Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size You can trace Professor Helen O'Connell's discovery of the full clitoris – and the rewriting of the world's anatomy texts – to two books: one that angered her and another that inspired. The first book, Last's Anatomy, she couldn't seem to escape. The 1985 edition was the set text for her surgical exam and – to her "utter disbelief" as a classic overachiever – she failed the test three times. She calls this the "ridiculous book"; it had almost no mention of the clitoris, and certainly no illustrations, yet there were two pages on the penis. To top it off, aspects of female genitals were described as a "failure" of male genital formation (O'Connell still has the book, the word "failure" underlined in blue pen). "I knew at some point," she says, "that I was going to have to tackle that." She came across the second book – a University of Melbourne social scientist showed it to her – a few months after finally passing her surgical exam, in 1989. It was called A New View of a Woman's Body and was published by the US Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centres. It's full of detailed drawings of vulvas. For the clitoris chapter, the female researchers took off their pants and compared themselves with illustrations in respected anatomy texts. Then they masturbated, observed each other and took notes of the many parts of the internal and external clitoris that were changed by, or contributed to, sexual pleasure or orgasm. Young Helen O'Connell, aged 27, found it "really cool" and the women's observations – though not scientific – "valid". When she first tells me about this book in her consulting rooms in The Royal Melbourne Hospital's private wing, it's obvious she's still fascinated by these women and the way they watched and mapped each other's sexual responses. "Amazing methodology!" she laughs. "Don't you think? Just. Amazing." In the book, the researchers said they had no access to dead bodies or dissection rooms, so had to partially rely on old anatomy texts. And that was a lightbulb moment for O'Connell: she had access to dead bodies and dissection rooms at the University of Melbourne, where she was studying her master's of medicine in women's health. "We just needed to do good science and work it out from the cadavers," she says. And that, really, is how Helen O'Connell came to change the world of female anatomy forever. I find myself sitting in O'Connell's office because, rather strangely, of Netflix. A few months ago I was watching a series called Explained, a show that packages the modern world – The Stock Market, Designer DNA, Cryptocurrency – into snappy 15- to 20-minute documentaries. On this particular night, the episode to load on my television was on the female orgasm. Around the eight-minute mark, the narrator said that in 1998 "the Australian urologist Helen O'Connell and her team discovered that the clitoris was way more powerful than we'd known". I sat up straight: a memory came flashing back to me. It was 1998 and I was a young journalist at The Age, reading the day's news list. O'Connell had found that modern medical science was mistaken about the clitoris: the small button – or glans – that you can see is just the tip of the iceberg. Under the pubic bone, the organ looks like a wishbone with a body up to four centimetres long. Coming out of the body are legs, or crura, up to nine centimetres long, and also eggplant-shaped bulbs up to seven centimetres long. All these bits, O'Connell confirmed, are sensitive areas made of spongy tissue and become erect, just like the penis. A Melbourne doctor rewriting the anatomy books: this yarn, I thought, was a guaranteed front-pager.


But when I picked up the paper the next day, the lead front-page story was about a parasite that had shut down Sydney's water supply. Victorian premier Jeff Kennett was calling for states to have the power to veto potential hikes in the incoming GST, and visiting US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had urged action on climate change. The clitoris story ended up on page six, squeezed between the paper's fold and a story about an American donation of wheat to Indonesia. Even in this, its moment of glory, the clitoris was treated as it had ever been: downgraded and difficult to find. Sitting on my couch watching Netflix, it was O'Connell who fascinated me. It's been 20 years since that ground-breaking scientific paper: where was she now? What new mysteries of female sexuality had she solved? Had someone given this woman an Order of Australia? O'Connell's discovery was important for practical reasons: it gave surgeons a map of the key nerves, blood vessels and connecting parts of the clitoris so they could try to avoid destroying sexual sensitivity during any pelvic-area operation. O'Connell had witnessed many penis-related surgeries where great care was taken to avoid any loss of sexual function, but no one knew enough about the female anatomy to do the same for women. Her work also inspired a generation of sex educators, therapists, artists and academics who use her research to answer some fundamental and persistent questions about sex. The clitoral v vaginal orgasm debate, the orgasm gap between heterosexual women and their male partners, small penises and "loose" vaginas, the so-called G-spot: all these things, sex therapists and researchers say, could be better understood if men and women knew more about the clitoris, and therefore female arousal. British writer Jessica Berens once said that without a proper map of the female bits, it's as if everyone's been driving around for ages and still not found where they want to go: a bit like Canberra. It's been 20 years since we've had a proper map, but are we, I wondered, there yet? Helen O'Connell is not a sex guru. She is not Bettina Arndt or the eccentric sex therapist played by Barbra Streisand in the 2004 film "Meet the Fockers". Credit:Kristoffer Paulsen I'm only three minutes late to meet O'Connell, but her medical secretary is phoning, checking my whereabouts. Every single minute is crucial to O'Connell, 56, because being a clitoris guru is just a sideline. Australia's first female urologist, O'Connell is a surgeon who treats patients with lower urinary tract problems such as incontinence and obstruction. A gifted endoscopic surgeon, she fixes or removes things within the tiny spaces of the urinary tract using a small telescope. She's also Director of Surgery and Head of Urology at Western Health, a sprawling health network servicing 900,000 people in Melbourne's west. In her rather limited spare time – and for no payment – she chips away on her female anatomy research, publishing a paper only last year on her search for the elusive but famous G-spot. More on that later. When I get up to her third-floor consulting rooms, O'Connell, assured and professional, welcomes me into her office. She's wearing a dark pants suit and cat's-eye maroon glasses, blonde hair to her shoulders. We start awkwardly: I thought the meeting was to merely discuss the prospect of a profile, but she's like, "I've got one hour now, begin!"


