http://www.newsweek.com/2009/04/18/sexual-masters-of-the-universe.html
Bill Masters may have been the 20th century’s most unlikely romantic. Bald, thin-lipped, stocky and bow-tied, with a white shirt, white ballpoint pen and starched white lab coat, the brusque St. Louis Ob-Gyn appeared almost antiseptic in person, and his milky, wandering left eye convinced most acquaintances that he was as cold and clinical as he looked. Then there was his day job. As the driving force behind Masters and Johnson, the biggest brand in postwar sex research, Masters spent 40 years exploring the physiology of coitus, often with the help of a vibrating optical dildo called Ulysses—hardly the most sentimental of occupations. Least amorous of all, though, may have been Masters’s love life. In the late ’50s, he persuaded partner Virginia Johnson to have sex with him, but only, he explained, “as a way of further comprehending all that they were learning through [laboratory] observation”; they remained together for more than a decade of extracurricular experimentation and, beginning in 1971, an additional 22 years of marriage, even though they “weren’t emotionally tied at all,” as Johnson later confessed. All of which is just to say that Masters wasn’t the sort of sap you’d expect suddenly to announce, at the tender age of 76, that he was leaving Johnson to marry a recently widowed blonde named Dody Oliver whom he’d privately considered the “love of his life” since 1938, when they dated for a single summer. Except that on Christmas Eve 1992, that’s exactly what he did. “I carried a torch for her for 55 years,” Masters explained, giddy as a schoolboy.
The story of Masters’s secret sweetheart isn’t the only scoop in Thomas Maier’s exhaustive new dual biography, “Masters of Sex.” (We learn, for example, that Masters probably fabricated case studies to support the “gay conversion” therapy advocated in the couple’s third book, “Homosexuality in Perspective.”) But for a reader like me, who’s young enough, at 26, to look back and wonder what exactly the beaded, bearded, braless sexual revolution has to do with America’s current attitudes toward copulation, it may be the most revealing. As the story of Masters and Johnson makes clear, rescuing sex from the ancient mists of myth, mystery and religiosity left America a happier and healthier place. And yet Maier’s book—appearing in the midst of a minor Aquarian revival that includes a new edition of Gay Talese’s “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” and screenings last week in New York of “Carnal Knowledge” and “The Graduate” at the Museum of Modern Art’s ongoing Mike Nichols retrospective—also suggests that our subsequent attempts to liberate sexual pleasure from the grip of fusty, old-fashioned love had much the opposite effect. Not every hang-up, it seems, should come unhung.
When Masters and Johnson began their research in 1957—they’d eventually observe an estimated 14,000 live orgasms—America’s carnal knowledge was largely limited to the local priest’s preachings on the subject, plus the occasional pinch of Freud or Kinsey. With the publication of “Human Sexual Response” in 1966 and “Human Sexual Inadequacy” four years later, however, the nation finally had a chance to learn the fundamentals of fornication: women can be multiorgasmic; intercourse may continue well into one’s 80s; clitoral orgasms are hardly inferior to their vaginal counterparts; and so forth. The results, of course, were revolutionary, especially for women, and as Maier notes, the vast majority of couples benefited from Masters and Johnson’s therapeutic touch. But despite its necessity, the revolution they unleashed led some libertines to view the bedroom as little more than a lab—a place, in short, where sex needn’t be more than a pleasurable “mutual masturbation exercise,” as Masters himself once put it. Which is when people started getting screwed.