Virginia Johnson, Widely Published Collaborator in Sex Research, Dies at 88
George Tames/The New York Times
Sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson interviewed a couple at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis in 1969.
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: July 25, 2013 21 Comments
Virginia E. Johnson, a writer, researcher and sex therapist who with her longtime collaborator, William H. Masters, helped make the frank discussion of sex in postwar America possible if not downright acceptable, died on Wednesday in St. Louis. She was 88.
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Her son, Scott Johnson, confirmed the death.
Dr. Masters was a gynecologist on the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis when he began his research into human sexuality in the mid-1950s. Ms. Johnson, who joined him in 1957 after answering an advertisement for an assistant, worked alongside him for more than three decades. She was variously his research associate, wife and former wife.
The collaborators burst into public consciousness with their first book, a clinical tome titled “Human Sexual Response.” All about sensation, it created precisely that when it was published by Little, Brown in 1966. Although Masters and Johnson deliberately wrote the book in dry, clinical language to pre-empt mass titillation, their subject — the physiology of sex — was unheard-of in its day.
The book made Masters and Johnson an institution in American popular culture. They were interviewed widely in the news media, wrote for popular magazines including Playboy and Redbook, and on more than one occasion caused heated public controversy. Their work was discussed in rapt half-whispers at suburban cocktail parties and even inspired a band, Human Sexual Response, a Boston-based New Wave group of the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Their other books, also published by Little, Brown, include “Human Sexual Inadequacy” (1970); “The Pleasure Bond: A New Look at Sexuality and Commitment” (1974, with Robert J. Levin); “Human Sexuality” (1982, with Robert C. Kolodny); and “Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving” (1986, with Dr. Kolodny).
The couple’s work was therapeutic as well as scientific. The medical establishment had long treated sexual dysfunctions psychoanalytically, but Masters and Johnson took a more physical approach. They were credited with helping thousands of men with impotence and premature ejaculation, and thousands of women with difficulty in achieving orgasm, among other problems. In doing so, they helped establish the field of modern sex therapy, training a generation of therapists throughout the country.
The couple’s research corrected many longstanding scientific misconceptions and overturned age-old cultural taboos. Much as the biologist Alfred C. Kinsey had paved the way for Masters and Johnson with his reports on human sexuality in the 1940s and early ’50s, Masters and Johnson in turn helped make possible the mainstream careers of later authorities like Alex Comfort, the author of “The Joy of Sex” (1972), and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
It was an index of just how much their work had been accepted, Masters and Johnson told The Washington Post in 1978, that Johnny Carson had not made a single joke about them in the previous two years.
More than any investigator before them, Masters and Johnson moved sex out of the bedroom and into the laboratory, where it could be observed, measured, recorded, quantified and compared. While Kinsey had relied on interviews and questionnaires to elicit accounts of his subjects’ sexual habits, Masters and Johnson gathered direct physiological data on what happens to the human body during sex, from arousal to orgasm.
Working with an initial group of 694 volunteers — 382 men and 312 women — Masters and Johnson hooked subjects up to instruments that recorded heart rate, brain activity and metabolism as they copulated or masturbated. Using a tiny camera placed in an artificial phallus, they were able to capture direct evidence, previously unseen, of what happens inside the vagina during female sexual arousal.
Among their findings were these:
■ Contrary to popular belief, there was absolutely no difference between a vaginal orgasm (the good kind, according to Freud) and a clitoral orgasm (the bad kind).
■ The length of a man’s penis has no bearing on his ability to satisfy his partner.
■ For elderly people, a group long considered sexually demure if not altogether chaste, vigorous sexual activity was not only possible but normal.
Virginia Johnson, Widely Published Collaborator in Sex Research, Dies at 88
Published: July 25, 2013 21 Comments
Ms. Johnson was often described in news articles as a psychologist, although in fact she never finished college. When Dr. Masters hired her, she was a divorced mother of two who had been a country singer, psychology student and writer. But as he often said, Ms. Johnson was precisely what he was looking for: an intelligent, mature woman who could help put his female subjects at ease.
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Mary Virginia Eshelman was born in Springfield, Mo., on Feb. 11, 1925. An accomplished pianist and mezzo-soprano as a young woman, she performed country music under the name Virginia Gibson on a Springfield radio station, KWTO. She studied at Drury College in Springfield and the Kansas City Conservatory of Music and was later a business writer for The St. Louis Daily Record.
As Ms. Johnson said in interviews, she was raised to believe that a woman’s goal was marriage, and she took the injunction to heart. When she was very young, she married a Missouri politician; the marriage lasted two days. She later wed a lawyer many years her senior; that marriage also ended in divorce. In 1950, she married George Johnson, a bandleader, with whom she had two children. The couple were divorced in 1956.
Besides her son, Scott, Ms. Johnson’s survivors include a daughter, Lisa Young, and two grandchildren.
At their organization in St. Louis — originally known as the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation — Ms. Johnson was mainly responsible for administration while Dr. Masters oversaw the science. In 1978, the organization was renamed the Masters & Johnson Institute, with Ms. Johnson as a co-director.
Although many reviewers praised their work over the years, it was not always well received. Their book “Homosexuality in Perspective” (1979) was criticized by both opponents and proponents of gay rights. Opponents condemned the book for its assertion that gay men and lesbians were just as entitled as straight people to have their sexual problems treated. Proponents were angered because the range of treatments Masters and Johnson provided included therapy to “cure” gay people who said they wanted to be straight.
The couple’s most controversial book was “Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS” (Grove Press, 1988), written with Dr. Kolodny. It argued that the virus that causes AIDS was “now running rampant in the heterosexual community” and would continue attacking the straight population “at a frightening pace.” It also suggested that the virus could be contracted through casual contact with things like contaminated contact lenses or food prepared by an infected restaurant worker.
The book touched off an uproar. The authors were widely criticized for its basic premise and alarmist language. They were also taken to task for not having first submitted their findings for peer review, the custom for scientific literature. C. Everett Koop, then the surgeon general, publicly called the book “irresponsible” and accused the authors of using “scare tactics.” In interviews, the authors defended their conclusions.
For much of their 35-year collaboration, Dr. Masters’s and Ms. Johnson’s personal lives were intertwined. In 1971, they were married in a private ceremony. (Dr. Masters had been married once before.) They divorced amicably in 1993, citing the inability to reconcile his relentless workaholism with her more sociable temperament.
Dr. Masters, who later married again, closed the institute in 1994. He died in 2001. In the late 1990s, Ms. Johnson started and ran the Virginia Johnson Masters Learning Center, in Creve Coeur, Mo., near St. Louis; the center provided audiocassettes and literature about overcoming sexual dysfunctions.
During their marriage, Dr. Masters and Ms. Johnson were often asked what helped keep things harmonious between them. Their reply was simple: there was one subject, they said, that they almost never discussed at home.
The subject was politics.
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