In one of her research papers – which, with a tangle of keys, she unlocks from a white cupboard – O'Connell details the history of the clitoris in anatomy. In the 16th century, Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo (who called it a "seat of lust") and his contemporary Gabriele Falloppio (he of Fallopian tubes fame) feuded over who found the clitoris first. Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf did a comprehensive job of describing it in the 17th century, even discussing the crucial clitoral bulbs. And in the 1840s, German anatomist Georg Kobelt published an extensive account of the female genitals, their spongy tissues, muscles, nerves and blood supply. His black-ink drawings are like a landscape of rivers, lakes and tree roots. "Really beautiful," notes O'Connell, who says she simply used modern science to confirm much of his work. Helen O’Connell’s work built on the groundbreaking 1840s anatomy and “really beautiful” drawings of Georg Kobelt. Credit:Georg Ludwig Kobelt But unlike O'Connell, Kobelt failed to connect all the internal bits as one structure, the clitoris, fed by the one nerve complex and blood supply. His work also left unexamined the relationship between the urethra, vagina and clitoris. Kobelt was soon forgotten anyway, as the clitoris fell out of fashion. That was the fault of Sigmund Freud, the bearded father of psychoanalysis, who declared in the early 1900s that clitoral orgasms were immature and "vaginal orgasms" mature. In 1948, the 25th edition of the seminal Gray's Anatomy removed the clitoris completely. While the clitoris made a comeback in later editions, only the part you can see – the glans – was noted. O'Connell and her team took 10 cadavers and removed the pubic bone to expose the internal clitoris. They photographed what they saw and did laboratory tests on the tissues. At the time, anatomy texts often failed to mention the clitoral bulbs, which become engorged when aroused. Sometimes they were drawn half their size or put in the wrong place and were named "bulbs of the vestibule". A vestibule is a lobby or entrance hall, presumably to the vagina itself. "What the hell is the vestibule?" asks O'Connell, and we laugh, giving me the first glimpse of a lovely sense of humour behind the serious facade. Anatomy books also connected the bulbs to the inner parts of the vulva. But O'Connell found this to be incorrect: they were joined to the clitoris body. Meanwhile, there was a whole bit of anatomy – the Bartholin's glands – that O'Connell couldn't find: they simply weren't where the anatomy books said. The standard texts also showed the clitoris flat against the pubic bone, but in reality, O'Connell found, it exists in three planes; with bits going everywhere. The 1995 edition of Gray's Anatomy said the clitoris's major nerve supply was "very small". But the nerves were actually "noticeably large", greater than two millimetres in width. O'Connell was "blown away" when she discovered how large they were. "There's a lot going on in those nerves," she says, with a smile. In 2005, O'Connell confirmed her original research with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 10 living women. "See just how amazingly bright it is?" she says. "It's because of the high blood flow." I'm holding this scientific paper and O'Connell is looking over my shoulder at a black-and-white scan of a healthy, non-aroused pelvic area. The clitoris stands out from the surrounding tissue in a white glow. She tells me she saw a patient's MRI today – a woman who was probably quite distressed – and there was little blood flow in that area. "It's as if there's no clitoris there. I've not tested this, but the tissue is probably very sensitive to stress levels."


