BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

On Tuesdays at Bond University in the radiant subtropical suburbia of the Gold Coast, 33-year-old sexologist Dr. Gabrielle Morrissey holds up big pieces of paper printed with words. VULVA. FOREPLAY. ANAL SEX. “The whole bit,” she shrugs. “In class, we talk about all the negative words men use for vagina - and men use them a lot . Yet they're always trying to get in that negative place! And they're turned on by that negative place. So they're erotized by negativity. I ask them to explain this to me, and they go -” here she adopts a hillbilly accent – “ Well, it doesn't feel like that word when we're doing it! So it's okay to call a vagina a spunk bucket, but they'll go to the ends of the earth to put their dicks in that spunk bucket.”

A self-described “relativist who celebrates diversity”, Morrissey is consulted by the young, old, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, androgyne, queer, fetishists, celibate, progressive, and conservative. The artless way she drops her body into a chair invites frankness. This is, you feel, a woman you could talk to without judgment. “I do a lot of talking and investigating and teaching around anatomy and pleasure,” she casually says, “flipping picture after picture after picture in class just to show all the incredible diversity and how it's all normal. It's part of my rage against symmetry – this idea that we're all supposed to be perfectly symmetrical, and look like Gray's Anatomy … which we don't.”

Educated at the University of Pennsylvania - “Those frat guys were just asses!” - and the Curtin University of Technology, she helped develop Curtin's Master of Sexology degree and launched the world's first Master of Forensic Sexology program at Curtin in 2003. She has also worked for the Family Planning Association and Planned Parenthood. Her sexology consultancy, Bananas and Melons, is dedicated to the concept of balance. Its logo? A yin/yang symbol altered to incorporate a penis between two breasts. Morrissey's approach to sexuality has always incorporated humor.

Despite this expertise in matters erotic, she spends Saturday nights alone with the unfinished manuscript of her next book, Spicy Sex . Her latest, Urge: Hot Secrets for Great Sex (HarperCollins), is necessary reading. Solutions for premature ejaculation, mutual masturbation, female orgasm – it's all there. In terms of sexual engineering and technique? Superb. Stylistically? Morrissey writes like a drunken sailor. Oral sex is explained as “face-to-cock, face-to-vag or face-to-bum action”. A surge of libido is not subjected to delicate psycho-sexual analysis, but dismissed thus: “Sometimes we just want to fuck.” It's not for everyone, but she'll settle for most. 60 Minutes, say. Big Brother . Out to educate, she doesn't shy away from rough.

* * *

It's midday in Byron Bay, and a young gay waitress with blonde tips and a ring through her nose swaggers over to take orders. Expressohead was once little more than a hole in the wall, a café known for its trippy murals and staffed, some said, by members of Narcotics Anonymous. Now located behind the cinema, it is spacious and flanked by palms. Ovoid leaves lighten with sun against blue sky. Subdued dub thuds from the speakers. Blackboard specials include the popular tofu and pumpkin burger: $9.60. The terrace is busy with tourists and tattooed locals. Table numbers are painted on small stones. An undercoat of turquoise paint is revealed by scraping back the table's claret top coat: I HEART BU is badly carved.

Morrissey approaches from the carpark. Her body is buttery, big, warm. Beneath a loose white top and shirt, she is braless. Her toenails glisten lolly-pink. Broad-boned and sensual, her face is beautiful very suddenly in laughter. She shakes those caramel ringlets and smiles – an evaluative reflex, nothing informal. The waitress takes her order of chai with soya milk. After a perfunctory greeting, Morrissey gets down to business. I watch her roll her sleeves as if preparing for a fight. “The clitoris has more nerve endings than the penis,” she announces in an unexpectedly blunt, nasal American accent. “Its only purpose is sexual. The men in my class go: What happened to Freud? And I go: Yeah, huh, what happened to Freud . I call him ‘that fucker Freud'. His legacy? We're suffering in terms of sex.”

