Court Vox: The interview
Unlearning patterns of behaviour, allowing men to be vulnerable, and the power of being mindfully erotic.
For our podcast, Naked Men Talking, we caught up with Court Vox.
Based in West Hollywood, Court is a somatic sex educator.
In the conversation we talk unlearning patterns of behaviour, allowing men to be vulnerable, and the power of being mindfully erotic.
How did you realise that this was the kind of work that you wanted to focus on?
I started getting interested in Shibari rope bondage in my 30s and met a woman who was a psychotherapist that worked with the nervous system. And at the time, nervous system stuff was not being talked about like it is now. And I said, you know, I would really like to be a sex therapist, but not one that talks to people, one that kind of works with the body and experiential learning. I said, I just I don't know what that is or that it even exists. And she said, have you heard of sexological physical body work. And I had not. I looked it up in my car as soon as I got to my car after kind of working with her. I think within two weeks I was signed up for that course. And then over the next two years I studied that modality along with surrogate partner therapy and kind of like changed my life.
What triggered the Shibari interest? How did that fit into what you were doing?
I came out when I was 19. My first relationship was like three and a half years. I took a year off from that. And then I went straight into another five year monogamous relationship. So from like 24 all the way till like 32, I was in monogamous relationships. And when I came out of the second one, Truvada had been introduced and so had Grindr.
It was the whole world. There was sort of this sexual revolution happening. And I had this thought in my mind that was like, if you're going to be a hoe, now's the time.
And I had a lot of sex. I had a lot of great sex. I learned a lot about myself. In my twenties, I had been more of bottom. And in my thirties I really moved more into top energy and more into dominant energy. And it was a really big exploration.
I got to a place where I was like, there's gotta be more and I'm curious. And I don't remember how Shibari Rope Bondage came into my kind of ecosystem, but I took a course.
If you're in an exploration stage, Shibari features somewhere in there, doesn't it?
It's interesting because on my retreats and in private work, I offer rope as an experience and it's something that people are always afraid of and it's intriguing. And inevitably it's like on my last retreat, there was nine men and all of them were like, rope, please, more rope. I want to learn how to tie and I want to learn how to be tied. There's something really beautiful and grounding and sexy. it's a multifaceted experience that I think people should try.
There's so many aspects of your work that we could talk about, but I wanted to focus in on men and get your views in relation to intimacy, masculinity, and loneliness, and the intersection of all of that in relation to men. I guess that the question is, what is wrong with men?
I don't know that that's the right question, actually. I think the question is how can we move - move into connection and away from loneliness or like what is in loneliness that is allowing us to grow into something deeper, right?
When we look at history and we look at kind of like times in our lives of like deep contraction, there is also expansion and then followed by contraction. And so I think, you know, even as we're talking about Grindr and Truvada being this huge opening and expansion, I now think we're in this time where we're coming back to something that's like, okay, we have that. It's not going to go away. It's part of our ecosystem. It's part of our zeitgeist. It's part of our culture. And also like, it's not serving me the way that it was. It's not serving our community the way that it was. And so now what is the way forward? And so I think that's the question I'd like to address. And I think the way forward is community. It is in-person events. It's not online.
The most beautiful thing happens on my retreats, which is something I refer to as erotic brotherhood. It's not sexual and it's not not sexual.
But on my retreats, I offer one-on-one coaching and sessions with certified trained sexologists, sexological body workers, as well as group work, group erotic experiences, workshops, morning practices. And in all of that, these men are really cultivating themselves. And then they're bringing it back into a larger community with each other and sharing and talking.
What was your experience? What desire did you pull out today? And so we're we're having experiences that allow us to speak and share from a really deep place and within retreat we're also having micro contractions and expansions. What the beautiful thing about immersion is you can have that a few times before you leave and it's such a elevated kind of amplified space that you couldn't possibly have that in your day-to-day life. Or if we were doing something that was like, we're going to meet for an hour today and then next week we'll meet for an hour. It's just not the same.
I think that the answer to loneliness really is community, but it's not just community because we have access to bars and clubs and all the things that we call community. But it does require leadership that says we're going to go a little bit deeper here. We're going to talk about things that are not related to social landscapes of where you come from, what your job is, what kind of car you drive, where'd you go to college? These are hierarchical questions, and they place us.
In our attempt to connect with one another in deeper ways, we actually start to move further apart. And so the questions have to be different. The questions that we're inviting from one another have to be different. And that starts from a leadership position in communities. And so that's one of my aims as a leader of my own community is to invite people to ask different questions and to share from a more authentic place.
