Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #862710 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 11
• Binding: Audio CD

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Louis Bayard How suggestively their names intertwined from the start: Masters, with its echoes of bondage and onanism, and Johnson, that venerable euphemism for penis. If they hadn't been the most famous sexologists of their day, they might have opened an S&M club in Tribeca. Gini, with her purring smile, would have greeted the customers; Bill would have stayed in the back room, testing the hoists and chains. Which was only a couple of degrees removed from what they did in real life. Their partnership began in St. Louis in the mid-1950s, when William Masters, an ob-gyn and fertility specialist at Washington University, decided to launch a scientific inquiry into human sexuality. Unlike his predecessor, Alfred Kinsey, Masters proposed something far more immersive than questionnaires: direct observation of the body's procreative functions, with each pulse and quiver painstakingly recorded. He began in a small way by spying on prostitutes (conscripted with the local vice squad's help and the Catholic archbishop's blessing). When one of his subjects suggested he find a female partner, Masters settled on an unlikely candidate: an unemployed, twice-divorced mother with two small kids and no degree. Initially hired as Masters's secretary, Virginia Johnson quickly proved her worth in the lab, efficiently gathering personal histories and sounding the notes of empathy that were absent from Masters's cool register. With the help of tools like "a motor-powered Plexiglas phallus," the white-coated team observed approximately 10,000 orgasms over 11 years. The fruits of their labor were gathered in a volume called "Human Sexual Response," which managed to sell 300,000 copies in just a few months. Was it the plain brown paper wrapping? Was it the ribald prose? ("This maculopapular type of erythematous rash first appears over the epigastrium.") Or was something more tectonic going on? Thomas Maier's intelligent and well-conceived biography reminds us that, as recently as the mid-1960s, "the word 'pregnant' could be bleeped from any television show. Sex education was kept out of the classroom." Copulation itself was "the private domain of the marital bed." Masters and Johnson, with their pharmaceutical calm and their vast edifices of data, made sex an over-the-counter commodity -- and, along the way, demolished some entrenched myths. Intercourse during pregnancy endangers the fetus? Nope. Vaginal orgasms beat clitoral orgasms? Sorry, Dr. Freud. As for females being the delicate sex, the research showed that women could achieve five or six orgasms in as many minutes while men had to quit the field for at least an hour after every climax. Women suddenly had a green light for sex, and the news was welcome not just to hedonists -- Hugh Hefner was one of the study's biggest funders -- but to feminists, who glimpsed a new dawn of erotic self-determination. "It's 10 o'clock at night," read the sign at Ms. magazine headquarters. "Do you know where your clitoris is?" The answer, according to the St. Louis researchers, was a decided yes. Large numbers of women had already confessed that they enjoyed their best sex alone. Kinsey died at the height of his notoriety, but Masters and Johnson were able to parlay their fame into a second career of sexual healing. For a then-whopping fee of $3,000 (actually, it's still whopping), movie stars, senators and the just plain dysfunctional could spruce up their sex lives with the help of male-female therapy teams, achieving results in a couple of weeks that might have required many years of traditional psychoanalysis. By the time Masters and Johnson came out with a second volume in 1970, their names were as wedded in the public mind as Romeo and Juliet. Before long, they were wedded in the eyes of the law, too. Their union, so appealing on the surface, had one slight problem: They didn't love each other. Much of the problem lay with Masters, who admitted to being "sort of a bastard" and a stranger to the ways of the heart. He carried on an extramarital affair with Johnson for many years before divorcing his wife and, in the twilight of his life, abruptly ditched Johnson for an old sweetheart. He was also the driving force behind the team's controversial embrace of conversion therapy for gays. In "Homosexuality in Perspective" (1979), he and Johnson claimed they could straighten out gay men or women in a matter of weeks, with a "failure rate" of only one-third. Buttressed with phony case studies, the book's findings were quickly denounced by the medical establishment and seized upon just as quickly by the religious right as evidence that gay lifestyles were a choice, not an orientation. So Masters and Johnson bear some of the blame for the "ex-gay" ministries that currently litter our cultural landscape, but who is to blame for the dissolution of the Masters-and-Johnson brand? Their names are now largely unknown, I'd wager, to anyone under the age of 40, in part because the mainstreaming of sex they advocated and embodied has taken hold with such a vengeance. We are not, to put it mildly, as shockable as we were. Cosmopolitan magazine weighs in each month with primers on the female orgasm; sex columnists like Dan Savage and Susie Bright embrace every kink and fetish of the human comedy; grown men fill the airwaves with choruses of "Viva Viagra!" The culture that Masters and Johnson helped to create has swallowed them whole.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* He was an ob-gyn on staff at the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Emotionally chilly and egotistical, Masters was interested in researching human sexuality. Johnson was a divorced mother of two, looking for a job and a way to earn a degree. She accepted a job offer as research assistant—and sex with Masters as a condition of employment, ostensibly in the name of science. Working together in the 1950s and 1960s, they built on the earlier work of Alfred Kinsey and changed the way Americans looked at sex. Maier goes beyond the image and contributions of this world-famous couple to reveal a driven and calculating man who divorced his faithful wife after 29 years and married Johnson to prevent her from marrying a wealthy benefactor of their clinic. Johnson, though granted equal credit for their work, never got over feelings of inadequacy. She subverted her personality and desires only to have Masters divorce her after 21 years to marry an old sweetheart from his youth. Maier recounts the boldness of their experiments and treatments, controversies surrounding their use of surrogates and study of prostitutes, and their eventual decline as the sexual revolution they sparked raced ahead of them. Based on interviews, Masters’ unpublished memoir, and clinic documents, Maier’s book offers a wonderfully written and totally absorbing look at an amazing couple. --Vanessa Bush

