American Prospect: "Masters of Sex is this spring's true must-read book for those looking to revisit the heady, early days of the sexual revolution."

Sex Work
Two new biographies -- one of Helen Gurley Brown and the other of sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson -- offer cautionary tales about mixing sex and the workplace.
DANA GOLDSTEIN | May 14, 2009 | web only
Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown by Jennifer Scanlon, Oxford University Press, 288 pages, $27.95
Masters of Sex by Thomas Maier, Basic Books, 432 pages, $27.50

"I've never worked anywhere without being sexually involved with somebody in the office."
So said Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine for over 30 years, in a 1982 interview. When the reporter asked Gurley Brown if she had any ethical or feminist compunction about sleeping with a boss, she replied, "Why discriminate against him?"
This kind of glib, manufactured-to-shock statement was typical from Gurley Brown, who had nearly two decades of experience in advertising by the time she wrote her 1962 best-seller, Sex and the Single Girl. Gurley Brown knew how to market herself. One of three female copywriters at Los Angeles advertising firm Kenyon and Eckhart, Gurley Brown worked for a string of unsuccessful male bosses, yet never earned a promotion herself. At one point, management decided that despite her high-quality work, she was "overpaid," and cut her salary in half.
Frustrated, Gurley Brown focused on dating and began to pen vignettes about her personal life. At 31 and already considered an old maid by the standards of the 1950s, she wrote, almost proudly, that "every last one" of her boyfriends and lovers was married. Her response to the indignities of the glass ceiling wasn't to make a fuss demanding equality but to convince her male companions (often co-workers turned lovers) to buy each and every dinner, pay in full for every vacation, and shower her with luxurious gifts. In Sex and the Single Girl, Gurley Brown, by then 40 years old and married to super-rich movie producer David Brown, warned young women not to sell themselves short by going Dutch on dates. "Don't you dare!" she admonished.
In an adoring new biography, Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon reopens the old debate about whether Gurley Brown can really be considered a feminist. That, of course, depends on one's definition of feminism. Undoubtedly, through her books and in the pages of Cosmopolitan, Gurley Brown encouraged young women to enjoy sex and to embrace, at least during their 20s, the single life. Her frank discussion of sexually active dating was offensive to many early-1960s readers and certainly pushed the culture toward accepting that even "good girls" engage in premarital sex. Considering Gurley Brown's influence, Scanlon, who previously wrote a cultural history of Ladies Home Journal, the staid magazine for housewives, goes to great lengths to portray Gurley Brown as a proto-second-wave feminist -- a sort of libertarian Betty Friedan, more concerned with fun than with whining about women's "victimization."
But it is only after immersing oneself in the back catalog of Ladies Home Journal that one could really mistake Cosmopolitan as radically feminist. Like Hugh Hefner, Gurley Brown was not just a magazine editor but the purveyor of a fantasy-lifestyle brand. The product Gurley Brown sold didn't purport to fix, or even address, the real economic and career anxieties facing midcentury American women. Rather, Cosmo proffered an escapist alternate reality in which every woman could distract herself with a work-related dating life as glamorous as the one Gurley Brown experienced in the Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. For Gurley Brown, Scanlon writes, the office was "a decidedly sexy environment," not the site of daily humiliations for women relegated to serving as "office wives," making coffee and picking up laundry for frequently lewd, condescending male bosses. Knowing that Gurley Brown experienced these privations in her own career only makes her wildly optimistic view of the intersection of sex and work seem more peculiar.
A far more sophisticated take on the complications of mixing sex and work can be found in Thomas Maier's absorbing new joint biography of sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Masters of Sex. Masters and Johnson were the first scientists to monitor the workings of the human body during actual copulation -- yes, they watched volunteer subjects, hooked up to heart-rate and blood-flow monitors, have sex on lab tables. The team revealed Freud's sex theories as the misogynist bunk they were: The clitoral orgasm isn't less "sophisticated" than the vaginal one; both types of orgasms involve the same nerve endings, and clitoral orgasms prove far stronger. As Maier writes, Masters and Johnson, in their groundbreaking works Human Sexual Response (1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), portrayed human females as veritable "sexual Olympians," capable of hours of multi-orgasmic masturbation and sex.
The details of how Masters and Johnson conducted and funded their research are as fascinating as one would expect, given the subject matter. Masters, already a celebrated OB-GYN and fertility expert, began his mid-career transition to sex research in the 1950s, watching through peepholes as prostitutes entertained their customers. In exchange for their cooperation, he provided the women with free medical examinations and negotiated with local police to hold off on vice arrests for a week.
It was Johnson, however, originally hired by Masters as a lowly research assistant, who realized that "ordinary" women could be cajoled into having sex for the sake of science, not least because they were eager to strike a blow against male misconceptions of how the female body works. Much of Masters and Johnson's later data on the female orgasm came from watching women masturbate with the assistance of a mechanical, thrusting dildo with a camera on its tip, nicknamed "Ulysses" by the clinic's staff. Johnson, thoughtfully, would warm the phallus with a damp washcloth before experiments began. And in addition to watching married couples have sex, the duo convinced subjects to mate in the lab with complete strangers, wearing nothing but silk face masks designed and sewed by Johnson's elderly mother.

