Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love
Thomas Maier
Language: English
Pages: 440
ISBN: 0465079997
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Showtime's dramatic series Masters of Sex, starring Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan, is based on this real-life story of sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Before Sex and the City and ViagraTM, America relied on Masters and Johnson to teach us everything we needed to know about what goes on in the bedroom. Convincing hundreds of men and women to shed their clothes and copulate, the pair were the nation’s top experts on love and intimacy. Highlighting interviews with the notoriously private Masters and the ambitious Johnson, critically acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier shows how this unusual team changed the way we all thought about, talked about, and engaged in sex while they simultaneously tried to make sense of their own relationship. Entertaining, revealing, and beautifully told, Masters of Sex sheds light on the eternal mysteries of desire, intimacy, and the American psyche.
man with hundreds of female gynecological patients, Masters remained perplexed. The young 82 Through the Peephole woman’s description of orgasm—and the possibility that she might fake her reaction just to get the whole thing finished—seemed beyond his comprehension. “I simply could not understand her,” he recalled. “I’m not sure I ever did.” After much frustration with this otherwise brilliant doctor, who monitored her orgasm but couldn’t grasp her explanation of how it felt, the young woman
this job, she didn’t have any more ambition than to earn some money. “The medical world just didn’t appeal to me in any way, shape, or form,” she explained. “I always liked the doctors I knew as a kid growing up. But it meant nothing to me.” When medical students or young resident doctors walked through the hallway, Johnson occasionally looked up to acknowledge them with a glance. She befriended nurses in their twenties or early thirties, and, for a moment, she might chat with these women about
Dr. and Mrs. Masters to hospital fund-raisers and holiday events sponsored by the medical school. “They would come through the door as a trio,” recalled Sandra Sherman. “I felt there was something more to it than that. Some men need harems.” As they chatted at the table, Sandra gained a sense of both women. She enjoyed Gini as a lively conversationalist and a good listener. Gini’s dress and demeanor stayed well within the narrow confines of social acceptability among the doctors and their wives,
Dr. and Mrs. Masters to hospital fund-raisers and holiday events sponsored by the medical school. “They would come through the door as a trio,” recalled Sandra Sherman. “I felt there was something more to it than that. Some men need harems.” As they chatted at the table, Sandra gained a sense of both women. She enjoyed Gini as a lively conversationalist and a good listener. Gini’s dress and demeanor stayed well within the narrow confines of social acceptability among the doctors and their wives,
Rosie the Riveter and other females who took on traditionally male jobs in factories and other businesses to replace the absent GIs serving overseas—there remained many unshakable constraints, both in public and in private. “Wartime propaganda emphasized women’s femininity even as it exhorted them to take nontraditional roles in industry,” observed Katharine T. Corbett in her history of St. Louis women. Nowhere was this duplicity more evident than on sexual matters. The ignorance among females