Helen O'Connell

And she's episode one.

Helen O'Connell is episode one of Women Like Sex.

I wanted to start with that to set

a tone to be like, I'm not talking about sexy time.

and it's made up of the same kind of spongy erectile tissue as the penis.

Its full structure wasn't uncovered until 2005, and this time by a woman, Australian neurologist Helen O'Connell.

Keep in mind, the penis was fully anatomically described as early as 35 BCE, so the clitoris has been waiting for a long time for the spotlight.

The clitoris has over 10,000 nerve endings, and one of its main purposes is sexual pleasure.

I mean, women's bodies weren't even studied up until very recently.

And I've spoken on this podcast before about the extraordinary work of the Australian neurologist, Dr. Helen O'Connell, who, while she was training as a surgeon and studying medicine at university, she noticed something that it really gave her pause.

The medical textbooks that she and all her peers were studying to become surgeons devoted pages and pages to male genital anatomy.

And yet the clitoris, an organ whose primary function is pleasure for a woman, received almost no meaningful attention.

I'm not Dr. Frankenstein.

I don't know if you're familiar with Helen O'Connell, the Australian gynecologist, but she basically rediscovered the clitoris, the size of it in the 1990s.

So originally, we were trying to measure blood flow of the glands, the clitoris, the visible clitoris.

After spending way too much of my own money, we realized that there wasn't enough of a delta, not enough of a change in size in many women.

Okay, this is the bulb of the clitoris.

So for those of you who don't know, and I'd like to point out not many people did know until Dr. Helen O'Connell published a groundbreaking anatomical study in 2005, the clitoris is not just the elusive bean.

[laughs] Yeah.

It's not just this elusive bean.