Masters, known as cold and businesslike, relied almost totally on the attractive, effervescent Johnson to interact with volunteers. When he divorced his wife in 1971 to marry his longtime business partner, the media portrayed the pairing as a real romance, proof that there could be no sex without love. The truth of the Masters-Johnson partnership, however, was far more sordid. By Johnson's own account, and that of friends and colleagues, Masters hired the divorced mother of two under the implicit understanding that she would become his sexual partner -- for the purposes of research, Masters claimed. "Sex for Virginia Johnson would become part of her job," Maier writes matter-of-factly. And indeed, Johnson told Maier herself in an interview, "No -- I was not comfortable with it, particularly. I didn't want him at all, and had no interest in him." Johnson engaged in sex with Masters, she claimed decades later, because as a single-mother, "I had a job and I wanted it."

The couple's marriage was precipitated by Johnson receiving a marriage proposal from Hank Walter, a fragrance company executive who worked with the pair on pheromone research. (Like Helen Gurley Brown, Johnson had a history of getting involved with men at work. Her second husband and the father of her two children was a band leader in whose group she sang.) Realizing this relationship would take Johnson away from their profitable sex-therapy clinic, Masters persuaded her to marry him instead, as an investment in the Masters-Johnson brand.

Throughout Masters of Sex, it is difficult to discern exactly what Masters and Johnson meant to each other. Johnson's recent statements on the matter may not be completely trustworthy; after 20 years of marriage, Masters, suffering from Parkinson's disease, left Johnson to reunite with the sweetheart of his adolescence. What's more, Johnson, by all accounts, including her own, was enthusiastically committed to Masters' research, which became her own life's work.

Though she didn't even hold a bachelor's degree, Johnson is credited with developing the innovative therapy technique, "dual therapy," that Masters and Johnson used to counsel married couples suffering from sexual dysfunction. Inspired by the work of behaviorialists such as Albert Ellis, Ivan Pavlov, and B.F. Skinner, Johnson posited that instead of engaging in years of often ineffective Freudian analysis, much sexual inadequacy could be "cured" by simple sex-education. Masters and Johnson charged up to $10,000 for a two-week course of dual therapy. They each took the sexual history of each member of the couple, comparing notes to identify sexual hang-ups and arrive at the truth of what was -- or wasn't -- going on in the marriage bed. Couples were then taught specific sexual techniques for overcoming problems such as premature ejaculation and vaginismus, a condition in which a woman's vagina tenses up, physically preventing penetration. Masters and Johnson claimed an 80 percent success rate.

Though Masters, late in life, said, "There's no question I was a male chauvinist," he went to great lengths to ensure that Johnson was credited for her contributions to their work. Perhaps he was motivated by a desire to show there was nothing professionally untoward in promoting his un-credentialed assistant to the level of full-fledged clinic co-director. Regardless, he removed the M.D. designation after his own name on the cover of the couple's second book, making the team appear even more egalitarian.

If something is missing in Maier's psychologically astute depiction of the Masters-Johnson relationship, it is a lack of depth in his portrayal of the sexual revolution in which Masters and Johnson played key roles. Maier often makes pre-Masters and Johnson America seem like a sexual backwater, ignoring the publication, years earlier, of popular books such as Sex and the Single Girl. And he gives little context with which readers can evaluate whether Masters and Johnson were correct in their supposition that about half of all postwar married couples experienced inadequate sex, especially wives. Indeed, given that recent research shows 95 percent of all Americans have had premarital sex, ever since the 1950s, one wonders if sexual ignorance was quite as widespread as people pretended it was.