Intrigued, I suggest that this suffering is most prevalent amongst men, whose earliest feelings of tenderness are inevitably treated with derision. “ Every experience is a true experience,” she flatly says. “I don't believe in ‘puppy love' – that's just a complete insult. When you experience love, whatever age you are, that is real love. You can't be patronized by a person just because they're chronologically older. They may have never experienced the kind of love you're experiencing! Just because you're sixteen doesn't mean it's not love! Hormones just enhance what feeling; they don't manufacture it.”

This trivialization of male sensitivity is not only widespread, Morrissey says, but indulged in on all levels. “If you get a randy dog on the beach, you'll get someone who'll say -” and here her voice ices with sarcasm, “ Boys will be boys! It's everywhere. We're taught that to be a man is to be an experienced lover, and to be a good husband means to have a wealth of sexual experience. But sleeping with thirty-five women doesn't give you any greater insight into your partner than if you'd only had two other lovers, because your partner is her own woman.”

Morrissey believes that men are actively discouraged from understanding relationships as life-enhancing. Marriage is sold to males as entrapment. “It's anti-monogamy propaganda!” she cries, amazed. “Commitment-as-castration, that kind of thing. You hear a lot of comments about ‘the old ball-and-chain' … and for many, marriage is waaay in the future, but they're still joking about that terrible day they'll have to settle down. Teenagers ask me whether monogamy is natural, because they're worried they won't be able to do it. They're taught that they must sow their wild oats, you know? Even if they don't want to!” Engaged, she leans forward. “Prior to western religions, there was no such expectation. Marriage wasn't seen as a trap, and you had a lot of books like the Kama Sutra that openly instructed men on the pleasuring of wives.”

The pleasure of wives is no longer considered necessary; pornography instructs men to understand sex as essentially masturbatory. “Porn definitely doesn't teach men how to pleasure women!” Morrissey exclaims. “Women are asking: How do I get my partner to pleasure me the right way? And men openly tell me: I've got no idea! I think I'm doing it all wrong!” Her laugh is hearty, aerated. “And I just wanna, you know, hug them when they're that open. Some guys ask: Is it really all about the clitoris ? or, Is she telling the truth when she says it's okay when she doesn't have an orgasm? Questions they'd love to ask their partner, and I think: So ASK! ”

Lovemaking? A dialogue. Abusive sex? A monologue. Morrissey tilts her head. “I get very frustrated that I hear from men that women are a mystery, that pleasing them is impossible, it's too hard … but it just hinges on listening . If just takes just a few moments to actually listen . Even in a reluctant partner who's not accustomed to speaking for herself, verbally or non-verbally, the answers are still there. It's not just about expressing your own desires but actually listening to what your partner wants and encouraging that dialogue. Because some women aren't comfortable. A man has never asked them what they want.”

She believes that as a culture, we have yet to even come close to sensitizing - let alone de sensitizing - ourselves to meaning when it comes to sex. “People fumble when they start to have real feelings,” she explains, shading her eyes from a shaft of sun. “Some run away, some seek advice, others take off the mask. We're fluent in titillation but completely illiterate when it comes to meaningful sex. We don't have role models and templates for meaningful sexuality, but we're bombarded with titillation. And this has created mass confusion.”

Without understanding the long-term effects of porn, men are being bamboozled into secrecy and shame: the technology of emotional disconnection. Porn also teaches that tenderness and emotional context are irrelevant. Morrissey bounces a little in her chair. “I call it Pornutopia!” she enthuses. “Porn has dubious social value and negative educational value because men then have this idea that this is what sex is, and it's rarely like that. Porn is a visually utopian power play as opposed to what sex actually is, which is a shared activity – and not a sport – between two people seeking connection. If we weren't seeking connection, we'd just masturbate! When I ask what makes for good sex, males from every age group reply: connection . Which is completely missing from porn. So porn creates this opposite model.”

