Got A Resolution? There's A Guru For That

AFTER COMING OUT AS QUEER eight years ago and seeing a variety of therapists in New York City and Los Angeles, filmmaker Kait Schuster, 29, was struggling to feel connected to her body during sex.

- Molly Oswaks

“Everyone else’s sex problems, as imagined in my mind, were very small,” she says. It wasn’t until two years ago, when she discovered the work of “sexuality doula” Ev’Yan Whitney and her podcast The Sexually Liberated Woman, that something clicked. “It was the first signal into being like, ‘Oh, maybe I’m less alone than I think,’” she says.

Schuster instantly sought direct access to Whitney, who offers one-on-one coaching on her website, sexloveliberation.com. (Weekly hour-long calls are $750 per month; most clients, Whitney says, work through their hang-ups in three to four months.) The fees were more than Schuster could afford, but she recalls thinking, Someday, if I could do that, it would be so cool. Then, around her birthday, she got an email from Whitney advertising a special rate of $70 for a single session. “It felt like a sign,” she says. “The universe was like, ‘I’m bringing this to you.’”

That first meeting went well, and Whitney offered a discount for more sessions and a series of exercises meant to reframe her new client’s approach to intimacy. At one point Whitney suggested Schuster take a break from sexual activity altogether. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. I can do that?’ ” Schuster recalls. “And she was like, ‘Of course you can do that.’ The reality was that when I was working with her regularly, my sex life was the most connected and easy it had ever been. I don’t know what worked, but it worked.”