Masters and Johnson's reputation was sullied by their publication, in 1979, of a book that claimed, without evidence, that homosexuality was a lifestyle choice that could be reversed through therapy. Countless Christian fundamentalists continue to cite Masters and Johnson to lend their sexual "conversion" narratives a scientific sheen. Still, the couple's positive legacy of legitimizing the study of sex -- and, most radically, reclaiming female sexuality from the Freudians -- cannot be overstated. They are assured a place in the history of sex and feminism. Alas, despite Jennifer Scanlon's protestations, Helen Gurley Brown carries not half their weight in cultural significance. Masters of Sex is this spring's true must-read book for those looking to revisit the heady, early days of the sexual revolution.

Gelf: Q & A about "Masters of Sex" and Biography writing

BOOKS | SCIENCE
MAY 16, 2009
When Masters Met Johnson
Biographer and investigative reporter Thomas Maier chronicles the couple and their research that revolutionized American attitudes toward sex.

Sara Michael

It's fitting that Thomas Maier's latest biography opens with the scene of a 15-year-old girl, later to be known to the world as Virginia Johnson, losing her virginity to her high-school sweetheart in the back of a Plymouth sedan. How else could you launch into the intimate story of one of America's pioneers of human sexuality?

Johnson is one half of the pair credited with shattering long-held myths about the physiology of human sexual response in the 1960s. In Masters of Sex, Maier's intimate portrait of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the author examines the lives of this secretive couple who brought sex to the lab and were among the first to study the physiology of the orgasm.

"Had Bill Masters still been alive he would have put the kibosh on this."
Thomas Maier. Photo by Joyce P. McGurrin.
Maier peppers the biography with at-times graphic yet clinical scenes of human sexuality, like the one of a masked woman masturbating with a Plexiglas dildo outfitted with a camera, or that of the methodical sex surrogate coaxing her client suffering from sexual dysfunction. But more than recount Masters's and Johnson's clinical approach and perhaps questionable therapies, Maier chronicles in great detail the lives of this extraordinary pair, based on many on-the-record interviews, most extensively with Johnson. Maier ultimately tells the story of a couple's complicated relationship and of a woman who he calls a "pioneer of female sexuality."

In the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Maier talks about how he got Johnson to open up and how—even with the word "sex" in the title—he's having a hard time getting his book into reviewers' hands. (You can hear Maier speak, along with Science of Sex creators Anne Machalinski and Christie Nicholson and OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder, at Gelf Magazine's Geeking Out reading series on May 21st at the Jan Larsen Art Studios in Brooklyn, New York.)

Gelf Magazine: I understand this is really the first biography of Masters and Johnson. What made you decide to write about them?

Thomas Maier: They really are the last big American figures of the 20th century for which there was not a biography. I think that is true.

Gelf Magazine: But that's not what drove you to dig in?

Thomas Maier: No, what prompted me was that I interviewed Masters in 1994, on the day of his retirement. I have been a reporter for 25 years at Newsday and there was a point where I was doing a lot of health and science coverage, so I just happened to do that. I was writing a book on Dr. Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor, at that time, and I thought this would be an awfully interesting story. I had written this book about the Kennedys and I was going to do this book on [former New York Yankees owner] George Steinbrenner. I actually have a letter from Steinbrenner that said he was going to cooperate, and what happened was, in March of 2005 I got the letter saying, "Let's talk in September or October." Well September and October roll around, and it turns out he has kind of faded out on me, so Steinbrenner was not available.
So I revisited the idea of Masters and Johnson, and the idea of a man and a woman studying love and sex, who had not married, but then get married and then get divorced—all set against the background of the American sexual revolution. It seemed to me to be an intrinsically fascinating story, and it was much more than I ever imagined.


Gelf Magazine: Why did you think it was important to tell the story of the couple behind this research?
Thomas Maier: I think their lives represent a lot of the eternal dramas, contradictions, and dynamics of male-female relationships. They were a full-blooded heterosexual couple. If they made a movie of it I could definitely see people like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing them, or in an earlier generation, a Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. Virginia Johnson, she became available after a couple of false tries. I finally gained her cooperation in November 2005.

