Sexual Wellness: An Interview with Ashley Cobb
Sexual wellness is an essential part of overall well-being, yet it’s often treated as a taboo topic, leaving many people without the knowledge or confidence to explore it fully. Open conversations about better sex—whether it’s pleasure, intimacy, or consent—are vital to breaking down these barriers and empowering individuals to embrace their bodies and desires.
Enter Ashley Cobb, an Award-Winning & Certified Sexologist, Speaker, Writer & HIV Activist. She is known for her open and forward-thinking approach to sexual freedom, and has become the millennial microphone for women of color seeking ultimate pleasure and sexual liberation. Ashley has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Shape, Style, Huffpost, Business Insider and more.
First inspired by Sex In The City’s Carry Bradshaw, Ashley started her sex-influencing career as a blogger, except instead of a print column in 1998, she started with a website in 2016. Combining her own experience with sexual topics that affect womxn, Ashley has since grown her fan base to around 100,000 humans through her powerful ability to destigmatize conversations about sex and pleasure.
What Is Sexual Wellness?
Sexual Wellness: Ashley’s definition of sexual wellness centers around the ability to advocate for oneself. She says, “The World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of sexual wellness is a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social wellbeing concerning your sexuality.” She goes on to break these aspects down in relation to self-advocacy:
- Physical: “being able to advocate for your physical health in terms of being able to visit your doctor [and] being able to ask for certain tests.”
- Emotional: “are you having sex from a place of a trauma-based response? Are you having sex from a state or I’m doing this ‘because I want to,’ [or] because ‘I feel like it’s how I get love?’”
- Mental: “Is it consensual sex? Are you mentally in a state where you’re able to consent to what’s happening to you?”
- Social: “That one is difficult because people perceive things differently socially. For me, it would be based on what you want to do. Sometimes people conform to societal norms but it’s not from a healthy standpoint.” Finding a husband, being ladylike, and all that other crap.
This idea of conforming to society’s idea of what sex should be was part of Ashley’s inspiration for getting into the sex-influencing space. She says that many Black Womxn “are very reserved when it comes to sex. A lot of us just feel not as open as we would like to be due to societal things and religion.” She herself grew up in a church in the South where “sex isn’t something you talk about … because then you’re perceived as this hoe or loose woman. And we don’t want to be perceived like that because we want to be able to get husbands, [have people think] you’re ladylike and a worthy woman and all this other crap.”
So one mission, which Ashley knows is a difficult one, is to get Black Womxn (and all people) to understand that “you can be sexual and still be desirable and worthy of all the things that you are worthy of. One does not take away from the other.”
Having Better Sex
Why is it important to have these conversations? Why talk about something if doing so could risk your reputation as “worthy” or “respectable”? Because people want and deserve better sex.
As Ashley said: “The people who talk about sex are the ones who are having better sex. The more you talk about it, the better your sex will be … if you talk about it, it stops becoming taboo … if you don’t talk about things that you’re interested in [you might think] that’s weird or strange or no one’s doing that. But if you’re in a conversation with people who are interested in the same things you’re interested in, you can normalize sex for Black women. We all have sex but we don’t have the important conversations around [it].”
Just as conversations about cannabis are needed to destigmatize the plant so that more people can experience its benefits, Ashley believes we need to have open conversations about sex so that more people can experience pleasure. She recalls one time, she had just posted a video on her Instagram asking people why they got married to people they weren’t sexually compatible with, and got countless messages and comments from people in response saying that they thought it would get better over time. Many said that “they were religious and they didn’t have sex until marriage and … they didn’t know that you were supposed to enjoy sex. They didn’t know it was going to be a big thing until they were in it.” Ashley says that even if people had never had sex before marriage, they are still often unsatisfied by the sex they’re having.
“Even though they had nothing to compare it to-we women hear the stories, we read the magazines, we see people who are talking about this mind-blowing sex-even though you aren’t having it when you’re having lackluster sex you’re like … ’this can’t be what the people are talking about. I’m missing something.’”
But conversations about sex aren’t often easy to have. In doing so people might find out that their wants and needs are vastly different from their partners’. They may need to decide whether these differences are something they can work on, or if they aren’t sexually compatible enough to be happy staying together.
Heightening Pleasure with Cannabis
Ashley also shared her personal experience with using cannabis during sex. She says that for her, cannabis “heightens the experience…because it increases your sensation and your pleasure … I like the feeling you get when you’re already turned on and cannabis just heightens that feeling.” While she has tried and used CBD in the past, she prefers using THC. She knows that “CBD works really well for pain… But I don’t have any kind of pain or discomfort.” The biggest effect it has on her is giving her a strong dose of drowsiness, which isn’t often desired when you’re trying to have mind-blowing sex.
When Ashley started talking about her cannabis use on her platforms, she was shocked by how many people already used the plant; “Y’all have been doing the whole thing this whole time, why didn’t anyone tell me?!”
Connect with Ashley Cobb
Ashley Cobb, (she/her) is an Atlanta based sex educator, writer, and HIV activist known for her open and forward-thinking approach to sexual freedom. Ashley is an advocate for the revolutionary power of pleasure and has dedicated her life to bringing Black sexuality to the forefront, and across generations.
She currently serves as a CDC “Let’s Stop HIV Together” Ambassador, where she works tirelessly to spread awareness and understanding of HIV prevention. Passionate about making a difference in the fight against this disease, Ashley utilizes her unparalleled knowledge from her background in Public Health and her experience as a former classroom educator to educate and empower others.
With her contagious enthusiasm for reproductive justice initiatives and comprehensive approach to understanding sexual health issues, she makes an incredible impact on the communities she serves. Committed to providing supportive resources for people who look like her, Ashley is a powerful advocate who fights fearlessly for change. With her warm, down-to-earth personality, Ashley has become the go-to source for everything related to sexual health, pleasure and wellness. Her work has been featured in top media outlets such as Essence, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, and Women’s Health.
Learn more about Ashley Cobb by following her on Instagram @SexWithAshley and by visiting her website here.