Her exposure to men suffering porn-related sexual and spiritual burnout is comprehensive. “Cyberporn is a problem that's growing and growing and growing,” she acknowledges, stirring honey into her chai. ”I've had men weeping in my office because they feel completely helpless. They're afraid of computers. If they turn one on, they get sucked into this vortex, and they feel they can't turn it off. Like any addiction, porn addiction requires more of the same to get the same effect. So that sweeps them into a spiral where they end up viewing images that previously, they never would have found erotic at all – and they're not even sure they find them erotic now, but they're on this downslide where they need more and more, and the same content just doesn't do it any more. And this is combined with the knowledge that at the touch of the keyboard, harder content is there.”

She pauses to take a sip. “Emotionally, these men can feel an incredible disconnect – it's like a fugue state. And then when they're away from the computer, some of these men are in a deep state of shock at what they've allowed themselves to witness and experience.”

In particular, Morrissey is deeply disturbed by the vogue for shaving the vulva. Her voice grows serious. “I have yet to find a man capable of explaining the Brazilian to me on a level that allows me to digest it and say: Well, that makes sense, then . Men tell me they just like the look of it, and then I'll say: But what about the prepubescent thing? There's no denying that we're sexualizing the young, and we're doing it to little girls way more than little boys. Why? It's the addiction principle: we need increased stimulation for the same effect.”

Morrissey notes that in many cases, fatherhood saves the male soul. “When men become fathers, they circle back. What are your parenting principles? How are you going to raise this person? They will start saying: Oh, I hope things are better for them than they were for me! or, I'm going to be very careful because I know what I was like, and how I treated girls, and I don't want that happening with my daughter! Part of the process for a lot of parents is to start connecting the dots to see what messages they're relaying to their children. On an individual level, there's a desire for innocence to be prolonged and to not have those negative rites of passage into sexuality but, yeah, there's this tide in mass culture against it.”

Recoiling from the model of sex as a “goal-orientated penetrative sport”, Morrissey believes that sexual pleasures should be celebrated and indulged in without the “necessary goal” of orgasm. The “pump-and-thrust marathon than leads to both partners coming, preferably simultaneously” is not just a widely perpetuated goal, she says, but dangerous in terms of satisfaction. So many women, so little feeling. “I think innocence is wonderful!” Enraptured, Morrissey closes her eyes. “And I think to be young – God! There's so much to love about being young! It would be terrifi c to go through some of that discovery again.”

* * *

Morrissey's upbringing was both upscale and unconventional. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on September 7, 1971, she lived in Japan until she was two, moved to Virginia when her only brother was born in 1973, and then lived in Singapore for two years. The family relocated to Guyana – “We were there in ‘78, through the Jim-Jones-cyanide-Kool-Aid thing” – only to find themselves evacuated when the governor was assassinated. Returning to Virginia in 1979, Peter Morrissey, an American diplomatic specializing in Asian culture, and Di Morrissey, now a bestselling popular novelist, divorced. Peter Morrissey was awarded custody, and moved the children to Jakarta, Indonesia, until 1983, whereupon they lived in Islamabad, Pakistan, until 1987. From there, they moved to New Delhi, India, and remained there until 1989. Morrissey graduated from high school, and flew to America for her Master's. She then began gravitating towards her mother: New York, Byron Bay (where Di Morrissey lives), Sydney, Perth, and Byron again, where she plans to remain for at least a year.

There is a sense of loss in Morrissey that she works hard to disguise. When questioned about the emotional fallout of her parents' divorce, she audibly cools. During the interview, she refers to her father as “Dad” but Di Morrissey is described as ”my mother”. She repeatedly stresses the advantages of the diplomatic corps, as if to justify her mother's distance. “We'd get letters nearly every day,” she notes. “She was always pouring out her emotions and her thoughts. I remember thinking: how is she a writer? She can't write! There was no punctuation. Stream of consciousness.” Seemingly unaware of the contradiction, she describes the divorce as “civilized” and then refers to herself and her brother as “ Kramer vs. Kramer children” (the Oscar-winning Kramer vs. Kramer depicts a deeply fractured marriage – Meryl Streep abandons an enraged Dustin Hoffman and their child to pursue her own ambitions).

