Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love [Hardcover]

Thomas Maier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2009

In Masters of Sex, critically acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier offers an unprecedented look at William Masters and Virginia Johnson, their pioneering studies of intimacy, and the sexual revolution they inspired. Masters and Johnson began their secret studies in a small Midwest laboratory, and soon became the nation’s top experts on sex. Over the course of more than forty years, they analyzed and explained the secrets of orgasm, emotional fulfillment, and sexual dysfunction. But they divorced after twenty years amid a clash of success, betrayal, and jealousies.

Weaving interviews with the notoriously private William Masters and the ambitious Virginia Johnson, Maier offers a titillating portrait of the legendary couple. Entertaining, revealing, and beautifully told, this groundbreaking book sheds light on the eternal mysteries of desire and intimacy, and their complicated roles in the American psyche.

Editorial Reviews

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 Based on interviews, Masters’ unpublished memoir, and clinic documents, Maier’s book offers a wonderfully written and totally absorbing look at an amazing couple.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

Nelson DeMille, bestselling author of The Gold Coast and The Gate House
“The subject of this book—sex and love—should interest just about everyone. As a bonus, Thomas Maier is a very fine writer, an accomplished biographer, and an astute reporter. If you read only one biography this year, it should be this first-ever look at the secretive lives of Masters and Johnson.”

Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife and A Writer’s Life
“A well-written and insightful account of Masters and Johnson, who, in a clinical sense, probably knew more about sex and marital love than any other couple in America”

Debby Applegate, Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
“Masters of Sex is a terrific book about the unlikely couple who touched off the sexual revolution. More than a biography, this is an intimate history of sex in the twentieth-century.”

Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer
“No novelist could come up with something as remarkable as the real life story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the married experts giving advice to America on sex and love. With insightful reporting and writing, Thomas Maier has captured this extraordinary relationship between these male and female sex researchers, a legacy that transformed the way couples live today.”

Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D., Past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and author of Prime: Adventures and Advice About Sex, Love and the Sensual Years
“It’s hard to imagine any sex researcher or serious student of sexuality who wouldn’t profit from reading this book. The information revealed in Masters of Sex has never surfaced before—and besides being a real contribution to the history of science, it’s a totally captivating read!”

Hugh Hefner, editor in chief, Playboy magazine
“Thomas Maier has written the intimate, engaging biography that Masters and Johnson deserve. Critics often accused the pair of ‘dehumanizing’ sex with their research—of removing its mystery. But as Gini Johnson told Playboy in 1968, mystery is just another name for superstition and myth. The more we know about the physiology of arousal, the better we can enjoy the uniquely human experience of sex for pleasure. Masters and Johnson showed tremendous courage in their research.”

Booklist (starred review)
“A wonderfully written and totally absorbing look at an amazing couple.”

O, The Oprah Magazine
“Perhaps influenced by its steamy subject matter, Masters of Sex…may strike some readers as unusually graphic for a biography, but this unsettling story of sex and science in theory and practice is ultimately more cautionary than titillating.”

Library Journal Online
“Award-winning biographer Maier…delivers the first in-depth look at a complex couple who helped revolutionize the study of human sexual response. Academics and amateur sexperts alike will rejoice.”

Discover magazine
“Maier’s illuminating biography delves into the lives of the couple that started science’s sexual revolution.”

The American Prospect
“Absorbing…Masters of Sex is this spring's true must-read book for those looking to revisit the heady, early days of the sexual revolution.”

The Economist
“If there is a moral to this tale, it is perhaps that the human heart remains as much of a mystery as the sex organs once used to be.”

The Daily Beast
“Sedulously researched and deeply absorbing…Masters of Sex is a richly informed and elegantly organized account of the two people behind the logo that stood for new sexual horizons.”

The Buffalo News
“Writing a readable but serious biography of Masters and Johnson was no easy task. The natural impulse is to drain such passionate clinicality of personality and leave a hollow crusade in its place. Maier’s book resists it constantly. It’s about heroes and flaws and a couple of people whose lives underlay a good half of what we know for sure about what we all think we know so much.”

