direction is alive and that one is just safe.

She puts it plainly. The more demanding our lives are, the more rigorously we must attend to our pleasure. Not as a reward for the work. As the instrument that tells you whether the work is the right work. NZ Motorsports

What This Looks Like at Your Desk on a Tuesday

Let me make this concrete, because a philosophy that does not change your Tuesday is just a nice feeling.

You are pricing a new offer. The patriarchal-guidelines version asks what is reasonable, what will not upset anyone, what you can justify. The desire version asks what would actually thrill you to be paid, and then treats the flinch you feel at that number as information about your conditioning, not information about your worth.

You are deciding whether to take a client. The trained-woman version weighs whether saying no makes you difficult. The desire version notices that your whole body contracted when you read their email and treats that as a legitimate input, not an inconvenient feeling to override.

You are choosing what to build next. The conditioned version chooses what looks impressive on a website. The desire version chooses what you cannot stop thinking about in the shower, because sustained desire is the only fuel that survives the unglamorous middle of building anything real.

This is not woo. This is risk management. You are simply refusing to discard your most reliable instrument because someone once taught you that wanting things was unbecoming.

The Part Men Have Always Known

There is a reason the boardroom rewards appetite.

Ambition is just desire that society decided to respect when a man holds it. Drive is desire in a suit. Vision is desire that learned to use a slide deck. We celebrate all of it in men without blinking, and then we call the same energy in a woman too much, intense, difficult, a lot.

So women learn to fold it down. To want quietly. To ask for less than they need and apologise for the asking. And then they build businesses that reflect the size of the permission they gave themselves, not the size of the desire they actually carry.

Mama Gena's work, underneath the provocation and the deliberately shocking title, is a permission slip dressed as a reclamation. Her core claim is that women are the greatest untapped resource on the planet, and that reconnecting a woman to her own pleasure and power is the thing no amount of success or education has managed to solve on its own. Lin

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You can build a perfectly competent business from obligation. Plenty of women have. But the business that actually fits your life, pays you what you are worth, and does not hollow you out to sustain it, that one gets built from desire or it does not get built at all.

The Invitation

I am not asking you to read every page of Mama Gena and agree with all of it. Her work is bold and it is polarising and that is rather the point. I am asking you to take the one principle that is genuinely useful and put it to work.

Desire is a compass. Pleasure is data. The thing that lights you up is not a distraction from the strategy. It is the strategy.

We talk about exactly this kind of inner work inside the Hustle and Glow Network, because the women building the most aligned businesses are not the ones with the best funnels. They are the ones who stopped overriding themselves long enough to hear what they actually wanted, and then had the nerve to build it.

That is the work. It is not soft. It is the hardest, most rigorous thing most of us will ever do.

So here is your homework, and I mean it. The next decision you make in your business this week, ask the question you were trained never to ask. Not is this reasonable. Not will this be approved. Just this. Do I actually want this?

Then build from the answer.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long form conversation series on marketing, identity, community, and what it actually takes to build something real. Find her work at socialglobalgrind.com and join the community at hustleandglow.com and linkin.bio/francescahustles