Confessions of a Bondi Blonde

Consider the clitoris.

Or rather, ignore it at your peril.

Mine sits there undemanding most of the time, letting me get on with my day, unless I’m wearing too tight jeans or am stuck in traffic on the 333 Bondi Express on my way to town. Throb, throb goes the engine. Oh, vicar!

For most women, it’s a happy little pussy cat appendage and appreciates being touched by self or other, gratefully responding and flowering with tender movements. If it is not treated right, it may not flare up but still has the potential to get us and our relationships into an awful lot of bother.

Usually, it’s ignored, like a good friend we like to see, but are too busy to spend much time reacquainting our self with.

For something so hidden, the clitoris gets an awful lot of bad press.

There are pubs’ full of stand-up comedy describing it as an island off Greece or a place so hard to find that you need a map, a flashlight or a compass to locate it. And if these pub dwellers are lucky enough to stumble across one late on a Saturday night, they often either twist it like a knob on a radio, hoping for a happy reception, or lap at it with the enthusiasm and technique of a Labrador.

Hands down pants. Pant, pant? I don’t think so.

But ladies and sometimes not so gentle men, the truth is, we’ve been sold a pup.

The clitoris isn’t a small, wee thing, sitting like a princess’ pea atop a vagina, waiting blushingly to be stroked to life. It’s huge.  The little pink bit we all see (with a mirror, in Playboy or otherwise) is only the nub of the matter. It’s the tip of a woman’s sexual iceberg.

Have a look at clitoris at its Wikipedia page  (warning: not at work or in front of kids unless you’re up to explaining it) . The little penis-like piece sitting like a cherry on top is what we normally consider to be the whole organ. But it’s really only the up periscope of a submarine, with the rest of the vessel hidden safely (even if one is sporting a Brazillian haircut down south).

The pink bit under the hood travels beneath the skin, up a couple of centimetres, before, just like a woman, changing its mind and turning around. It divides into two and hangs like a couple of bananas, fitting snugly around the vaginal opening.

In all mammals (excepting, bizzarely, the spotted Hyena) this connective tissue solely works together to maximise a woman’s sexual pleasure. That’s why we enjoy not just the rub, but the thrust too. Penetration stimulates the tissue, encouraging blood flow and arousal. Clever, clever clitoris!

That fun duo, sex experts Masters and Johnson, decided that all female orgasms are clitoral in nature. Further research by Aussie urologist Dr Helen O’Connell supports this theory. These guys all agree that vaginal orgasms result from clitoral stimulation. Must have been a great conversation when that agreement was reached. How did they celebrate, do you think? 

So you guys, relax and enjoy the ride.You don’t have to look for the G-spot anymore. Like Santa Claus, it doesn’t exist.

The Bondi Blonde (me) generously offers you a few other handy travel facts to have in mind if you are lucky enough to be heading south this winter.

• Unlike the penis, which wees as well (you are very clever, you multi-taskers), the clitoris functions solely to induce sexual pleasure.
• The tip of the clitoris, the bit we see, has the same number of nerve endings as the whole penis. And we’ve got all the other stuff too. So be gentle!
• Some women can sustain an intense orgasmic state for much longer than previously thought. So it’s not so much multiple orgasms, but one long one.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. But facts like these more than make up for it.

P.S. I am so glad I am sworn to celibacy right now. Really glad.

I’m gonna go to Gunnedah.

What, you may ask, does this probably fly blown fly speck of a place in Northern NSW have to offer an Eastern Suburbs maven like me?

According to its website, Gunnedah is an exciting place to visit. Well, that’s nice, considering it’ll take me six and a half hours of travelling on 450kms of crappy underfunded highways to get there.

Gunnedah is only 30 kilometres from Keepit Dam, one of the earliest water storage dams in Australia and described as a great place “to stay a day, or even longer”. And I’m sure it will take me at least a day to absorb the delights of the Watertown Museum, temptingly described in the top notch Gunnedah tourist website (visitors – 156) as “a fine example of using a feature no longer required”.

Back in town, I’ll be spoilt for choice. Should I seek out the large koala population for a toke on some gum leaves, refresh with a few laps at the Gunnedah swimming complex or climb up the not very steep Porcupine Lookout to take in some of the other 34 sights handily signposted by the local council? A photocopied brochure detailing each delight is available from a friendly local volunteer at the Visitor Information Centre, just next to the railway bridge.

If I get a little bored in this undoubtedly interesting country town, I can always hop back in my topsoil covered car and use up $150 of petrol to sample the delights of the nearby tourist drawcards, the delightfully named Boggabri, Baan Baa or venture further afield to Wee Wa. These are probably all meaningful local Kamilaroi Aboriginal names for water or river or some such, but to me they sound like diseases sheep get if they aren’t mulesed.

After a meal in one of Gunnedah’s three Chinese restaurants, it’ll be time to rest my weary head. The accommodation sounds fit for a princess. Will I choose the Imperial or Regal Hotel? Since I am on a budget, perhaps I’ll just pitch my tent in the imaginatively named Tourist Caravan Park.

You may have worked out that a need to sample the undoubted delights of Gunnedah is not my prime motivation in wanting to sacrifice $300 in fuel to get there.  Rather, I want to become a local. I’ll enrol to vote in the council elections, join the CWA, barrack for the Gunnedah Bulldogs and do whatever I have to do to become a Gunnedah girl in as short a time as possible. And then I’ll leave in a flurry of dirt and dust, hotfooting it back to bright lights, big city Sydney.

You see, I’ve done the math. Gunnedah has a population of 7,500 with around 2,000 women between 15-65 years old. It probably has less than .001% of the single, fertile female population of NSW. But from this shallow pool, two little female fishies have swum away into wonderful lives. Erica Baxter, second wife of Australia’s second richest man, the lantern-jawed James Packer hails from Gunnedah; as does David Jones’ latest darling, international model Miranda Kerr.

Now, I am not in any way comparing myself to these two freaks of beauty. I’m way older (probably closer to their combined age than a single figure). And my figure, while not bad for a Bondi Blonde of a certain age, will not stop traffic. I pay David Jones to wear nice clothes, not the other way around.

But the pickings for a single woman in Sydney are slim. Bondi Blondes like me usually have to don a bikini and compete in jelly wrestling competitions to awaken interest from jug-jaded local men.   

When facing level 3 restrictions in the Sydney man-drought, it makes sense to increase my odds and the chance of it raining men in my direction. And I figure that the investment into becoming a rare Gunnedah gem, rather than a common Bondi Blonde, is similar to my previous escapade to improve my life’s competitive advantage.

I saw somewhere (source: probably A Current Affair, after a wonder diet segment) that Coolum, Qld had the luckiest newsagency in Australia, selling the highest number of winning lottery tickets by a big, big margin. So when the $58 million dollar Powerball jackpot was up for grabs, off I flew on a $90 Jet Star flight to Maroochydore. After a side journey to the Hyatt Coolum on a Henry’s coach, I jostled with sunburnt happy tourists, buying the most expensive quick-pick before heading back to the airport and dreaming about how to spend the loot on the return flight. The freakishly statistically unlikely jackpot winner – a syndicate of first time quick-pickers from bleakville, Victoria, failed to dampen my enthusiasm to exploit any competitive advantage available to me. Hey, I did recoup $32 on my investment, a return of 7% of the sum outlaid.

Becoming a Gunnedah girl is simply another way to improve my competitive advantage in the
Sydney scene.

So, I better get to bed. Tomorrow I’m going on a road trip. I’ll be off, in the words of Dorothea Mackellar (another Gunnedah girl) “at the dawning of the day; on the road to Gunnedah.”