Photograph courtesy of Basic Books
The grad student had a pillowcase over her head for anonymity, but she could breathe—fast and hard. In time, she inserted the Plexiglas…er…machine, thoughtfully warmed with a moist towel by Virginia Johnson, and her movements quickened.
“Males hate this machine,” Dr. William Masters remarked to his guest, the director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, “because invariably the females speed up the machine at a rate that no male can equal!”
As cameras whirred and the young woman writhed, the Kinsey scientist leaned close, peering eagerly through the transparent machine that illuminated her cervix. Masters had just made it possible to observe subtle physiological responses that had been mysterious—and wildly misunderstood—for centuries.
What Masters and Johnson learned about human sexual response (they tracked, all told, some 15,000 orgasms) revolutionized science’s understanding of female sexuality, not to mention the standard treatments for sexual dysfunction.
And it all happened here, behind closed doors, in conservative 1960s St. Louis.
Eastman-Kodak swore to keep the film images confidential. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat’s publisher agreed to keep silent. The St. Louis police chief granted immunity to the prostitutes who volunteered for studies. Washington University chancellor Ethan A. Shepley told his board in only the vaguest terms what the star of the OB/GYN faculty was researching. Even Cardinal Joseph Ritter, who’d no doubt heard his share of unhappily married confidences, told Masters that while the Catholic Church could not sanction his research, it would be interested to know his results.
When Thomas Maier started writing Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love (Basic Books, 2009), he knew it wouldn’t be easy. Masters was dead; Johnson was a recluse. And no one had ever fully explored their psyches, described their partnership, or traced the trajectory of their work.
Maier uncovered quite a few secrets.
Medical records revealed that Masters, a fertility specialist whose patients included the wife of the Shah of Iran, had a low sperm count (but blamed his wife).
Late in his career, there was some fudging of the case histories—and Masters continued hiring surrogates to have sex with clients for therapeutic purposes after he publicly promised he would stop.
His patients—some for traditional OB/GYN, others for sexual dysfunction—included actress Barbara Eden, former Alabama governor George Wallace after he was paralyzed, and conservative pundit Phyllis Schlafly (whose response, Maier recalls, was a crisp, “I don’t have anything good to say about him”).
Masters had a surgeon’s cold deliberation, changing his white coat several times a day and writing only with white ballpoint pens. Yet he was surprisingly gentle with patients who were vulnerable or ashamed, perhaps because of the deepest secret of all: When he was a child, his father had humiliated, beaten, and rejected him.
In adulthood, ambition drove him. Masters knew he needed a female partner to do credible, pioneering research in sexuality, and he found the perfect research partner in Virginia Johnson, a divorcée he initially hired as his secretary. Smart, independent, and adept at reading sexual undertones, “she was Carrie Bradshaw before there was a Carrie Bradshaw,” Maier chuckles. “She had a native genius for understanding human nature and practical insights into how to solve sexual problems.”
When Masters realized that the information he was gleaning from world-weary prostitutes wouldn’t help him understand housewives, it was Johnson who persuaded more typical women to volunteer. When they developed dual therapy, she listened to the wife while he listened to the husband; by comparing notes, they could reach the underlying emotional and psychological issues.
And when clinical-observation sessions grew too arousing, Masters announced that they would relieve their own inevitable sexual tension with each other rather than project it onto their clients. Johnson did not demur.
Their sex was reportedly torrid—especially before they married—but the strongest emotion Masters felt toward Johnson was probably gratitude. Without her, he could not continue his life’s work. He gave her increasing credit, once even withholding his “M.D.” in a book byline to keep their names in balance. And in 1971, to keep her from marrying someone else, he left his wife and married her himself.
The world thought it a happy ending, but their passion soon faded, and Parkinson’s disease dulled Masters’ mind. Johnson wasn’t happy, but she stayed by his side until, on Christmas Eve 1992, he abruptly informed her that he was leaving her to marry his first love, who’d spurned him 50 years earlier because of a tragic miscommunication.
Masters died in 2001, at 85. Johnson, now 84, lives in seclusion here in St. Louis—and goes by the name Mary Masters.
“I think she still loves Bill Masters,” Maier says slowly, “and she is still incredibly angry with him. He made her; it is a modern-day Pygmalion story.”
The ripple effect of that story was considerable. In Maier’s opinion, “Virginia Johnson’s one of the great feminists of the 20th century. She’s almost single-handedly responsible for identifying—and underlining—the power of female sexuality.” She and Masters put an empirical end to the Freudian obsession with the vaginal orgasm, reported that women’s most intense orgasms happened when they were alone, and revealed women’s potential for multiple orgasms—three calm biological facts that ricocheted like racquetballs through the emerging women’s-liberation movement. As one scholar noted, if women didn’t need men to have sexual pleasure, heterosexuality became “not an absolute but an option.”
And the upshot for straight men? “It relieved some of our performance anxiety, by recognizing that sexual dysfunction isn’t just one partner’s problem,” Maier says. “But it was also quite humbling: Their findings showed that the weaker sex, at least in the bedroom, may indeed be the male. They underlined the limits of male sexuality and the apparent limitlessness of female sexuality.”
Perhaps in recompense, they categorically refused to release the average size of the penis. And many of their therapeutic exercises diffused the crude focus on genitalia, bringing a new sensuality to American sex.
It all fell apart in the end. Masters and Johnson followed groundbreaking books about heterosexuality with Homosexuality in Perspective, which suggested (despite Johnson’s vehement private disagreement) that some homosexuals could be converted to heterosexuality. Then came an uncharacteristically panicky book about AIDS, warning that it was undetected but rampant in the heterosexual community and could spread through French kissing, mosquito bites, and toilet seats.
What the hell happened? Johnson was less involved, a young acolyte was doing most of the writing, and Masters was showing the effects of Parkinson’s disease—yet remained eager as ever for media splash. “Bill had pushed the envelope his whole career, and he’d always been right,” Maier says. “Now he was losing his sharpness, and he’d also lost the checks-and-balances system of a university.
“Washington University essentially pushed him out,” Maier continues. Several faculty colleagues were horrified by his research (one stood outside Masters’ medical suite with a stethoscope pressed to the wall), and conservative board members were apoplectic.
Even today, there’s a deliberate distancing, says Maier. He called various administrators and campus groups to suggest that the university hold a symposium, give Johnson an honorary degree, at least hold a book event. “Everybody was very gracious,” he says, “but the answer was always no.”
Finally, he gave up and held his reading at Left Bank Books. Which was OK, because despite all of Masters and Johnson’s clinical breakthroughs, “much of the book is about the yearning for love,” he says. “They tried to find things out from a scientific, medical standpoint—and they did—but the affairs of the heart, what really motivates people, remained a mystery to them, even in their own lives.”
It’s amazing how much they learned about sex. It’s even more amazing how little they learned about love.
Staff writer Jeannette Cooperman’s interest in this subject traces back to graduate school, where she wrote about the Catholic church’s response to the opening of the duo’s St. Louis clinic.
