Sex Scandal for the History Books

NBCU Photo Bank / AP Images Masters and Johnson wrote the book on sex, and now a definitive biography of the duo reveals everything you wanted to know—and more— about their secret personal affair.

There is something about the scientific study of sexual behavior—which goes by the plain-Jane name of sexology—that is hard to take seriously. Maybe it’s because few of us ever really lose our childhood sense of embarrassment—a mixture of awe and giggles—around the whole subject of naked bodies and the things they get up to. Or maybe it’s because we’d prefer to be kept in the dark about what, exactly, fuels the engine of carnal desire. Whatever the reason, the field is of fairly recent vintage. There was Freud, of course, theorizing about the inferiority of clitoral orgasms and insisting that erotic impulses began in the cradle (not to mention Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing), but it wasn’t until the 1940s when Alfred Kinsey received government funding for his pioneering surveys on sexual behavior and attitudes that the idea of treating amorous response as a respectable discipline came into its own. And then along came Masters and Johnson to take the field to a whole new, hitherto undreamed-of level.

“In this scenario,” Maier notes, “women’s potential fireworks display in bed far exceeded the single little firecracker of the men beside them.”

Thomas Maier’s Masters of Sex comes with a hyperbolic and somewhat-misleading subtitle: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love. The urge to draw in readers with attention-grabbing summations is an understandable one, but the actual story of these pioneering sex researchers, who worked together and eventually married, is both more interesting and less sensationalistic than this description would have you think. Maier’s sedulously researched and deeply absorbing biography suggests that love is far more elusive than an orgasm; that it is possible to treat sexual dysfunction of various sorts with relative rigor and a startling lack of sentiment (in Masters and Johnson’s 1970 book, Human Sexual Inadequacy, “couples were called ‘marital units’ and ‘coital opportunity’ became another name for love”); and that the duo who “taught America to love” had clay feet when it came to their own romantic lives, for the most part putting their careers before gratifications of the heart and flesh.

For anyone who grew up in the ‘60s or ‘70s, the names of Masters and Johnson had the instant-recognition factor of a logo, like the old-time department store Peck & Peck. Even if you didn’t know what they did, you knew they stood for something revolutionary—that they were, in their white coats and seriousness of purpose, as integral to the sexual revolution as the Pill and the Beatles. As it happened, the two became a team almost by accident, in one of those serendipitous encounters that often seem to underlie visionary enterprises. It was “just before Christmas 1956”: Forty-one-year-old William Masters, who was an OB-GYN on the staff of Washington University, renowned for his surgical skill and fertility expertise, was looking for a female assistant to help him in his innovative, closely guarded research into the physiology of human sexual response. “…Unlike Kinsley, whose research was done on paper and not in the lab, Masters proposed to directly observe the body’s functioning during sex—meticulously tracking each pulse, breath, thrust and quiver.” Because he was particularly interested in female sexuality (and unlike, many men, understood that he knew “nothing at all” about it), he also realized he needed a woman by his side to act as a kind of interpreter. After asking his wife—who had no interest in joining him in his clinical work—he turned to the newly hired, 32-year-old Virginia (known as “Gini”) Johnson, a twice-divorced mother of two. Her nonchalant response upon hearing that Masters was not engaged in fertility research but was conducting a sex study, based on volunteers making the beast with two backs in an examination room equipped with a chaise longue and a slew of electrical outlets on the third floor of Washington University’s Maternity Hospital, made him decide in her favor, notwithstanding the fact that she was essentially “a friendly paper-pusher with some typing skills” and no proven aptitude for scientific work..

“From the outset,” Maier writes, “Masters and Johnson’s remarkable success sprung from their dual approach, the matrix of male and female therapists exploring the boundaries of human sexuality together.” Although Johnson had no training, she had a soothing way with volunteers and was an eager student, willing to learn “the intricacies of anatomy, biology, and physiology” and to work long hours gathering personal histories as well as watching female strangers pleasure themselves and anonymous couples fornicate. These activities were done against a backdrop of medical devices, wires, and gauges and with the help of a dildo-shaped gadget created by Masters that photographed the vaginal cavity in living color as it was aroused, entered, and then penetrated. The device could be adjusted according to differences in size, weight, and vaginal development—and if you weren’t careful, you could end up electrocuting someone. One colleague described is as “a motor-powered, Plexiglas phallus"; its nickname was simply Ulysses (after the recently released Kirk Douglas film, which featured a giant cyclops). Other medical devices were on tap as well, including an electrocardiograph machine, an electroencephalograph machine and a tiny television screen that tracked the electrical impulses coming from the brain. “These tools served as a kind of sexual polygraph,” Maier writes, “as detectors of the truth in an area so often filled with exaggeration and lies.” Volunteers were drawn from a disparate population, composed of graduate students, hospital staffers, and faculty wives, and were instructed in, among other things, the “squeeze method” and “sensate focus” exercises. Female volunteers entered the exam room naked except for a terrycloth robe, wearing pillowcases over their head with two holes cut around the eyes.