New York Times Book Review
“A bombshell…eye-opening.”

New York Times
“Told with patience and care...Maier writes well, and with humor.”

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Edition edition (April 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465003079
• ISBN-13: 978-0465003075
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,231,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

America in our times is the backdrop for my four biographies, all of which have been singled out by critics for their best-of-the-year honors. The latest, "Masters of Sex" is now a Showtime television series starring Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan along with an updated version of my book of the same name based on the lives of Masters and Johnson. (On Amazon, make sure to look for the new book edition with the cover featuring actors Sheen and Caplan and the Showtime mention).
Now out in paperback and Kindle, "Masters of Sex", Basic Books, was called "eye-opening" and "a bombshell" by the Sunday New York Times Book Review and "well written with good humor" by the NY Times daily reviewer Dwight Garner, when first published as a hardcover in 2009. The Washington Post called it "an intelligent and well-conceived biography", along with a starred review by Booklist. The Chicago Tribune listed it among the paper's favorite non-fiction books of 2009. [Oprah's "O" magazine even cited it among its top 10 "smart, engaging, occasionally uproarious" books dealing with sex]. This first-time biography of Masters and Johnson also received "blurb" endorsements from Gay Talese, Nelson DeMille and biographer Debby Applegate, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
"The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings" (Basic Books, 2003) was featured on ABC's "20/20" program, the CBS Evening News, NBC's "Today" show and in publications around the world. "The Kennedys" was praised as one of the top 10 all-time JFK books by the American Booksellers Association's "Book Sense" program. It was featured prominently as annual holiday choice by USA Today's literary critics. It was also a selection of the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club, excerpted in Redbook and received "blurb" endorsements from historians James MacGregor Burns, Ronald Steel and Newsweek's Evan Thomas. The unabridged audiotape version of "The Kennedys" also won the Earphone Award from Audiofile magazine. Warners Bros. Home Video produced a DVD documentary from my book with the same name that was sold in 2008 along with Oliver Stone's classic movie feature "JFK".
"Dr. Spock An American Life" (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1998), was selected as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 1998 by The Boston Globe and as a "Notable Book of the Year" by The New York Times. Excerpts appeared in Newsweek, U.S News and World Report and it was condensed as a Readers' Digest book. I also appeared on NBC's "Today" show, C-Span's "BookTV," and served as consultant and on-air commentator for a documentary about Dr. Spock's life, jointly produced by the BBC and A&E's "Biography." A paperback version was published in spring 2003 by Basic Books to mark Dr. Spock's 100th birthday. Filmmaker Susanna Styron, daughter of novelist William Styron and a teacher at Columbia's film school, bought the rights to this book with her production company.
"Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power and Glory of America's Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It," (St. Martin's Press, 1994) won the Frank Luther Mott Award by the National Honor Society in Journalism and Mass Communication as best media book of the year. Excerpts appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Worth, and The London Telegraph magazine. An updated trade paperback of "Newhouse," published by Johnson Books, was picked by Entertainment Weekly as one of the top ten "must reads" for the 1997 summer season.
Since 1984, I've been a writer for Newsday in New York, previously working at the Chicago Sun-Times. In 2002, I won the world's top $20,000 investigative prize from the International Consortium of Investigative Reporting, now called the "Daniel Pearl Award", for a series about the deadly exploitation of immigrant workers. Others investigative series of mine have won the national Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award, the national Worth Bingham Award, National Headliners Award, New York Deadline Club, Society of Silurians and many others. I earned a master's degree in 1982 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where I won the television documentary prize at graduation. and was later awarded a McCloy fellowship to Europe.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about sex, not love March 30, 2010

By S. J. Snyder VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Clearly, as Thomas Maier shows, that was the case in the marriage of William Masters and Virginia Johnson. It's not just that a quasi-forcible sexual relationship devolved into a quasi-loveless marriage. It's that Gini Johnson, for all her sexuality, never thought of looking outside the marriage, apparently. It's that Bill Masters apparently, until his end-of-life marriage to a college flame, couldn't be with a woman unless he could dominate her.

