By Melissa Karen Sances
For the Valley Advocate
For Yana Tallon-Hicks, the “V-Spot” has been the epicenter of her career. The column she began for the Valley Advocate in 2010 has since spawned a sex therapy practice, her first book and a Tedx Talk in Vienna — not to mention her beloved child.
“The column is like my ‘Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon,’” she said in a Zoom interview in November, referring to the game that links the prolific actor to every one of his peers within six steps. “It’s like six degrees from my life.”
Finding her voice
Tallon-Hicks grew up in western Mass. reading the syndicated sex column “Ask Isadora” while waiting for brunch at Jake’s in Northampton. It was a rite of passage — one that felt particularly precious because no one she knew was talking about sex, while, all around her, girls were sexualized every day.
“I was like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” said Tallon-Hicks. “The conflict was really confusing.”
In her early 20s, inspired by “self-righteous indignation,” Tallon-Hicks started shuttling her friends to clinician-led community-based health care provider Tapestry Health for sex education.
“It was just so nice to have someone say, ‘I’m going to take you seriously, here are your options, and you have the power to make your own decisions,” she said of her experience with Tapestry Health.
As an undergraduate, Tallon-Hicks received a Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corp grant — which was a paid, 10-week internship program that placed undergraduate students at reproductive and social justice organizations — to work for Carol Queen, founder of the Center for Sex & Culture, a nonprofit that provided sex-positive education and resources (which has since closed), in San Francisco.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in queer studies and sexuality from Hampshire College in Amherst, she returned to San Francisco working as a sex educator/sales associate at female-friendly sex toy shops like Good Vibes, which she calls “the Apple Store of sex toys.” There she learned extensively about sex toys, anatomy, sexual health and human sexuality.
Upon returning to the Valley, she “cold-called” the Advocate, offering to do whatever they needed — though, ideally, she said, she wanted to write a sex advice column. To her surprise, she was hired for exactly that.
Tallon-Hicks had few examples to refer to.
“‘Ask Isadora’ was like three or four little questions with one- or two-sentence answers,” she said, noting that that model wasn’t going to work for her. “I’m so fricking verbose, I don’t know how the hell anyone did that.”
At the time, Dan Savage was making waves for his syndicated sex and relationship advice column, “Savage Love.” Where Isadora was buttoned up, Savage was confrontational. Tallon-Hicks literally grew up while writing the V-Spot, evolving from provocateur to earnest ambassador.
In the beginning, she and her editor brainstormed different column names, settling on the V-spot “as a twist on g-spot and the Valley.” And while some sex columnists at the time used pen names, Tallon-Hicks wanted to claim her own “to set a precedent for not being ashamed to talk about sex.”
After the Advocate started illustrating its columnists, she began getting recognized locally. But the advent of Instagram made her anonymity a distant memory.
“People would walk up to me at the grocery store and tell me a bunch of stuff, and I was like, ‘I just need apples,’” she said. “Or I would be talking to friends about something personal at a cafe, and someone next to me would say, ‘Don’t you write that column?’”
But the question she got most often was: Do you offer therapy?
Vibing with clients
After becoming known for her singular voice, Tallon-Hicks had “a little bit of a professional identity crisis” while in graduate school at Antioch University – New England in Keene, New Hampshire, where she earned a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy. She learned that as a therapist, she was “not supposed to be a person, that you’re really supposed to be as neutral as possible.” One professor asked her to Google herself through the lens of a potential client. Tallon-Hicks was mortified. “I wrote a column about making homemade lube in my kitchen with my roommates!” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m screwed: I can’t be a therapist.’”
Tallon-Hicks has now been a practicing couples and relationship therapist for eight years, and currently sees 56 people out of her office in Greenfield. Her unabashed approach to sex has turned out to be an asset that builds trust with both readers and clients.
“I’ve gotten the feedback that I write exactly the way that I talk,” she said. “I do have protected pieces that I’ve never written about, but if people have read the column, I actually feel a lot more relaxed, like they kind of know my vibe.”
That doesn’t mean that everyone automatically feels at ease with her. Reading a column and being vulnerable with a stranger are different exits on the highway to sex positivity. If a client is nervous, Tallon-Hicks gets real with them, saying: “I’m well aware you met me three minutes ago, and all social norms are telling you not to share. You should know that a butt plug is like a stapler to me, and whenever you’re ready, I’m here for it.”
Asking for it
While in graduate school in 2016, Tallon-Hicks was asked to do a Tedx Talk in Vienna, Austria, by someone who’d read the V-Spot and found her on Instagram. As part of a TEDxViennaSalon on “The Future of Intimacy” — essentially, a Ted Talk to a localized audience — she discussed sex education, consent and pornography.
In 2019, she gave birth to her son, who is now six and already asking questions about anatomy. (That’s nothing, she said — but was stumped recently when he asked about God.) Three years later, she published her first book, “Hot and Unbothered,” which she said “is like doing sex therapy with me except it only costs $18.”
She’s currently working on another book, “Redefine the Relationship,” about restructuring relationships across monogamy to polyamory.
After putting down the column for a minute, she went on a date with a “deep local” who told her, “I remember reading the V-Spot when I was waiting for brunch at Jake’s. I miss it.” She realized that she did, too.
For the second time, she asked the Advocate if she could write the column, though now they were rehiring her for a job she had already defined. She wrote her most recent V-Spot in an hour. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just in my bones,’” she said. “A book is a long, drawn-out rigamarole, but the column feels like I’m talking to somebody. I wrote it in a coffee shop and then went to Zumba class.”
Now in her late 30s, returning to the V-Spot feels like coming full-circle: “That’s so much of my advice if you want something, you can ask for it.”
Learn more at yanatallonhicks.com, and submit your V-spot questions to the Advocate.
Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.
