Showtime series "Masters of Sex" follows researchers—and lovers—William Masters and Virginia Johnson as they study America's sex life.
We got saddled with the strict Puritan heritage, branded into the mind of every high school student in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s grim portrait of the consequences of extramarital sex, The Scarlet Letter. The Puritans threatened anyone getting busy outside of marriage with hellfire, but even they weren’t as bad as the Roman Catholics of the time, who thought sex of any kind was sinful.
By the time the Victorian era rolled around, Puritan restrictions began to buckle as our friend Mr. Vulcanized Rubber Condom hit the scene, and a Viennese doctor named Freud looked at his neurotic patients and wondered if nookie might be the root of the trouble. The Roaring Twenties brought shockingly short skirts and sultry dances, but when the Great Depression struck, some blamed the calamity on all the sexytime of the previous decade. Things quickly buttoned back up: Hollywood got the prudish Hays Code, and sex retreated in shame.
But all was not lost. A new breed of social researcher would fight to pry sexuality back out of the closet. Promoting the radical idea that human sex deserved serious study, Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed thousands of Americans about their bedroom activities in the 1930s and '40s, producing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. The research was greeted with high dudgeon when it revealed, among other things, that over a third of all males had had a sexual encounter with a dude and that over a quarter of wives cheated.
Fertility specialist William H. Masters, a church-going Episcopalian and a registered Republican, picked up where Kinsey left off. Kinsey was more of a data guy, whereas Masters was a clinician who wanted to treat patients who came to his office suffering from sexual ills. Masters helped banish many of the taboos and fears that were behind all kinds of sexual failure and was rewarded with an enviable obituary in the New York Times: he was described as the person who “revolutionized the way sex is studied, taught and enjoyed in America.”
A new series on Showtime, " Masters of Sex" (premiered September 29), based on the book Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love, follows the great researcher and his partner in sex investigation, former nightclub singer Virginia Johnson, as they struggle to answer a deceptively simple question: "What happens to the body during sex?"
http://www.alternet.org/sex=relationships/masters-sex for more on this story...
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