“My brother and I were raised by my dad,” Morrissey manages over a sudden cacophony of cicadas. “Dad had access to maids, housekeepers, cooks, nannies. My mother wanted a career, which she couldn't really have as the wife of a diplomat back then. She wanted to write, and so moved to Sydney and started on Good Morning Australia with Kerri-Anne Kennerley. I would talk to my dad a lot. He really liked me as a sounding board. That said, having my brother and dad around all the time was difficult. I preface this by saying that I love Pakistan, and feel frustrated at the way it's perceived. But I was going through puberty in an Islamic country with a male housekeeper, a male cook, and a male guard at our gate. A father and brother. And me! Always having to keep my eyes lowered. It took years of training to learn how to look people in the eye, because my template was to look at the floor, especially in public.”

Competitive and hungry for attention, she was increasingly infuriated by the sexual inequality. “I felt an insane jealousy of my brother. In the summertime, he could wear a flipping t-shirt -” she spits out the t, “but I had to wear something down to my wrists and I was -” her throat tightens, “ hot, and I was jealous, and I was mad, so I had those real concrete, tangible jealousies. My brother could bike to the shops and I wasn't allowed to. Being male gave you freedom. And being female -” here her voice grows hoarse, “had lots and lots of rules .”

Morrissey's characteristic frankness can be interpreted as a reaction to the rigidity of her upbringing. “When your parents and your friends' parents are CIA agents and DEA agents,” she says, lowering those small dark eyes as if to charge, “and you're talking about strict moral guidance people, it's not like a hippie commune. We lived in Government Agency Land. Secrecy was part of my life, absolutely.”

To some degree, this enforced secrecy caused Morrissey to compartmentalize her life. Us and Them. Good and Bad. Mother and Dad. And that measure of paranoia was a necessity. “I can sometimes still be a little … shocked … when I meet people and go: You mean, you don't have fire drills in your house? But what if there's a fire? ” Her incredulity is comic. “ Don't you talk about these things in your family? ” She laughs. “ What if there's a burglar? Do you know where your weapons are in every room? I know where there's a golf club, and where there's a knife, and where there's a baseball bat in every house I'm in. It becomes automatic. My dad is very against guns in the house so we never had guns, but we had weapons in every room, we had the radio tapped through to the marine base, a code for our house, just in case anything happened … and occasionally things did.”

During Morrissey's stay in Islamabad, jihad was declared. The Embassy was attacked. Security shutdown for Americans was immediate. “My friend and I were trying on our prom dresses – we were getting fitted by a tailor.” Her glance is arch. “I knew from the day before that trouble was brewing - adults whispering, tension. Fourteen-year-olds don't pay attention to world events. And then the siren. I looked into my friend's eyes. We have to get to the bomb shelter! And just … running across the fields and into the compound area, and marines going -” she gestures widely, “ THIS way! THIS way! .”

It is as if she feels compromised or lessened by the memory of fear. “The other interesting thing is that it was the Cold War. So that meant the Russians were our enemy. And if we had an encounter with a Russian, we had lodge a full report with the Embassy. I once had a fight with a Russian girl in a milk line in India. Nothing transpired – she cut in front of me, three seconds of angst - but I went home as the dutiful daughter and mentioned it in passing. My dad said: Did anyone see you? and I said yeah, and he said -” she slowly sighs the words, “ We have to report it . And I remember thinking: This is ridiculous .”

Morrissey's hostility against this degree of homogenization was intense. She channeled rage through her sexuality by punishing those who represented the system. “ Marines were interesting,” she curiously says. “When we young, they were our protectors, but as we got older – fifteen, sixteen – it was fun for us to taunt them. We were terribly cruel. They were never allowed to date us. We were illegal to them – not just in age, but against their policies, off limits – and we would swan around in our bikinis and flirt and play pool … we felt terribly powerful. We were on a compound, we were safe, we were in what we called ‘ Little America Land '.” Her tone is acrid. “And then we'd go out and date peers in the culture and we were on shifting sand again.”

