Myisha Battle remembers that when she was growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, the sex education textbooks at her school were censored by black marker. Her quest for answers led her to become a clinical sexologist and sex and dating coach. She now hosts the KCRW podcast “How’s Your Sex Life?” and is the author of This Is Supposed to Be Fun: How to Find Joy in Hooking Up, Settling Down, and Everything in Between. For Battle, the key to great sex is conquering shame, and it’s this ethos, and feminism, that guides her practice. 

Iman Sultan:  How do you approach your work as a sex and dating coach? 

Myisha Battle: If you were a fly on the wall in my practice and in a therapist’s practice, it would look the same. It’s people in a room talking. [But while] therapy helps people look back in time at past patterns and traumas, coaching does a great job of looking forward, positioning the person where they would like to be. With individuals, it might be that they want to meet a person to settle down with, but they want to have great sex in the meantime. It’s very action-based. I expect my clients to actually do things between sessions and come back to me with reflections on how things went, what tactics worked, what didn’t. I tend to work with people for about three to six months but I have some clients I’ve been working with for years now. They are usually couples who are reworking the way they are in partnership with each other. That might look like working with a gender identity change, or an orientation identity change within the marriage or relationship. Or it could be opening the relationship, where each partner is dating, and I can be a support to them along the way. 

IS: What inspired you to become a sexologist?