Sex Scandal for the History Books

Johnson was considered to be the more approachable of the two, with her mellifluous voice and sincere manner; Masters, who wore a bow tie and carried white ballpoint pens to match his white coat, was considered to be the more reserved, if not outright cold. They worked together to the exclusion of much else, ignoring their home lives (Masters also had two children) in their pursuit of physiological discoveries about male and female arousal patterns, the uses of foreplay, and the disproving of myths such as the one that said sex among couples during pregnancy posed a hazard to the fetus. Early on in their professional partnership, Johnson agreed to a clandestine sexual relationship with Masters, who romantically referred to intercourse as “a mutual masturbation exercise.” The couple proceeded to sexually engage as though it were part of their training—“a way of further comprehending all that they were learning through observation”—and in return, Masters upped Johnson’s salary as well as her title. Despite her lack of a degree, his former secretary went from being an assistant to a research associate and was given equal billing in their scientific publications. Depending upon whose voice you listen to in the chorus of voices that Maier has orchestrated, Bill was the name and Gini the workhorse, or, again, Bill was the star and Gini his cunning sidekick. (“He lowered his standards to elevate hers,” remarks one friend. “It was a condition of their going forward together.”) Similarly, depending again upon whose opinion you warm to, they became involved erotically because it was part of the job requirement or because Johnson wanted to ensure that “the perks kept coming along.” No one seems to have suggested that they were in love—least of all, Johnson herself. “I probably never had loved him,” she reflects years later. “We had in common a real devotion to a sexual relationship and that was probably the strongest common denominator that we had.”

In 1966, they co-authored their landmark book, Human Sexual Response, which presented itself as the medically based continuation of Kinsey’s Gallup-like questionnaires—construed by the pair to be “mere sociology.” In it, they outlined the four separate stages of human response in men and women, derived from watching 382 female and 312 male volunteers over nearly a decade. They also put Freud’s belief in the superiority of vaginal orgasms firmly to bed, having discovered that there was no biological difference between them and clitoral orgasms, and blasted the delusion that bigger penises guaranteed greater sexual effectiveness. But the book’s most explosive finding by far was that women were naturally capable of multiple orgasms, unencumbered by the refractory period that slowed men down—sometimes as many as five or six within minutes. “In this scenario,” Maier notes, “women’s potential fireworks display in bed far exceeded the single little firecracker of the men beside them.”

Masters of Sex follows the couple at its center through the heyday of their celebrity, when they were courted by Hugh Hefner and talk shows like Meet the Press, to the gradual polluting of sexology beginning in the mid-‘70s by what Masters called “an astounding assortment of incompetents, cultists, mystics, well- meaning dabblers, and outright charlatans.” It also covers the later controversies over their use of sexual surrogates and the assertions of their third book, Homosexuality in Perspective (1979), in which they pushed for “conversion” therapy, claiming a success rate of 67 percent among the more than 300 homosexual men and women they had studied over a 14-year period—results they may have fabricated. The methodology in this book was far less meticulous; indeed, as Maier describes it, “Homosexuality In Perspective contained far more speculation than science…”

By their second book, Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), which offered nothing less than “a therapeutic regimen to cure chronic sexual dysfunction and distressed marriages,” Masters had dropped his “M.D.” designation, furthering their equal status. Their lives were bound up in the lab and in bed, whatever the lack of emotional intimacy, and on January 7, 1971, Bill Masters and Gini Johnson got hitched after Bill abruptly dumped Libby, his devoted wife of 29 years. Masters summed up the grounds of his divorce with his usual dry-as-dust clarity: ”Ultimately, my wife and I had to face the fact that our relationship was essentially nonexistent.”

Set against a larger cultural landscape that spans the domesticated ‘50s and liberated ‘60s on up to the present, stopping on the way to evaluate the effect of Masters and Johnson’s work on everything from feminism to perfumes, Masters of Sex is a richly informed and elegantly organized account of the two people behind the logo that stood for new sexual horizons—a world where “ejaculatory incompetence” and the “female-superior” coital position were given intelligent and comprehending scrutiny. That their work never received public funding is one more striking detail among many; that the couple themselves remains elusive is, perhaps, one of the ways in which matters of the psyche resist clinical evaluation. Despite the fact that Johnson cooperated with the author (Masters, who died in 2001, was also interviewed) and her perspective tends to dominate the narrative, she comes off as deliberately vague about her own motives and wishes.