It's kind of the antithesis of the transactional nature of online connections and hookups with people that you never see again. That connection that you're describing is, I guess, aspirational for a lot of people, but maybe they don't have the tools to know how to actually engage with people in that way?
I think you're absolutely right. I talk about your erotic toolbox or your erotic toy kit, right? So many of us are still working with the same information that we had when we were 16 years old or 19 or whenever we had sex for the first time. And now we're, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 years old and we're like mature in every other aspect of our lives. And yet here we're still 12 or 16 years old and being like, why do I feel so inept? Why do I feel so unprepared or bored even? It's like, well, you're working with the same shit you did for the last 35 years.
Zero growth.
Zero growth. And that speaks to a sort of larger inquiry around our relationship with sex, intimacy, eroticism in the world from a cultural perspective - so many people are very, very, very uncomfortable talking about it because they're very, very uncomfortable with themselves and their own relationship to it. It's a real shadow. It's a cultural shadow as well as a personal shadow for us in terms of how do we talk about it when every time I bring it up, even with your own therapists, your own therapist might go, I'm not comfortable talking about sex with you. In which case, it's probably time to find a new therapist.
There has to be a space for people to step into where all is welcome here. Your body is welcome here. How do we charge and enliven your spirit, your body, your relationship to men, your relationship to yourself? And for me to say as a leader, I want all of you to be here - not just bits and pieces, but I want your grief, I want your sadness, your joy, your kinks, your fantasies, it's all welcome here. And to be in a space like that is incredibly liberating. And I'm not just speaking it, I'm embodying it. That's who I am. And to walk into a space like that, it's like a little bit strange. Because at first you're like, can I trust this? Is this real?
Because you're making yourself more vulnerable than you've ever been before?
Yes, but when other men start to step in slowly with their vulnerability and their sharing and they're allowing themselves to be seen as messy and untethered and not completely together, or to share fantasies that feel completely out of the realm of acceptability and then still be met with, I still love you. And it's not just, I still love you, but fuck yes, I celebrate you. I celebrate your capacity to be vulnerable with me. I celebrate your kinks, your desires. I fucking cheer you on. If I would envision a world for men in general, but queer men, GBTQ men, that's the world that I want to live in.
You mentioned the retreats and the one-on-one work that you do. Who are the men that are coming to do this work with you?
By and large, the average age is 40. I do have men of all shapes, sizes, and colours come to do work with me. By and large, they are American. I've had some Europeans. And I think, you know, that's just because I live in America and I live in Southern California. A lot of coastal men, so New York, Chicago, Texas. Los Angeles and California.
As I grow and expand, it's like, how do I reach some of those middle places that maybe don't have as much access? And, you know, I'm one person and it's sort of like, I'm growing, I'm growing at my, speed that I have capacity for and can keep up with.
You touched on briefly some of the things that happen at a retreat. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that in terms of what the program at a retreat looks like? You talked about morning practice. Is that just a circle jerk?
I think language is important and I would never use the term circle jerk.
What term would you use?
I would use mindful erotic practice.
Why wouldn't you use circle joke?
Because it's pornographic. And it insinuates that we're getting off on each other and focused on taking from one another, which there's nothing wrong with that. I want to be clear. I'm not judging it. It's something different, right? That's not what my gatherings are.
But a mindful erotic practice is to be in communal space with other humans. It doesn't have to be just men, but in my retreat its men. And it's having a relationship with your body, your whole body. A circle jerk is like, we're going to grab our cocks and we're just going to jack off together and like watch each other and great, beautiful. Go do your thing. We actually know how to do that. Right? We know how to do that. It's on porn. We've been doing it for forever. What we don't know how to do - and this is where myself as an educator comes in - is how do you include your whole body in an experience in a room with other people, right? And even if you're having a mindful erotic practice on your own, our kind of pattern is to go right to the cock. But we have a whole body that is erotic.
And there are 33-plus erogenous zones in the body. And if we are wanting to expand our pleasure and expand our relationship to our orgasm and even redefine what orgasm means to us, we have to look outside our normal pathways or our pathways that we're always going to. And that's for a lot of us, it's like go straight to the cock. And that's a lot of sex in general, is we go straight to the cock, we go straight to the hole. And it's sort of like, well, if you're going to complain that you're having bad sex, you're not having bad sex, you're having the same sex.
Learn new things.
