Interview with sex educator Kim Loliya

Kim Loliya is a trained sex educator, facilitator and body-based coach specializing in women's sexuality and empowerment. In addition to one-on-one sessions with clients and couples, she runs workshops, courses and retreats in the UK and abroad. She is also one of the editors for Sex+, a sex positive magazine rewriting narratives about sex.

What is sex education? What does a sex educator really do?

What I do has multiple strands. The first strand is education, it’s really about speaking to people, running workshops, doing presentations, talking about sexuality and talking about relationships on subjects like consent. It’s similar to what I did a couple of weeks around the orgasm gap or things that interest people around sex, relationships and sexual health as well. Sometimes that goes into areas that are related to sexuality such as well-being, vulnerability, how we communicate our desires and what feels good, etc. That side is very public facing and more about presenting information into the space. That can have various forms because I do panels as well as evening and weekend events.

The other thing is that I am a coach and I specialize in women’s pleasure. I see women one on one and couples, but my primary specialism is helping women have great sex and making them feel safe and happy in their sexuality. I help them understand their sexuality and encourage them to ask for what they want. All of this connects to empowerment as well. I see clients at home or online.

My third strand is that I have a magazine called Sex+ which is all about sharing stories about sex, sexuality and rewriting narratives about sex. It was born out of being very tired of how sex was portrayed in the mainstream media, I wanted to have my own publications that had their own say around sex, showcased different narratives and championed for things that weren’t being heard.

Finally, there’s the consultancy strand. I’ve worked with companies that want to understand more about how consumers behave around pleasure. It’s a consultancy where I’ll speak to businesses and groups of people who want to have an understanding on sexuality, its history and future. Some of that work is project work, I’m working on a series of workshops for children in primary schools. The goal is to supplement the current provisions around PSHE, also basically known as relationship and sex education in schools, which isn’t very good. It’s very rushed and run by teachers who are embarrassed.  I’m working with a group and we’re trying to get funding for that project.

Do you think people still have a long way to go regarding sex education? Either in schools or at home?

Yes, they have a very long way to go. Consent isn’t taught enough, really understanding what feels good for people’s bodies moment by moment and then creating boundaries and communicating what they need. And that’s not just in the bedroom, it’s at work, with our friends and family. We’re not empowered enough to really have any self-knowledge on what we need and that obviously shows up in the bedroom because we end up tolerating sex that doesn’t feel good. We need basics around understanding when the body isn’t enjoying something that’s happening in sex and saying, “I need to slow down, I need to change something, hold on a second, I need to enquire and see where my body is at”. Schools should also instill a sense of bodily autonomy, your body is your own and it doesn’t belong to your partner, society or the government. It really is your own. We don’t get those messages and grow up thinking that people have claims over our bodies and that’s completely false. We don’t really learn how to stay safe not just sexually but emotionally as well. How do we recognize the signs of a toxic relationship?

Beyond that, there should be an emphasis on pleasure. It’s different for everyone and we need to learn how to understand the kind of pleasure we want and need. There’s also a huge amount of misinformation, a lot of the women I speak to don’t understand their anatomy, they don’t know where their clitoris is, they don’t understand the difference between their clitoris and their urethra. It’s basic anatomy that is completely missing and women aren’t the only ones to be misinformed. Some men have no idea around their anatomy and prostate health.

What’s one of the most shocking things in your profession?

The most shocking thing is when people think there’s not a problem and that we don’t need sex education because it’s 2019 and we can just google things. It’s people who usually go, “why do we need sex-ed? We don’t need it, we know what we’re doing, it’s fine. We can have sex whenever we want, we just have to buy condoms”.

There are people who have some sort of awareness that there is a problem, and that’s a really hard level to be in because all you can see is the problem. It can be depressing and feel overwhelming because the more you look, the more you see. The more you investigate, the more you realize there’s no end to oppression, trauma and sexual shame. It’s an endless cycle. Usually this level leads to empowerment, where you go, “I need to do something, I need to write something, I need to have an Instagram that talks about sex or, I just need to talk to my friends. When people say that there’s no problem, I need to say, yes there is! And then show them some stats”. It’s a sense of empowerment that can take many forms. My particular empowerment is, “ok, this a bit fucked up, I’m going to become a sex educator and overcome all my fears around doing this work and actually do it, because I feel like it’s needed”. It’s not at all something that is for everyone, obviously, but there are various options available.

