Browse: Home / Creating community & conversation around controversial topics: Interview with Ev’Yan Whitney

Creating community & conversation around controversial topics: Interview with Ev’Yan Whitney

By on 04/24/2012

What happens when a casual lifestyle blogger realizes her real calling is learning about & exploring sexuality online? A new blog is born, naturally.

Sex Love Liberation is that blog.

I’ve had my eye on the creator of Sex Love Liberation, Ev’Yan Whitney, for a year now and had the pleasure of meeting and talking with her last year at the World Domination Summit in Portland, OR, her home base.

Ev’Yan is a beautiful combination of openness and strength, quiet and candidness. Her site is provocative but never vulgar. It attracts an incredibly diverse audience that comes to learn, listen, explore, and contribute from their own experiences. Her site fosters both public & private conversation.

Sex Love Liberation is a beacon of hope in a sea of sameness.

And that’s why I think it’s such an important You Economy story. I wanted to explore the motivation behind Sex Love Liberation and the experience of running a site based on such a controversial (from so many angles!) topic.

N.B. Our conversation discusses the topic of sex but not the actual content of her site. You might not want to listen to the video at work — but we’re certainly not talking about anything even remotely inappropriate!

Highlights:

  • Sex Love Liberation is actually a refinement of your original personal blog, right? Tell me about how you came to honing your message down to that simple credo. (00:42)
  • How do you prepare yourself first for the difficult task of putting controversial ideas out to the public and then for the thankless exercise of receiving the response? (02:43)
  • “Take the criticism without letting it seep into your bones.” (5:18) Click to tweet!
  • Welcome the discussion. Ruffle feathers. Make people think. (7:15) Click to tweet!
  • SLL attracts an extremely diverse audience. Did you have a strategy for attracting so many different types of people? How do you foster the conversation between them? (7:30)
  • Where do you see your movement & your business 6-18 months down the road? (14:01)

Discover more about Ev’Yan at Sex Love Liberation and follow her on Twitter @ev_yan.

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Posted in , , | Tagged , , , | 20 Responses

20 responses to “Creating community & conversation around controversial topics: Interview with Ev’Yan Whitney”

  1. Jen
    Jen 04/24/2012 at 4:39 pm | | Reply

    I love this interview. The tweet bits are soul nourishing alone, but the conversation — wow! I agree with your point, Tara, that there’s such hope in Ev’yan’s ability to connect with a broad audience when the web sort of puts us in bubbles. I do think it is because sex is universal and Ev’yan’s posts and emails draw us all out of our boxes to a safe space for exploration and conversation.

  2. Joanna DeVoe
    Joanna DeVoe 04/25/2012 at 5:32 pm | | Reply

    Great interview. Great questions. I LOVE Ev’Yan’s blog. Actually found her thru her husband’s work. What a sexy couple those two make!

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    [...] I love (love!) Tara’s interview with Ev’Yan. [...]