Learn new things. Learn your body, learn how to touch yourself, figure out where you like to be touched and how so that you can express it to a partner. I really like my chest touched. I really like my armpits licked. I really like the insides of my thighs caressed. I like to be spanked on my ass and my upper back. I like the back of my head caressed. My ears are really sensitive if you whisper naughty things into them. This is just like information gathering.
And then the second step to that is how do I share that in a way that invites people to want to give me pleasure? And I know it sort of sounds simple, but it's very challenging for so many people.
We're so used to not having those conversations and sharing that information. And I come back to that transactional nature of sexual encounters that you never really have time to establish that with someone if they're just coming in and getting off and going again.
Well, I actually would disagree. I think that you as a person need to reestablish your own inquiries and your own boundaries and your own intro conversations to hookups. If you're looking just to get off, be upfront about it, right? I just want to get off, I've got 30 minutes.
For me, like I'm very particular about time when I'm setting up a hookup like that. And if somebody has 30 minutes, I'm a no for that. For me, it doesn't work, right? It works for them because they just want to come and jack off together and get out the door.
But if I say, you know, I would like an hour, hour and a half, just set aside, I don't want to rush. Here are all the things that I love to play with. You know, what are the things that you love to play with? You know, are there anything that's a hard no for you? Anything that's a yes? Anything that's a maybe? By and large, the people that say everything, I'm game for everything, they're They're actually, nine times out of 10, they're not great experiences for me.
No, they have no idea what they want or what to give you.
No, or how to express a boundary of a no. And what's true for me is, is I know that I have that information because I've tested it, I've tried it. And for me, sometimes I still make the choice to go with that person. But at the end of it, I have to take personal responsibility.
There's none of this like, why did that happen to me? Why do I keep having bad sex? It's like, well, I know why this happened. I know why this wasn't the experience I wanted because I didn't follow my desire, what I wanted. I didn't express it or I did express it and I still decided to make this choice regardless.
Do queer men, gay men have it easier than straight men in this kind of context? When we think about the constraints of the constructs of masculinity, are straight men, the victims here?
That's a hard question. That's a harsh question. That's a multilayered question, so I'll just start with, I think gay men have more access to sex, for sure, right? If you talk to a straight man, they're like, I've had sex with five people in my whole life. And a gay man is like, I've had sex with 60 or 10 or 20 or 1,000, right?
Sex is way more accessible to gay men than it is to straight people. To straight women, to straight men, it's more accessible. Is the type of sex that I'm talking about accessible to gay men? It is, and a lot of us don't have the tools or the even awareness that it exists to move into that.
I guess I'm thinking about almost permission to explore intimacy in a more open and fluid way for queer men. Everyone's experience is different, but there's less rules perhaps that we have to feel constrained by just because of the liberation that comes with being a queer man?
I think there's a difference between being queer and being gay. I think there's a lot more liberation in being queer. I think gay has become a sort of assimilation into straight culture and to be acceptable and to be able to work in corporate and bring your husband to weddings and shit, which is great. We needed that.
By and large it's benefited white cis straight-presenting gay men. And so it's very specific. I think queerness offers a lot of freedom in terms of like, well, we're not accepted anyway. And so we're just like, fuck it. We're just to do what we want.
I do think in queer, GBTQ culture, there is sort of like the opposite end of the spectrum where it's like there's so much freedom and there's also messaging of like, you can have all the sex you want, you should be having all the sex you want, you should be having fucking on the dance floor, you should be going to raves - there's a lot of shoulds.
Why aren't you in a polyamorous relationship already?
Right. Why aren't you fucking three men at a time? And why haven't you had an orgy yet? And so I think, you know, it kind of goes in the opposite direction where look, not all gay men want that. And there is the sort of messaging of, well, why not? You can, it's available to you. Why don't you want this? What's wrong with you?
There are men - gay men and straight men - who are emotional. They need an emotional connection. They're a one man guy. They want a monogamous relationship. They want some aftercare at the end, right? So assuming that every gay man has this incredible sex life is a myth.
The guys that are having these incredible wild experiences on gay cruises and things like that, by and large, it's drug-fuelled. What if you took those drugs away?
What does sober sex look like and is it going to be the same? Or are you kind of back into that place of like, I don't know who I am, I don't know what I'm doing, this is uncomfortable. And how do you deal with that?
Are these the types of conversations that are coming up in your retreats with these men - are they having these dilemmas around sex and intimacy in that way?
Everybody has their own kind of pathway and journey and story. But I think by and large, you know, there's a couple different types of clients. There are some clients that have like had tons of sex and they're like, I'm ready to have something different.
