Dear Doctor Dick

I’m a big, big fan of Emma Thompson but I simply can’t get motivated enough to go and see her new flick, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

The whole premise of the movie is that Thompson’s character Nancy Stokes seeks the help of a male sex worker to help her achieve something she never managed in three decades of marriage – an orgasm. I mean, really, is that unbelievable or what?

Hello! The clitoris is supposed to have some 12,000 nerve endings and yet, somehow, the viewer of this silly movie is expected to believe Nancy Stokes ended up with a husband – one she supposedly loved enough to stay with all that time – who was born without a tongue?

Or that in all those years, Stokes hadn’t taught herself what needed to be done to become a member of the bed-high club, solo division, let alone inviting her husband onto that horizontal workbench for some spirited pairs competition? The whole concept is ludicrous and I hope you agree?

Confused
Bald Hills, Queensland.

Dr Dick replies:
The clitoris actually has 8000 nerve endings – in more than three decades of research and client interaction, I’ve looked into this matter and counted them all – but you’re spot on, Confused of Bald Hills. Surely in a marriage lasting that long, Stokes’s husband should have been able to pop her cork at least bloody once while giving her fifty lashes with the Robert Young!

Confused, Bald Hills, Queensland: Sorry, the what?

Dr Dick replied: Sorry, the tongue. I’m always trying to avoid using technical terms that can confuse or even alienate clients. Hence my references from time to time to Dining at the Y and Yodelling up the Valley.

But here’s the best way I can explain it, and I don’t think I laid it out any clearer than in my seminal work, Women are from Mars; Men have a Penis.

The bottom line is that the only human sex organ that has ever counted is the brain, and men’s and women’s brains do work quite differently.

My entire counselling career has been based more or less on the one great absurdity of human intercourse. For the only species that can communicate on such a sophisticated level, why can’t humans master oral sex? And by that I mean telling their partners what they really would like them to do – to them – to help them across the line? To make sex as exciting and as enjoyable as it can, and should, be for both sexes.

It would appear that Nancy Stokes for all those years was too prudish or too shy to steer her hubbie in the right direction, to simply grab the silly bugger by his ears and whisper seductively: “Say hello to the bearded clam!”

But be that as it may, it is true that women, God bless their cottonsocks, are different.

The penis supposedly has as many nerve endings which helps explain why a man can be brought to orgasm by the simplest of triggers, such as the sound of a bra being undone, panties hitting a bedroom floor, someone saying “Would you like to come back to my place for coffee?” or in a teenager’s case, the simple words “Would you like to hold my hand?” where a poor lad is suffering from epididymal hypertension…

Confused, Bald Hills, Queensland: Sorry, you’ve lost me again….

Doctor Dick: Sorry, blue or lover’s balls. What I’m trying to explain is that women are different. I think a character in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall way back in 1977 summed it up best. She’s a reporter in Allen’s character’s Alvy’s bed and she says: I hope you don’t mind that I took so long to finish. Alvy replies: “Oh, no, no, don’t be … tsch … don’t be silly. I’m startin’ to get some feeling back in my jaw now.”

Of course, it would be remiss of sex therapy professionals such as myself to discount the possibility that some men might not be as adept at cunnili… sorry, tongue-in-groove work – as they might think. And there are some men, to be fair, who simply don’t have the appetite for, or enjoy hoeing into, a seafood taco. More fools them, I say.

In the many years of university study it took for me to become the world-famous sexologist I am today, I was determined to learn exactly what it was that women want… nay, need… in that department.

While my fellow students were out boozing, I spent many lonely nights in my dormitory room imagining that my index finger was the bud of a slightly aroused clitoris, trialling various mixtures of lip sucking and blowing motions and tongue advances and retreats, while employing all sorts of wicked, tempting circular motions with the latter, to see what could be achieved.

My theory was simple: if a sex toy that did nothing more than vibrate or sitting on an older-model washing machine in spin cycle could bring a woman to orgasm, then my aim was to discover what a loving male partner could achieve by using his lips and tongue to provide pulsating, alternating and irresistible periods of vacuum and then pressure plenium…

Confused, Bald Hills, Queensland: You’re doing it again.

Doctor Dick: Once again, sorry! In layman’s language, I was perfecting how to give the little ladies, albeit while practicing on my pretend clitoris, their version of a suck and blow job!

It took several years while I completed the first of my degrees in human behavioral sciences but I knew where my future life’s work lay – and my fieldwork as a budding sexologist could begin in earnest – one chilly winter’s night on dorm where I finally perfected the technique and made that finger come, not once but twice.