In a sense, they both, despite their groundbreaking research on sexuality, come off as old-fashioned, not on morals, but on personal psychology. With Masters, I think that "informed" some of his unscientific work on homosexuality. With Johnson, I think it was behind her refusal to get involved with feminism.

Anyway, if you don't want to accept just my judgment for this, Maier presents a full dual biography of both sex researchers, back to their childhoods, and what from that may have made them tick the way they did as adults.

I do have a bone to pick, though, with either him or his publisher, per the title of my review and the subtitle of the book. Masters and Johnson, while encouraging Americans to be more comfortable about their sexuality, only taught Americans indirectly how to love. They may have taught them how to "make love," but that's different.

And, you can see that in Maier's book, too.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Shakespearean Tragedy March 30, 2010

By S. M Marson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

While a graduate student at Ohio State, I was pursuing the path of becoming a sex therapist. As part of that, I attended a workshop sponsored by Masters and Johnson in Chicago. Prior to the workshop in Chicago, I met them at Ohio State. I was profoundly impressed with their insight and therapeutic skills. Within the literature, there have been so many false conjectures regarding their work; it is difficult to sort out reality from false rumor. Because of a series of letters I have in my files, I have concluded that the major events described in this biography are accurate.

The biography is packed with two profound paradoxes that should have a major impact the development, testing and construction of social science theory - but probably won't - we tend to make the same mistakes in our history rather than learning from our errors.

First, in my academic background I found theory construction be to paradoxical. In theory construction, we learned that devotion to a theory produces a blinder that can prohibit the researcher from identifying more meaningful explanations. In quantitative research, we are taught to begin with a hypothesis that emerges from a theory to avoid "type I errors." Masters was trained in traditional quantitative science and his world view was contaminated by theory (particularly Freudian theory). Because of her lack of formal education, Johnson (probably with greater innate intelligence than Masters) had NO academic world view. Her vision of sexology has no theoretical limitations. She was able to envision sexuality in a manner that was theoretically unparalleled. She, with the assistance of Masters's knowledge of science, was able to institute a major paradigm shift in sexology. Johnson's lack of academic training enabled her to guide Masters to employ his academic creditability to reshape our thinking. It is ironic that the chauvinism from the 1940's (which denied Johnson educational opportunities) was the catalyst for our current world view of sexuality.

Second, the relationship that created the emotional/intellectual bond between Masters and Johnson built AND destroyed our sexuality knowledge base. Both Masters and Johnson were victims of unrequited love. As a consequence, their bond was a marriage of convenience. At age 76, Masters divorced Johnson to marry his childhood sweetheart, while Johnson's desires were smashed by the death of her young love. Masters emotional betrayal of Johnson became the catalyst for the major intellectual tragedy of the 20th century - Johnson destroyed decades of unpublished cutting edge research. The sexology community was devastated.

The entire book is reminiscent of the Shakespearean Tragedy

Footnotes:
1) I never liked talking to Masters. Although he had a kind and gentle voice, his eyes were sterile and piercing. I never understood how he could be a GREAT therapist. Here again Johnson saved him. Unknown to most people, he had an eye disorder that produced the piercing characteristic. According to the author, he had it surgically altered - but never was able to achieve an emphatic expression.

2) Maier addressed the famous article in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. After I read this article, I immediately wrote Clive Davis the editor of THE JOURNAL OF SEX RESEARCH and insisted that he ask Masters and Johnson to write a rebuttal. In the next issue of JSR, Kolodny provided the scientific rebuttal. For the past 30 years, I have been using this material as an example of external validity.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Story of Couple that Changed How We View Sex July 23, 2009

By Dr. Stephanie Buehler

Format:Hardcover

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.