How do people usually approach you? Are they shy and reluctant at first?

It depends on how I meet them. A lot of people approach me by e-mail so I can’t really tell. But when I do speak to them they tend to be quite vulnerable. When I do retreats and I work with women on them, they tend to not approach me because they’re really embarrassed and afraid. So yeah, I would definitely say shy and reluctant. Sometimes, although it doesn’t happen that much, people will approach me with a cool, “I know everything and it’s fine” façade. People can have weird behaviors at times. But more often than not, they feel a little bit embarrassed but don’t want to show it. 

What made you interested in becoming a sex educator? How were you introduced to the field?

It all goes back to when I was about 12-13 years old. I wasn’t having sex but I noticed that there was something wrong with me. I was having phone sex with a friend and we were engaging in explicit conversations and masturbating on the phone. That’s when I realized I had issues around penetration. I thought it was weird but I didn’t really understand it. I just knew it didn’t feel quite right and that something about it felt off. I pretended everything was fine, which is quite a common thing women and girls do. I just left it and for the next couple of years, through puberty, I was like “right I need to sort out my vagina, I think there’s something wrong with it”. I got this feeling that my vagina was too tight and contracted, so I made it my mission to stretch it and try all sorts of things by myself to get over that. I was single for various reasons until I was about 24 and had my first major relationship. We were going to have sex and my partner went “I can’t get in, you’re too tight”. I just thought, “oh shit, I have to do something about this, there’s something wrong with me”. So I ended up going to a sexual health clinic and I mentioned I wasn’t able to have sex and had a problem. They sent me to the psychosexual service upstairs and I booked an appointment. After 6 months on the waiting list, I finally had a medical examination where my therapist determined I had vaginismus, which is when your muscles involuntarily contract to the point you can’t have any penetration. After that I started working with my therapist around understanding my condition, the need to relax and the psychological components. I also got a book on vaginismus and worked on stretching my pelvic muscles. Thanks to this treatment I managed to have sex for the first time.

After breaking up with my partner I ended up signing up to orgasm mediation practices and met the OM community. I got sucked into this world and went from being quite socially isolated and awkward to having a lot of friends. I had a couple of good years connecting and being free around my sexuality and my body. I felt like I had gone beyond the veil and discovered a different way of living. The community however, was also a bit of a cult. Not because of the who were people in it, but because of the people who were running it. They were really unethical and very into pressuring people into buying expensive courses. So obviously, all good things must come to an end and I ended up leaving the community partly because I was so pissed off with the fact that they were hurting my friends and trying to extort so much money out of people.

Subsequently, my girlfriend who was my best friend at the time, ended up in a production of The Vagina Monologues. I decided to run a little book club where we would go through the stories featured in play. I even got to meet the Playwright, Eve Ensler, who really inspired me. This led to me running several book clubs in London where I would meet up with people at coffee shops and talk to them about sexuality. By this point I really wanted to run my own workshops around this theme. I decided to go for it and invited my friends. I kept pushing and ended up doing several of them for a while. I then decided to train in somatic sex education and started seeing people one-on-one. After my training, my work expanded and I started to work more on doing retreats for women of color and generally working beyond the small bubble that I was in. I also developed the Sex+ Magazine, which started gaining more and more followers on social media and venue partnerships for our work. I did more workshops, panels and gigs and that eventually led me to opening my own clinic and coaching women and couples. I’m currently doing a part-time diploma in counseling in psychotherapy to deepen my knowledge and expand my work.

With all your experiences and all the work that you’ve done, do you think our social values/rules (e.g. monogamy, not checking out other people) hold us back from truly being sexually fulfilled? Do they make us unhappy or resentful?