O'Connell returns to her chair, leaving me with four papers to read later. I'm quite keen to read the one about the G-spot, but when I get home, I realise it's missing from the pile. New York artist Sophia Wallace with her clitoris sculpture, Adamas (Unconquerable). Credit:Sophia Wallace New York artist Sophia Wallace is talking to me via Skype from her white-walled Brooklyn studio. When she picks up her laptop and shows me around it, I see a giant golden clitoris sculpture on a plinth. It's stylised, a little abstracted, but based on O'Connell's correct anatomy. "The shadow it makes is sort of like a penguin," she says, when I ask her to describe the shape. "It's like the inside of a very complex flower, maybe an orchid. But it is also robust and strong." Since 2012, through her Cliteracy project and a popular TED Talk, Wallace has been evangelical about the true shape of the clitoris. She's written a human-dwarfing, giant wall of words called The 100 Natural Laws of Cliteracy, a sort a declaration of rights for the clitoris. Don't scoff: each year, an estimated three million young girls are at risk of having their external clitoris cut off, according to the World Health Organisation. One of the first laws Wallace wrote was a definition, which she holds up to me, big black letters on white card. And there, as part of that definition, is Helen O'Connell, the discoverer of the "precise anatomy, function, complexity and external and internal scale" of the clitoris. Wallace despairs that, 20 years after O'Connell's research, the taboo around the clitoris persists and its true form remains unfamiliar. The Oxford Dictionaries still describe it as "a small, sensitive, erectile part of the female genitals at the anterior end of the vulva". "I have to deal with censorship all the time," says Wallace. Her web-host hides pages and sections of her website, where you can buy an anatomically correct clitoris pendant or, for that special man in your life, "clitlink" cufflinks. Facebook and Instagram take down some posts. "I think we've come about five per cent of the way," says Wallace, when I ask her how "cliterate" society is now. "I continue to see these studies on what percentage of women orgasm through penetration or intercourse. And I am like, 'Who cares?' How many are giving pleasure and not getting pleasure? What are their barriers to pleasure? What is the clit's happy state? What does it have a right to expect? What is a good life for a clit?" The sex education of young Helen O'Connell did not start well. The nuns at her Catholic girls' school told the 10-year-old to go home and ask her mother about sex. And so Mary O'Connell, who was deeply Catholic, took her daughter into the backyard of their middle-class home in Preston, in Melbourne's north. They stopped near the incinerator. "It was possibly the ugliest part of the backyard," remembers O'Connell. The man plants a seed in the woman, Mrs O'Connell told her confused daughter. "I had no idea what she was talking about," says O'Connell. "And Mum was just devastated with embarrassment about the whole thing." From that moment on, all further questions were directed to her older sisters. (O'Connell is the youngest of five, with three sisters, including twins, and a brother.)


Her father Kelvin, a public servant who worked in civil aviation, was "sort of a feminist", says O'Connell. "He never, ever indicated that you should not do something because you were female." Unusually for her era, Mary worked full-time as a bookkeeper by the time Helen was five. O'Connell remembers watching the moon landing in 1969 at school with a small group of kids whose mothers worked, while the other kids went home. "She would say, 'A woman's place is in the home,' but she was in the workplace, so I'm not sure how that worked. I think she thought she was expected to say that," O'Connell says. "But we all knew that Mum was happiest when she was working." This was true for O'Connell, also, when it came to having kids of her own. With her first child, a son who is now 21, O'Connell had three weeks at home in a "blissful" state but felt "very strange at a profound personal level, an existential level". So she went back to her private practice, at first doing one session with patients a week. "I felt I knew who I was again. So the next week, I did two sessions." With her second child, a daughter who is now 20, she went back after two weeks. "It felt very strange to be full-time at home with healthy, perfect babies. I trained for 15 years to be a surgeon and none of that taught me how to be a mother." She pulled off being a top surgeon and a mother with "help, help, help": great husband help, office help, nannies. O'Connell also now has two adult step-children, but will go into no more details about her private life: "It's not a girls' magazine!" At high school, O'Connell was popular. "My main memory as we walked through school," says Suzanne Barnes, one of O'Connell's best schoolmates, "is of everyone saying, 'Hi Helen, Hi Helen!' She knew everyone, was school captain and she had this personality that attracted people." She loved to party and, in medical school, was one of the lead singers in a rock band called Unfinished Business. She married the lead guitarist. O'Connell had her heart set on being a surgeon, partly because her mother said she had good hands and that she must do something with them one day. And when she was two, she was operated on to fix a squint, which planted the idea that surgery could transform and cure. But why urology, which is essentially about what goes wrong in the wee department? She thought it had a great future. A senior surgeon had advised against general surgery; it was dead, he said. Turns out he was wrong. And O'Connell thought the urologists were well trained and she loved the range of surgery offered: through the urethra, into the bladder, kidney surgery, open abdominal and perineal. Not everyone thought urology a good career move. Her mentor, Melbourne psychiatrist Lorraine Dennerstein, remembers a surgery interview panel asked O'Connell what sort of man would want to share their urinary problems with her (there were no female urologists in Australia at the time). "Well, we all laughed," says Dennerstein. "What sort of male wouldn't want to see her? She was young and attractive and some men prefer to share these intimate aspects with a woman doctor. And, anyway, many people with urinary problems were actually women. No one thought the women might be uncomfortable going to a male doctor." O'Connell does not remember this, but she does recall a male anaesthetist telling her she'd starve from lack of work. "I didn't say anything back; I just tucked it away and thought, 'I'm sure you are wrong.' " O'Connell did not starve. She had no problem finding patients, male or female. Then in 1998, when the clitoris paper was published – the same year, coincidentally, that Viagra became available – a whole new world opened up. Her name is barely known in Australia – she's never received an OAM or anything like it – but she's regarded as an international clitoris guru; in 2007 the World Association for Sexual Health awarded her a gold medal, its highest honour. O'Connell never talked about her research to her orthodox Catholic mother. But just before she died, in 1999, Mrs O'Connell watched an ABC television program about her daughter's discovery. "For all of her bizarre stuff with Catholicism," says O'Connell, suddenly crying behind her desk, "she was very proud."

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