For Morrissey, adolescence was tightly regulated. She rode her horse and joined the cheerleading squad, but it wasn't enough. Limited self-expression, limited nurturing, limited contact with the world.  Sex must have seemed intoxicating, a liberation on every level. She bristles at the possibility that her fascination with sex is compensatory - a search for intimacy or an attempt to heal familial fractures - and yet the intensity with which she focuses on connection suggests otherwise. Morrissey has a deep need to bring couples together, to restore trust, dispense with secrecy, and to repair broken links in the psyche.

Her first relationship was characterized by honesty and commitment, and lasted four years. As they were “high school sweethearts” in India, their understanding of the other's needs and experiences was unique. She lost her virginity to him at seventeen. Morrissey speaks of this relationship with wistfulness; even her doctoral thesis concerned First Sex (“I have a big passion around it”). “We were very, very close,” she says, visibly softening. “I was so ready that I pressured him into sex. When I entered this profession, he was like: Of course! Little Miss Advanced . I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to sexual expression. We created our own world through the relationship. Through him, I learned partnership.”

Morrissey may have underestimated the impact of her parents' divorce. “I hit twenty and worried that I wasn't expressing enough freedom.” Disconcertingly, she shifts to the present tense. “ This is too much, too young - something's gonna go bust because we're gonna grow apart or we're gonna be so connected that we're gonna get married and this is all I'll have known and that can't be. I need to find an escape. ” Just as abruptly, she returns. “And sure enough,” she simply says, “by twenty-one, we'd broken up.”

The dedication to Urge makes it clear that she has been busy in the interim (“to all the lovers I have had the pleasure of, for every urge felt, and every urge exquisitely satisfied”). And her sly, playful glance in press shots is a message: like Carrie Bradshaw, Gabrielle Morrissey knows good sex. She also knows how it should be taught. “Titillating sex is everywhere,” she says as she pours herself another cup of chai. “The physicality of sexuality, the sexualization of the young … it's porn, but fifteen minutes of MTV does it as well. So that's part of the tapestry of our world at the moment. As a counterbalance, parent workshops are needed, workshops for schools. We need education about love and relationships - not just health class or protecting your body against sexual disease, but how to negotiate relationships. We need to teach life skills to boys in particular. In Scandinavia, this is what they're doing, and it's working .”

She maintains that the key to passion is to open – and sustain – a truthful dialogue with your partner. She runs her hands over an imaginary sphere. “Create a knowingness between the two of you, that this is just between the two of you, whatever your histories, your own thing, just the two of you together. Being a better lover is not about, you know - Don't let go of the clitoris! It's not like that – it's much, much bigger than technique.”

Morrissey wants a new sexual template based on emotional rapture rather than basic physical coupling. In Urge, she writes: “Human wishes, desires, emotions and drives can influence and be used to change the universe. The more intense the drive and desire, the more powerful the result.” Margot Anand's The Art of Sexual Ecstasy was a text she found particularly inspiring and informative (Anand's The Art of Sexual Magic has been endorsed by authorities ranging from the president of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute to Deepak Chopra). “An awful lot of people are fascinated by Tantra,” she says, “even if men come to it from the misguided principle that it will teach them how to make love for eight hours!” Laughing, she lightly slaps the tabletop. “ Oh, that damn Sting! Who's now retracted that statement … finally … but Tantra does allow couples to have that connection.”

Paradoxically, Morrissey's obsession with connection seems to preclude one of her own. “I'm not in a relationship. Men learn very quickly that they can't shock or embarrass me, and if they try to have sexual bravado around me, I'll win every time, hands down. I've yet to be outwitted sexually by a man. I'm looking for a man who can deal with my career, that's part of it. And who can be open. Personally? Someone who can commit, who respects me and my thoughts. Honest. Someone who finds me attractive in totality. And that I find attractive in the same way. Who has the ability to just … laugh .” Her pause brims with cicada song. “And flexibility,” she softly says, “because I've had enough of rules.”

* Originally published in Men's Style