I actually think those values hold us back from being honest about ourselves and who we are and what we need.  In turn, that makes us unfulfilled. Monogamy in itself isn’t a reason to feel unfulfilled. If you choose monogamy, you can have amazing sex until you die. The issue is that most people don’t understand that they have different choices in terms of their relationship styles. They think monogamy is the only choice. And because of how monogamy is practiced, people use it as a way of controlling their partner’s behavior and it brings up a lot of unresolved issues. It’s something like developmental trauma. For example, if when you were 5, someone spoiled your brother and gave him sweets and you weren’t given any and left to your own devices, that could bring up developmental trauma and issues around attachment. Once you become an adult, you might have fear of loss that is very deeply connected to when you were 5 and were left alone. So your jealousy in a relationship might be very very deep and go all the way back to your childhood. Often, our deepest traumas come from the ages 0 to 5 because it’s our most vulnerable stage and we can’t quite communicate our needs.

As a result, I think that if we go into monogamy while not understanding our triggers and how to deal with them, we will probably hold on to someone very tightly. It doesn’t help that society has drilled harmful messages into our heads like, “your man is your man, fight for him” or “your woman is your woman, you owe her”. These kind of toxic messages tell us that once someone is in a relationship, they’re locked in and “claimed”. You don’t own anyone but monogamy makes us think we do by creating a false sense of security. And what do people do? They either cheat very overtly by having another lover or they cheat in their minds. We’re social creatures, we’re deeply wired for connection and it’s very difficult to not connect with other people in the world. It’s not about going “monogamy is shit”, “monogamy is to blame; it’s about caring and being conscious that you don’t own anyone as well as working on your baggage and feelings of insecurity and jealousy. If you consciously choose monogamy, that’s great. If you feel like it’s something you have to do, then it’s not great.  

What have you personally learned from being a sex educator?

I’ve learned that the work is never done in terms of working on myself, my own shame and my own fear. I’ve learned that when you share your story and experience, it changes lives even if you don’t do it as a job. You just have to be honest about what’s going on for you in the world if you feel safe enough. There’s this podcast on polyamory called Poly Weekly and their tagline is: “it’s not all about the sex”. People say that poly is all about the sex when really, it’s often more about communication. And I’ve learned that it really isn’t all about sex, most of the work that I do is about helping people undo shame, to become more themselves and overcome fear and pent-up emotions. Once you’re able to be honest to your partner and admit what scares you the most, you can get free. Sex is a manifestation, like a temperature check of something much deeper. When you get free, you can have great sex. But ultimately, it’s about getting free.

Why is sex education important?

We all have bodies and sex is a very natural expression of being human and connecting. Understanding sex, so that we can have the best sex our body can hold, is really important. It’s not just about procreation, it’s something that helps us connect. It’s very central to the human experience just like death and money. It’s not a peripheral thing you can ignore.

Do you think people still view sex as a taboo subject?

It’s still very taboo and I don’t think we quite realize how taboo it still is for some people. Interestingly, the media is very sexualized, we’re always looking at sexualized jeans, sexualized food, sexualized perfume, etc. So we have this hyper visibility of sex and at the same time, sex is very taboo. You can see sex and consume it as long as you buy things and support the capitalist wheel, but if you engage in sex, then you’re wrong, shamed and you shouldn’t tell anyone.

Do you think there’s certain stereotypes about sex educators? Have you come across people who have wildly different ideas about what you do?

Yes (laughs). Stereotypes from the mainstream are that sex educators are sexually depraved and constantly having sex. Or that they have some sort of sexual trauma and compulsively have sex because they’re messed up. We’re always portrayed as hypersexual and sexually obsessed and I love that because the things I’ve heard the most from fellow sex educators are complaints about not getting any action. So it’s hilarious that people think we’re having sex all the time. We’re normal people and would probably be way more sexual if we weren’t so worried about paying our bills. Another misconception is that we do our jobs because we’re broken and pathological about sex. There’s a third stereotype around sex work, because if you work in the sexuality industry, you must be a prostitute, I guess? Some people do, and that’s ok, but lots of people don’t and that’s ok too.

How would you encourage people to be more sex positive?

it's all about being honest with yourself. We all have areas in our sexuality that feel uncomfortable or even painful. We need to beat those areas and that will help us become more sex positive. As we grow, we need to bring our tolerance and acceptance of ourselves to other people.