Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love by Thomas Maier (review)

Since Paul Robinson’s pivotal but now dated Modernization of Sex, interest in Alfred Kinsey has eclipsed that in William Masters and Virginia Johnson.¹ Kinsey’s 1948 and 1953 reports on human sexual behavior enter historical narratives as landmarks in the sexual revolution and queer visibility. Kinsey himself arouses perpetual interest; castigated by Andrea Dworkin, applauded by Thomas Waugh, and even played on film by Liam Neeson, the Indiana entomologist turned sex researcher has taken on symbolic value as a sort of American sexual Prometheus.

Memory has been less kind to Masters and Johnson, and they bear a fair portion of the blame. They amassed no massive historical sex archive to keep their names afloat to historians. Their landmark Human Sexual Response is turgidly written, with key findings disputed at best.² In contrast to Kinsey’s counternormative rejection of antigay moralizing, they willingly and foolishly enlisted in misguided sexual-conversion endorsements and AIDS-era fear mongering that continue to sully their reputations.

None of this has inspired historians to come calling, and it is thus left to biographer Thomas Maier to excavate the Masters and Johnson story. From the subtitle’s awkward claim of their having “taught America how to love” through the loose reference style, it is clear this is not a formal scholarly endeavor. Yet Maier has accessed new sources, including interviews and internal documents from their clinic, and historians will want to read this for the information if not always the analysis.

While scholars and lovers of good prose may wince at an opening tale in which “two teens lost their innocence,” Maier effectively reconstructs the lives of both the rambunctious Johnson, who openly “enjoyed sex” despite initially lacking a lexicon to articulate her desires, and the more reserved Masters, as clinical in his personal relations as in his work in obstetrics and gynecology (4, 17). On matters of methodology, Maier says little that supersedes Janice Irvine’s analysis of scientific sexology in Disorders of Desire.³ He does, however, carefully excavate the bureaucratic maneuvering that made it possible for Masters to begin observing prostitutes having sex not just in socially conservative St. Louis but in cities across the nation in the 1950s. Through extralegal arrangements with police, Masters was able to move beyond the Kinsey-style interview-based data collection he found unsatisfying. By cultivating an influential set of backers, partly based on personal debts incurred through his medical practice, Masters ensured a long press blackout in St. Louis, as well as the anxious but quiet support of his home institution at Washington University. Even a liberal Catholic archbishop gave tacit approval for his work.

Maier wisely credits the women in Masters’s observations with much input into his conclusions, from prostitutes’ learned techniques with johns to the young woman who explained faked female orgasms to the befuddled doctor. Masters eventually abandoned his prostitute studies as unrepresentative. That Maier offers no discussion on the racial dynamics of these fascinating, and troubling, exchanges is a disappointment for readers hoping to situate such underdocumented early efforts among the various vectors of gendered and racialized exploitation upon which the modern sexological project frequently hinges.

Of greater analytic salience is Maier’s discussion of the perverse relationship between Johnson and Masters. Imbalanced from the start, with the tenured, credentialed Masters hiring the degreeless Johnson for partially cosmetic purposes, the Masters and Johnson team ultimately morphed into a more egalitarian partnership, with Johnson bringing formative ideas to the duo’s clinical practice. Yet Maier burrows into the interpersonal dynamics that led to marriage (and later divorce), uncovering the coercive beginnings of their sexual relationship as a workplace expectation by Masters, devoid of substantive mutual consent. While Masters rationalized it then and later as consensual, Johnson in interviews with the author offered greater clarity, explaining...