Gelf Magazine: Tell me more about that. I understand she was hesitant to be interviewed.

Thomas Maier: Oh, she was extremely hesitant. For instance, Mary Roach, who wrote a book called Bonk that was a bestseller last year about sexuality—the impetus for that book was the mechanical dildo Masters and Johnson used in their sex experiments. Mary Roach is a science writer who has a very humorous style, and she tried to get Virginia Johnson's cooperation and Johnson wouldn't do it. The thing I think that helped was I sent her a copy of my Dr. Spock book, and the relationship of Ben Spock and his wife Jane—it was a 50-year relationship, a long-term relationship that didn't end well. Spock wound up divorcing Jane. And Virginia had met Jane Spock, and she read my book and it rang true with her. There were also a fair number of similarities with her relationship with Bill Masters, because in the end Bill divorces her and goes looking for his lost love, and Virginia goes looking for her lost love, which is the "the boy with the fiery red hair," whose name she wouldn't tell me.

Gelf Magazine: But you found that out.

Thomas Maier: I found it out from Lowell Pugh, who was the funeral-home director in a little town called Golden City, Missouri, where Virginia grew up. Its population at the time was 800, and she lived five miles outside of the Golden City.

Gelf Magazine: And everybody knew everything.

Thomas Maier: Everybody knew everything, and Lowell immediately knew it was Gordon Garrett, and it was predicted in the yearbook that Virginia Johnson would get married to him. So at the beginning of the book, the first time I interviewed Virginia, one of the audacious questions I asked—politely of course—was, "When was the first time you had sex? What was that like? When did you lose your virginity?" And she told me the story of "the boy with the fiery red hair."

Gelf Magazine: I couldn't believe she told that story, and in such detail. Were you surprised she opened up to you like that?

Thomas Maier: No, she is in a way a chatterbox. Masters was intensely secretive. Had Bill Masters still been alive, he would have put the kibosh on this. And you know he did write a 100-page memoir that was never published. He wrote it in the last few years of his life. He was suffering from Parkinson's and the reliability of some of the stuff… There were some questions about it, but it was on paper, and it was something he did with a professional writer, but it was never published. That was given to me by the family. But it was really Virginia's story.

Gelf Magazine: You clearly interviewed a lot of people, and the book has some very rich details. And all of it was on the record. How did you start this and get to the right people?

Thomas Maier: Well, I have been an investigative reporter for 25 years. One of the things you learn is concentric circles. You kind of approach people who know the person you want to write about and get closer and closer to the person. I went to a couple of different doors trying to get Virginia's cooperation, and then one day I stumbled upon her telephone number and I called her. And I found a woman who was 79 or 80 when I called her at home. She had really become a recluse—she had all her marbles—and she just started chatting.
Our first interview was about three hours over the telephone. Then I came out to St. Louis, but a lot of it was very long marathon telephone calls in a confessional or in a chatty way, talking about her life. She did a lot of fan dances initially. She would tell some of the story but she wouldn't give a names.
She was reluctant. The thing she was most reluctant about was not Gordon Garrett, believe it or not. The most sensitive area had to do with a key pivotal point in the relationship of Masters and Johnson. It occurred at the height of their fame, when they were on the cover of Time magazine. Their second book [Human Sexual Inadequacy] had come out; it created the therapy that would create the modern-day sex-therapy industry. It turned Freud on his head. They were making money in ways certainly Virginia had never dreamed of.
And Virginia wanted to get married to a man named Hank Walters, who was then the head of International Flavors and Fragrance. His firm got involved as a patron of Masters's and Johnson's work. He wanted to marry Virginia, and Virginia wanted to marry him and she wanted out [of the experiments with Masters]. She felt her work was done, and she wanted to find happiness.
There is a scene in the book where she is out with Hank, and Masters puts two and two together. They had had an affair—Masters and Johnson—and in fact sex was part of the requirement of the job. By the time she met Hank Walters, it had kind of fizzled. There was never really that emotional tie between them.

Gelf Magazine: Which is interesting considering what they were studying. Did that surprise you, that there wasn't a close connection or love between Masters and Johnson?

