Ahead of the February 11 Residence 11 Desire Summit on Sex and Relationships (get tickets here!), we’re conducting a series of livestream interviews with Summit speakers. You can watch them live or after the fact on our YouTube channel, Facebook page or Twitter account, and ask questions for our interviewees.
Yana Tallon-Hicks, LMFT is a sex therapist specializing in LGBTQ issues plus, kink and non-monogamous relationships. She is also the author of Hot and Unbothered, How to Think About, Talk About and Have The Sex You Really Want. She’s also a consent-based sexual educator and sexuality columnist and educator. Her workshops have taken place at Duke University, Marlboro College, Oh My Sensuality Shop, Hampshire College, Smith College, Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Simmons University, along with a growing list of other colleges & universities across New England and the U.S. Yana’s work centers around the belief that pleasure positive, and consent-based sex education can positively impact our lives and the world. You can find out more about her at Yanatallonhicks.com
Watch our interview below with Residence 11 Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel and Yana Tallon-Hicks, where they discuss navigating a mismatched desire in couples. Yana is also a speaker at the upcoming Residents 11 Desire Summit, where she will be speaking on this topic along with Nicoletta Heidegger. Make sure you hit subscribe, wherever you’re watching this, so you don’t miss out on any of our upcoming interviews.
On how questions she gets asked have changed over the years:
“I think more sex acts are becoming less taboo, and things are becoming more relational. Complicated, right? So instead of saying, is it okay that I want to do this sort of like taboo sex act, people are thinking more about, like, where does my desire to do this come from? How do I talk to my partner about it? How do I navigate sort of that, like, relational aspect, I also get a lot of people wondering if they’re, like, bad, weird or broken, for a variety of reasons. And it’s kind of like, and I talked about this in the book, where we’re kind of stuck in this damned if you do damned if you don’t place…”
On where one could find reputable sex education online:
“For myself, and even for adult clients, I like to use Scarleteen.com, which is actually targeted toward teenagers, it’s sex education for teens. But I think that their stuff is really clear and comprehensive. And that site has been built for years, so they have tons of stuff. I think it is important not to just Google, ‘is it bad that I like this..’ because you’re just going to find so much stuff to confirm your biases and that might not necessarily be helpful.”
“If you’re looking for one on one care, AASECT is a pretty popular website of sexuality professionals who have been gone through the ASSECT specific
training…
There’s also Poly Aware Professionals and Kink Aware Professionals (KAP), which are specific lists of professionals that are competent in those areas. And so on those sites, you can find doctors, therapists, occupational therapists, like whatever. And I think a lot of this is about building community.”
On what one can gain from her book, Hot and Unbothered:
“I feel like there are people who sort of like, they have a general understanding that like, you know, consent is a good idea. And sex positivity is a thing, right? There are these kinds of these like base-level understandings, but they really want to learn how to build these concepts into their actual sex lives.
…Identifying common barriers to positive sexuality and pleasure, such as the classic mood or pleasure pessimism in what I call ‘sexual imposter syndrome,’ things like that.
Parts of the book are [about] navigating how to move those barriers out of your own sex life and build more pleasure for yourself. And then the last part of the book is really like concrete troubleshooting. So that’s where we get into like navigating desire discrepancies and kind of building these concepts in a way that feels sustainable.”
Watch the whole interview above and be sure to subscribe to our channels to catch all our interviews!
About the Desire Summit: The Residence 11 Desire Summit, sponsored by sex toy companies FUN FACTORY and Blush, intimate audio platform BLOOM, romance novel publisher Avon Books, and yoga teacher training company Ganja Yoga, will feature extensive educational sessions with over 20 diverse authors and subject matter experts across psychology, physical intimacy, technology innovation, sexual health, music and narrative storytelling. Speakers include writer Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, author of The Sex Lives of African Women, polyamory expert Kevin Patterson, author of Love’s Not Color Blind, sex educator and dating expert Erin Tillman, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling romance author and TikTok favorite Sierra Simone (Priest, American Queen), Mia Hopkins (author of Tanked, one of The New York Times’ best 2022 romances, romance novelist Suzanne Park (The Do Over, The Christmas Clash), and Taylor Hahn, author of swinging novel The Lifestyle, among others. Keynote speakers will be intimacy coach Zoë Kors, author of Radical Intimacy: Cultivate the Deeply Connected Relationships You Desire and Deserve, speaking on 6 Questions That Will Get You Instantly Connected to Anyone, and sex educator Dirty Lola, who appeared as a sexpert on Netflix’s The Principles of Pleasure, speaking on The State of Modern Dating. Get tickets here for the Desire Summit.