And then there are men who are like, you know, I'm not having the sex that I want with my partner, or I'm not having the sex that I want. And I haven't had a ton of experiences and the ones that I had, they weren't great. And so like, what's going on here?
And then there are men that come to retreats that are really wanting more community and something deeper while they're exploring their eroticism, their sexuality. So it's a couple different types of men.
I've had men in their late 20s and men in their 30s and up to late 70s as well, but I think by and large the reason the average age is 40 because there's some life there. There's some life that's been lived and it's sort of like, okay, I'm at this point now where it's like, what's next? What's the next 20 years of my erotic life going to be like?
And, you know, our bodies start to change around 42. I've found just anecdotally that our desire and our arousal pathway shifts. We're not so spontaneous anymore. We're kind of more in a responsive arousal pathway, which means we're not ready all the time.
You match that with a more reflective headspace as well. You're starting to question things and compare things which you don't do when you're 19 or 20.
Right - you're kind of in the excitement of being 19 and your hormones are at where they're at and it's a different time in your life, you know?
Has your work in this space shaped or evolved your relationship with your body and your sexuality? Has it shaped the way that you experience intimacy in your life?
Why I started this whole thing was that I was really curious about the relationship with my own body and my own sex and my own eroticism. I would love to say I have it all figured out but the truth is like, as I'm leading these things, I'm also changing.
I know we're talking about men here, but my work with women is incredibly rich and rewarding. And what I've learned working with women is I've been able to, have a deeper relationship with my body in a different way, to understand my orgasmic potential in a different way.
Men think we have an ejaculation orgasm. Like it's a climax. That's what we know. And so it's like, well, that's what we do. But women can have back to back climaxes. They can also have like these frequencies in their bodies, which is called peaking. The way that they describe orgasm in their body is so different than we do. And so having like that language of understanding of like, I wonder if I could track that in my own body. I can, I can track that in my own body. I can track high arousal. I can track these different frequencies happening in my own body.
I'm so grateful that I've been able to work with women so that I can also like take that transmission and give it back to men and say, well, what if climax is not the only type of orgasm you can have? What if you could have full body orgasm? What if you could have prostate or anal orgasm without coming at all? What if you could have nipplegasms? What if you could have an eargasm? And like reframing some of these things so that we have different language to assign to different sensations that we have in our body. So I think, you know, it's the experience itself, but it's also having language and lexicon to speak about it to.
What are some of the insights about your body or your sexual experience that you'd wish you'd learned when you were younger?
Personally, I think I'm on the journey that I'm on and I'm really grateful for all my experiences. I am very fortunate that I have a mother who is incredibly supportive. She's celebratory of my work and who I am as a erotic human. She comes to me with her sex questions. She was somebody that was very open and open about masturbation and truly where babies come from - it wasn't the birds and the bees, it was the real conversation. I think it actually starts there.
It starts there and I wish that for everyone. I wish that we had more guidance when we were young, not like when we hit puberty and all of a sudden it's like we're having a conversation. It's like, no, it's actually, this is a part of our life that we've always been talking about.
I have a 21 year old son and we've always talked about sex. We've always talked about drugs. We've always talked about hard conversations because it's just been in our lexicon. It's not something that I like popped on him when he turned 11 or 12.
At the point where you're least able to have that conversation when the hormones are going crazy.
Yeah, and you want nothing to do with your parents at that point. When we start to speak about it as if it was just a natural conversation, it's like we're talking about breakfast - speaking about sexuality and eroticism as pleasure instead of fear-based, instead of you're going to get pregnant, you're going to get STIs, you're going to die - all the things that we learn in school.
I also think anatomy is important, right? We learn about the rest of our body. We know that this is our thigh and this is our leg, but there are anatomical parts to the cock that are important to know and our genitals and our asshole, you know?
No, totally. And you think queer men would be pretty clued up on it, but you hear them talking - they don't know how it works.
There's so much we're discovering about the erotic body, which, you know, when I say somatic, what I'm talking about is the whole body, right? You cannot discount the genitals from the rest of the body. You can also not discount the heart or the other systems that are at play. Sometimes when someone's having difficulty with erections or just numbness in their genitals, there sometimes is like something wrong with their gut and their digestion.
You cannot just look at one thing and go, we're going to fix this with a pill. It's like, let's look at the whole system that's functioning and what's off. And how can we recalibrate that before we move into diagnosing this little thing here?