Thomas Maier: Absolutely. It's an amazing story. Bear in mind, couples from around the world who had problems expressing the most physical form of love in a marriage were coming to them for help. They had found a process that for 80 percent of the people that came to them found some kind of success.
So Masters finds out she is having an affair with Hank Walters, and he says, "I will divorce my wife of 20 years" [and he divorces his wife] to basically keep the partnership together, and convinces Virginia to get married to him. She makes fundamentally a business decision. And so she gets married to Masters, but it's essentially a loveless marriage.

Gelf Magazine: Do you feel like you really got to know this couple, or are there pieces missing you wish you could have filled in more?

Thomas Maier: I think I have more people on the record talking about their lives than I think anybody would have imagined. I don't think people quite realize how difficult this really was. This whole staff—they were trained by Masters not to say anything.

Gelf Magazine: It sounds like it was a pretty long process, researching and writing this book. Was there anything that was different in writing this book than your previous books?

Thomas Maier: My books have been essentially biographies, but my first book about Si Newhouse, the media baron, was done without his cooperation. It's really a biography of his organization. The Kennedys biography was a biography about a family, a four-generation family.
The book I had written previously that was by far the closest to this is the Spock biography. It was the story of a marriage. Jane Spock had really introduced Ben Spock to Freudian psychology and he popularized Freudian psychology through that baby book, and in this case, with Masters and Johnson, it's the story of a man and woman who became more equal. It's the story of a man and a woman in a long-term relationship, and who made who. Bill Masters made Virginia Johnson on one level, but she made him.

Gelf Magazine: Any idea of what her impression is of the book?

Thomas Maier: She likes it. I am amazed. You know, she has been written about a lot. So there is a level of professionalism that somebody has about that. They are accustomed to being written about. But I was very concerned. She didn't read the book until it was published, so I was really very concerned about how she would respond.

Gelf Magazine: Masters and Johnson did some perhaps ethically questionable things for this research. Could sex research have been done any other way?

"I am not sure the ethics committee of the average hospital would approve their research."Thomas Maier: It's an interesting question. They were not only ahead of their time. Although Masters was pushing the envelope, he did so still in the parameters of the medical profession. One thing was, there's a section in the book called "Volunteers." The second part of that chapter has to do with Thomas Gilpatrick, who at one point has sex with a 19-year-old girl who was pregnant, and sure, as I am writing it, there is a line there where I kind of signal to the reader that I realize this is certainly questionable by today's more stringent ethical standards. I am not sure the ethics committee of the average hospital would approve their research. I certainly raise all the questions appropriately, but bear in mind I am writing a biography in a somewhat literary way. I kind of give a wink to the reader, saying, "I am raising the question; I am bringing this up, because I do question some of the way this is done." But in the context of his time, Masters was pretty careful in trying to be professional.
Gelf Magazine: How is the couple perceived today by sex researchers?

Thomas Maier: There is a group called the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, and the new president is a guy named Michael Perelman. He actually spoke at Masters's memorial service. My book is open-eyed, obviously, but I think they had a tremendous impact.

Gelf Magazine: Your book is very graphic in parts—enough to make a reader blush, really. But is there any other way to write a book about this topic?

Thomas Maier: If you look at the reviews, they are all over the place about that. Oprah's magazine said it was pretty graphic for a biography, but the other two or so reviews were done by men who thought it was almost a little restrained and dry—and I said, "what?" I do think most of the clinical stuff I talk about was certainly using clinical language. It's never vulgar. It's in context of medical terms and, frankly, I think the aspect of sex that involves human plumbing and stuff can be almost comedic. It has to be given certain due reverence and there is a level of comedy to it.
I don't think it's overly graphic at all. I think it speaks about sexuality in a mature way without any vulgarity. There isn't any other way to do it, and I certainly thought about it a great deal. I was very mindful for a guy who just wrote a book about presidential politics.

Gelf Magazine: What was the hardest part of researching and writing this book?

Thomas Maier: Well, the most difficult part is right now. I think I have written a marvelous book and it's very difficult to get reviewed. Newspapers are falling apart. The same apparatus that was in place 10 years ago with my Spock book just isn't reviewing anymore, including my own newspaper. Newsday is not reviewing the book. So I think that is without a doubt the most difficult thing for me right now.

Gelf Magazine: How are you getting around that? Are you just pounding the pavement?

