Ev’Yan Whitney is a sexuality doula and educator, and she wants you to know that self-care and sexual wellness are a lot less complicated than you might think. It all comes down to taking the time to understand what your body really needs.
Remember to breathe
When asked what she does to care for herself, Whitney says her self-care routine is “boring.” She explains “self-care” might often seem “flamboyant” or “showy,” like a facemask selfie posted to Instagram. But Whitney says she’s trying to focus on the simple stuff like remembering to drink enough water or just go outside and take a deep, centering breath.
“Sometimes the basics are sort of glossed over because we want those selfie self-care moments,” she says. Whitney says she does things like bubble baths and skincare, too, but if you haven’t been drinking enough water during the day, a face mask isn’t going to do the work you want it to do.
Whitney says she also sets boundaries for herself when people come to her for help with their own issues. “I used to respond to every email, every DM,” she said, but she got burned out very quickly and started to stop liking the work that she does. So now she says, “If someone wants my help, they have to pay for it because my time is valuable. And that money exchange is an investment on both of our ends.”
Be curious
Whitney advises a foundational approach when it comes to sexual wellness, too. It’s not all about masturbating every day and expensive sex toys, though those things are certainly valuable. What’s more important is taking the time and doing the work to learn about your own body.
“I really see sexual wellness as the basics, getting down to the most important aspects of your sexual identity,” Whitney says. “That looks like addressing those traumas that you have that are keeping you from accessing your sexuality with a clear head or an eager spirit.”
Self-pleasure sessions are opportunities to educate yourself on your own sexual body and “how it likes to be touched, how it likes to be kissed, what I do not want.” Whitney encourages people to be curious about who they are as sexual beings.
“I just think that we focus so much on the external, like the products we can buy and the things that we can introduce into a regimen versus the things that we actually need to be curious about,” she says, adding, “Before we can even buy a CBD lube, we need to be asking ourselves, ‘Who are we as sexual beings? What kind of sex do we want to be having? In what ways am I not empowering my voice when it comes to the sexual pleasure that I want to have, the sexual pleasure that I deserve to have?’”
Speak openly
It’s getting easier to think and speak frankly about sex. Online communities and terms like “sex positivity” weren’t around when Whitney first started doing this work.
Before she became an educator and doula herself, Whitney had to confront her own traumas and get to the bottom of the sense of shame she’d grown up associating with sex.
When she began to speak publicly about her experience, she learned she wasn’t the only one experiencing these feelings after all, and she felt driven to continue helping others. She says she wants to be there for people in the way no one was for her.
“In so many ways, I’m talking to a younger version of myself.”