Under covers

March 5, 2005
Sexologist Gabrielle Morrissey

Sexologist Gabrielle Morrissey
Photo: Sahlan Hayes

Catherine Keenan meets the sexologist with an urge to demystify the bedroom.

While they rarely miss a chance to have sex, Gabrielle Morrissey's students are surprisingly ill-informed about it. "They're still a little bit unsure about the clitoris. Men and women. A diagram comes up on the PowerPoint screen and there's this sigh of relief, either 'So that's where it is' or 'It is where I thought it was.'"

Granted, many of the students in her sexology classes are young undergraduates, but she thinks their ignorance points towards a wider problem. "We're very good at joking about sex, and we're very good at being titillating," she says. "But we're not very good at talking about sex in a meaningful way."

So that is what Morrissey has been doing since she ditched literature to make sex her career. She talks about sex on radio and TV and was the sexpert on Big Brother 2. She writes about sex in columns in Australia and overseas, and in books including Urge, which sold to countries such as the United States, Britain and Russia and has just been re-released here.

She teaches sex through workshops and counselling sessions run by her consultancy, Bananas and Melons, and through classes at Bond University on the Gold Coast. With a throaty laugh, she says she particularly enjoys these.

"[The students] are just stunned mullets to start with. And that's part of the glee for me. I say to them in the first week, 'You might think that I'm crazy when I say that you'll be talking about masturbation with your friends over breakfast, but you mark my words.' And often they do."

It's very easy to imagine Morrissey talking about masturbation over breakfast - or premature ejaculation, or cyber sex, or S&M, or any of the other myriad topics she covers in Urge, her defiantly non-technical guide to sex that begins with half a page of synonyms for penis, from doodle to trouser snake, with many unprintable stops in between.

At 33, she has been studying and teaching sex for 15 years, and speaks about it with a candour she could not have imagined when she was a shy undergraduate.

Her mother is the romance novelist Di Morrissey, and her father is a retired diplomat, so she grew up in Asia and barely had lessons in health, let alone reproduction. After she arrived in California to attend university, a racier flatmate dragged her, blushing, to an introductory sex lecture. "And then I fell in love with it in the first two hours, and I thought, 'I'm taking this for sure!'"

She went on to get a master's degree in human sexuality education from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in sexology from Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, with a thesis on women's first experiences of sexual intercourse and the implications of this for sex education. She later became head of Curtin's sexology program, where she launched a master of forensic sexology, and although she's now moved to Bond, she still supervises some postgraduate students there.

In her books and on her website, she habitually refers to herself as Dr Gabrielle, or Gabrielle Morrissey PhD, presumably to reassure readers that, despite all the references to peckers and boobs, she is a serious academic.

Still, she has had her share of awkward moments. In the acknowledgments in Urge, she writes: "Dad, please skip over the oral sex chapter, please, please."

"I don't think he did," she sighs over the phone from her home in Brunswick Heads, near Byron Bay.

The greatest awkwardness comes, however, when Morrissey is meeting men. The simple words "so what do you do?" strike fear into her heart, as her answer tends to elicit one of two reactions. Type A gets shy and intimidated and tries to back out of the room slowly. Type B gets forward and obnoxious and a bit flirtatious, as if she's imminently going to become their fantasy sexual tutor.

She has tried lying about her career and saying she's a nutritionist, but after getting caught out she now opts, reluctantly, for the truth. "Interestingly, my partners tend to be sons of psychologists, or somewhere in the family there is a GP who has been really interested in this field."

Some of these have developed into long-term relationships, but Morrissey is single at the moment. She quips that the only way she got Urge done was by staying in on Saturday nights, writing about sex when most people were having it.

"I used to joke that I made love to my laptop every Saturday night."

Is it ever weird making a job out of something that most people consider a pure pleasure? "I know more than a lot of people do. I know when I'm falling for someone, it's because my body's flooding with phenylethylamine, while most people just think I'm going goo-goo over someone. But the experience is the same. I'm still making the same stupid mistakes, and the silly things are still coming out of my mouth, and I'm still panicked for Friday night's date."

This would probably surprise some of Morrissey's students. Even more so than Urge, which tends to stick with sex, her Sex, Love and Relationships course at Bond covers the spectrum from anatomy to emotions, taboos to diseases.

Consequently, she finds it important to set ground rules to keep the personal and the academic properly apart - this is not therapy - and when it comes time to talk about jealousy, for instance, she keeps the discussion to abstract ideas about how it might have an impact on relationships. She doesn't let anyone swap bunny-boiling stories.

The students are broken up into tutorial groups of about 20 and Morrissey issues them a challenge every week. This can be anything from having to do some sort of extreme activity to observe their bodily reactions, to conducting a genital self-examination. "They get so squeamish about that one! I say,

'I don't want to know what you found. I want to know: did it take you five days before you did it? What was your process of thought? Were you excited to do it?'"

She describes her next book, Spicy Sex, due out next February, as a "user-friendly book for couples, full of really practical tips for keeping things spicy over time". By this she does not mean "meet your partner at the front door wearing only cellophane". Rather, it will include suggestions about how to carry a romantic evening through to the bedroom, or how to feel confident on top, or how to say no to sex without making your partner feel rejected.

"These are things that people might actually do." Perhaps with more success than finding the clitoris.
