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

Author:Thomas Maier [Maier, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Psychology, Science, General, Adult, Human Sexuality, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781597772518
Google: 3YXtAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 6320234
Publisher: Phoenix Audio
Published: 2009-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

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PHASE FOUR

Masters and Johnson featured

on Meet the Press

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Feminist Movement

“In the years between the ‘emancipation’ of women won by the feminists and the sexual counterrevolution of the feminine mystique, American women enjoyed a decade-by-decade increase in sexual orgasm. And the women who enjoyed this the most fully were, above all, the women who were educated for active participation in the world outside the home.”

—Betty Friedan, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

At the surprise engagement party for Doris McKee, friends and colleagues stood in hushed silence, waiting for the guest of honor to arrive. On this balmy October day, nearly every woman employed at the Masters and Johnson clinic gathered to honor McKee, a friendly, conscientious secretary who kept the tape recordings of each session the team conducted. Rose Boyarsky, a new therapist, hosted the poolside party at her house near Washington University and invited all of the clinic’s female staff, including their boss, Virginia Johnson.

With the sexual revolution in full swing by the 1970s, female staffers at the Masters and Johnson clinic were in the front lines of the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Feminists embraced their transformative findings, proclaiming women were every bit as sexual as any man and entitled to the same freedoms and equality in a male-dominated culture. Television, newspapers, and magazines covering these sweeping social changes credited Masters and Johnson for bringing the sexual revolution to suburban malls and the everyday lives of Americans.

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Masters of Sex

As Doris walked into the backyard with her new fiancé, everyone clapped and toasted. Howard, her future husband, remembered the jovial atmosphere, with provocative jokes that resembled a bachelor party, especially one particular artifact. “At the buffet table, there was a lovely bouquet of flowers,” Howard recalled,

“and in the center of it was the plastic penis that had been attached to the camera when the foundation was doing the survey of female orgasm!”

The totem-like quality of the mechanical dildo wasn’t lost on anyone familiar with Masters and Johnson’s research. The “artificial coital equipment,” as the researchers called it, was one of the most startling aspects of the team’s sex study. While conservatives expressed horror that such a contrivance would be used to define and defile human intimacy, leading feminists suggested something even more frightening—the irrelevancy of men in sexual satisfaction. These implications extended beyond what Masters and Johnson intended in their two books. “Masters and Johnson crafted an account of female sexuality that inadvertently threw into question the pervasive understanding of heterosexuality as innate and fully satisfied through intercourse with a penis,” observed cultural historian Jane Gerhard in 2000. “They, like the Freudians before them, had ‘discovered’ a female sexuality that existed independently from intercourse with men.” To many feminists, the mechanical device—with its electrical horsepower undiminished by a refractory period—symbolized the supremacy of women during sex compared to men. Scientific findings about the clitoris—debunking Freudian myth

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