Thomas Maier: Yes, to some extent. This week, I am at Harvard Medical School. I arranged for myself to go out to the National Academy of Sciences, and next week I am in Los Angeles. I arranged for the New York Academy of Medicine thing we had with Gay Talese here in New York. So I have done a lot more public relations than I had imagined. In fact, I probably should get going on my next book. I have kind of resolved to not let myself spend as much time between books as I did with this one. I have had five years between books and I really didn't intend for that to happen.
It's very odd. Here is a biography that is really the first biography of the last big cultural figures of the 20th century who had a huge impact on people's lives. I haven't said it, but I think Virginia is a hugely important figure in terms of female sexuality. She is really the pioneer of female sexuality. She turned Freud on his head; she was the one who made their experiments happen. Her charm, her wit, her intelligence, her uncanny ability with human nature—convincing 700 people to literally engage in sex and be observed with these instruments attached to them, under CIA-like secrecy. It's just one of the most extraordinary stories.

Playboy Praises "Masters of Sex" in New Review

05/05/2009
By J.R. Nelson
Author: Thomas Maier
Publisher: Basic Books
Number of Pages: 432 Pages
Cover Type: Hard Cover
BUY NOW!
If it's hard to imagine a truly adequate sex-ed class before William Masters and Virginia Johnson, it’s probably because there wasn’t one. Masters and Johnson literally wrote the book on how we get it on. Pioneers in the physiological study of human sexuality and the treatment of sexual dysfunction, their bestselling 1966 classic Human Sexual Response and its follow up, Human Sexual Inadequacy, were sparks that helped ignite the sexual revolution.
As Thomas Maier reports in his new biography of the duo, Masters of Sex, the journey of Masters and Johnson after that initial success was a hard one. Some of their work, including research on homosexuality and converting/reverting gays and lesbians and a later book on AIDS, have been justifiably controversial. In addition, the duo’s 40-year relationship was complicated; their marriage and professional partnership ended in bitterness. As Maier reveals in delicate detail, mysteries of the heart are not as easily solvable as those of the loins, even for the experts.
Famous as caricatures for their “white lab coat” exactitude and clinical prose, Masters and Johnson deftly informed and comforted millions. Maier offers an intimate, engaging look at a couple who helped free lovers from repression, suppression and Freudian myth and helped bring what was most human about us into the light.

Harvard Bookstore, Friday May 15th, 3PM- "Masters of Sex" by Thomas Maier

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome award-winning author and investigative journalist THOMAS MAIER for a discussion of his new biography of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Masters of Sex.


DATE: Friday, May 15th
TIME: 3:00 PM
LOCATION: Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge
TICKETS: This event is free; no tickets are required

Virginia Johnson - Pioneer of American Female Sexuality and Feminist Icon, In Her Own Way

Virginia Johnson's remarkable life and his role as a pioneer of American female sexuality -- as an American original -- is discussed by biographer Thomas Maier with legendary writer Gay Talese, Laurie Garrett and Dr. Robert C. Koldony at the New York Academy of Medicine. This panel discussion was part of the book launch for "Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, The Couple Who Taught America How To Love," Basic Books.

"Thy Neighbor's Wife" - Gay Talese Recalls Virginia Johnson at "Masters of Sex" Book Launch

At the book launch for "Masters of Sex," a new biography of Masters and Johnson, guest panelist Gay Talese recalls how Virginia Johnson was one of the few early reviewers to like what is his now classic 1981 book. Talese joined biographer Thomas Maier at the New York Academy of Medicine on April 27, 2009 along with other panelists, Pulitzer-winning medical writer Laurie Garrett and Dr. Robert C. Kolodny, former associate director of the Masters and Johnson Institute.

THE DAILY BEAST: "Maier’s sedulously researched and deeply absorbing biography suggests that love is far more elusive than an orgasm"

"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."