Review

Customer Reviews

Fascinating Story of Couple that Changed How We View Sex
I'm old enough to remember hearing the names Masters & Johnson when I was a teen, but too young to really understand how this couple dragged Americans into the sexual revolution. But being a sex therapist, I was very interested in learning more about the legacy of this couple. The author did a good job of bringing them to life--and what a strange life it was. In a way, the book brings up more questions than answers. But I think that's okay, as no one can ever really understand another couple's marriage from the outside. The author also did a good job of describing research about sex in a way that was non-titillating. I enjoyed this book.

Translating "Porn" into Science
Trained as a sex therapist by Masters and Johnson, having served on staff at their clinic and, as the only African American so trained, I
learned a lot about Masters and Johnson from Maier's well documented book. I learned of sea-changes that took place after I had left their clinic. Maier traces the fissure in their relationship, following through on a period of retrenchment on certain ethical stands they had taken earlier in their career, losing each other's trust in the process and, eventually going their separate ways. Maier never loses sight of the human element as he sketches their personal stories on a broad canvass - starting with an American psycho-socio-political backdrop in flux; from a period in time when nudity was equated with pornography to recognition of the pioneer work of M&J in documenting the human sexual response cycle - to their two-week course of treatment (sex therapy) for sexual dysfunction and disorders.

Lots of info about a fascinating couple
I agreed to review the book because I'm interested in both psychology and biography, and Masters of Sex combines the topics.

Masters of Sex is extremely well-written and easy to follow. It's meticulously researched - apparently the definitive biography of a pair of iconic researchers.

I'm not surprised that reviewers seem to be drawn from the community of psychology, specially sex therapists. The book will have greatest appeal to specialists who will enjoy getting detailed background on research they have studied academically.

They may also speculate on the ironies related to the research. Masters apparently epitomized the cliche of the cold fish. Johnson was warm but she was also lucky; she apparently became involved almost by accident, assuming an integral role over the years. She was in the right place at the right time. A professional woman at the clinic suggested that Virginia Johnson might feel defensive because she lacked training and professional degrees.

As a lay person, reading out of recreational rather than professional interest, I found the book excellent but somewhat overwhelming. The book is rather long: almost 400 pages with detailed quotes to support every point. The book goes into great depth to tell two stories: the troubled relationship of Masters and Johnson and the introduction of these formerly taboo topics into mainstream culture. I can see this book as part of required reading for courses in topics like Sociology of Sex...courses that wouldn't exist if this decidedly odd couple hadn't paved the way.