They Wrote the Book on Sex
by Daphne Merkin
April 30, 2009 | 5:54am
A definitive new biography of Masters and Johnson reveals everything you always wanted to know—and more—about America’s most famous sex researchers.
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.
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.
Regarding her acceptance of their sexual pact, Johnson seems conveniently blind to the complex interweaving of desire and ambition: “’No, I was not comfortable with it, particularly,’ she insisted. ‘I didn’t want him at all, and had no interest in him. I don’t know how to explain it.’” Although she resists being cast as a pre-feminist victim, she is happy to paint herself as Masters’ Girl Toy, created to satisfy his professional and personal needs. Throughout the book she refers to her former partner and ex-husband (Masters had one last surprise up his sleeve, divorcing Johnson in 1993 to marry a long-ago sweetheart for whom he had carried a torch “for 55 years”) by his last name, furthering the impression of a carefully calculated distance between them.
Johnson describes herself and Masters as “absolutely the two most secretive people on the face of the earth,” so it is fitting that one finishes this book wishing for more transparency and less occlusion. In the end, I found myself more intrigued by Masters, who seems genuinely, mesmerizingly inscrutable. Was he the man who loved women? Or was he the man who couldn’t love at all? Whatever the answer, his and Johnson’s far-seeing vision changed the sexual landscape forever, elucidating the delicate machinery of carnal pleasure and thereby bringing it out from under the covers and into the light.
Daphne Merkin was a staff writer for The New Yorker and is currently a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Elle. She is the author of a novel, Enchantment, and a collection of essays, Dreaming of Hitler.

"Masters of Sex" Book Launch at New York Academy of Medicine with Author Thomas Maier, Guests Gay Talese, Laurie Garrett and Robert Kolodny

Here's the opening remarks for the book launch of "Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love", which took place April 27, 2009 at the New York Academy of Medicine. Author Thomas Maier introduces one of the guest, legendary writer Gay Talese, and recalls Talese's questioning of Masters and Johnson's own love life -- in front of a convention of newspaper editors!
The theme of the evening was "Sex in America, Then and Now: The Lasting Legacy of Masters and Johnson", at the NYAM sponsored by the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation.
Distinguished author Thomas Maier offers an unprecedented look at Masters and Johnson, experts on the subject of sex, and their lasting impact on the love lives of today's men and women in his new book
To mark the launch of this new biography of sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Maier joins a distinguished panel looking at America's sexual attitudes since the 1960s and how it influences today's generation.
The guests included legendary writer Gay Talese, author of newly-reissued "Thy Neighbor's Wife," and Dr. Robert C. Kolodny, former associate director of the Masters and Johnson Institute and a co-author with them on several books.
The discussion will be moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett, now global health expert for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Maier's new biography, "Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love," is published by Basic Books.

"Masters of Sex" - Listen to Interview About New Book

Actress Dorie Barton Reads "Masters of Sex", Unabridged Version of Masters and Johnson Biography Now On Sale

The new downloadable audiobook version of "Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, The Couple Who Taught America How to Love," is now on sale. You can hear a sample of CHAPTER ONE, by going to this site and clicking on the player.

The book is read by Dorie Barton, whose voice very much captures the spirit of this book. As Barton's website says about her: " Dorie has been seen in myriad television shows, as both a series regular, in "Stark Raving Mad" with Tony Shaloub and Neil Patrick Harris, and recurring roles in "I'm With Her", "The In-Laws", etc., as well as many memorable guest-starring parts in shows including "CSI, and "Angel". She has starred in several television films, her most prominent being her work as the young Martha Stewart, in NBC's biopic, "Martha, Inc.". Film work has ranged from independent films, to some of the Hollywood's biggest hits such as "Meet the Fokkers", and "Down With Love", etc."

"Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, The Couple Who Taught America How To Love", Basic Books, On Sale April 27

In "Masters of Sex", critically acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier offers an unprecedented look at Masters and Johnson, their pioneering studies of intimacy, and their lasting impact on the love lives of today's men and women.
Masters and Johnson began their secret studies in a small Midwest laboratory working with prostitutes and volunteers who performed more than 10,000 sexual acts in the name of science. They soon became the top experts on sex for more than 40 years, explaining the untold mysteries of orgasm, emotional fulfillment, and sexual dysfunction to millions of Americans. Thousands of patients relied on their highly successful sex therapy, from politicians and Hollywood stars with marital problems to gay men and women seeking "conversion" to heterosexuality. Masters and Johnson were America's ideal couple, but they divorced after 20 years amid a clash of ambitions, betrayal, and jealousies.
Theirs is a classic tale of love, work, and fame against the backdrop of an American sexual revolution which they inspired. Weaving interviews with the notoriously private William Masters and the ambitious Virginia Johnson, who championed the power of female sexuality during her own quest for true love, Maier offers a titillating portrait of the legendary team.
Entertaining, revealing, and beautifully told, the groundbreaking Masters of Sex sheds light on the eternal mysteries of desire, intimacy, and the American psyche.