Sunday Review: Masters of Sex (TV series)

Actually slaves to love

By Jonathan Price

The season of sex has ended on Showtime. I mean of course, the series Masters of Sex, which I reluctantly got hooked on because it kept being advertised when I tried to tune in to Homeland. I had trivialized it and dismissed it from my gallery of pleasures as a knockoff of a popular book on a popular topic, sex, with all the limited appeal of a soap opera, but it is far better than that. And now you can binge on it if you get hooked, seeing it for peanuts on “On Demand” or on DVDs or by download from Netflix or another source.

    It turns out that Masters of Sex (2013) is a soap opera, with immense appeal, and its alleged topic—sex—is merely the attraction for a very sensitive and humane rendering of a number of individuals from the late 1950s: Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) and the attendant crew of significant others, hangers on, medical school associates, lovers, and prostitutes.
    Though the central two characters—eponymous authors of one of the two most famous studies of human sexuality in (American?) history, the other being Alfred Kinsey, the subject of the 2004 film Kinsey with Liam Neeson—are clinically and analytically studying the sex act, the drama is actually about human personality, love, ambition, and all the entangling relationships that result from their study. We learn precious little about the study’s observations and conclusions. We see a lot of its methods—wires and electrodes, artificial sexual apparatuses that are also movie cameras, the initial interviews with participants revealing personal and sexual details. For example, comically and pathetically and tragically with one late participant, the Provost’s wife, who says she is not sure she has ever had an orgasm. But Virginia Johnson assures her she would have known. We learn, for example, that women can reach orgasms clitorally, on their own; that sex has three stages; that women often have multiple orgasms; that the size of a man’s penis is virtually irrelevant.
    In fact, very few of these seem particularly remarkable or startling today. For me at least, one of the most startling revelations (at least as transposed by drama) was the attraction, intelligence, and overall importance of Virginia Johnson, the second half of the famed Masters and Johnson team that for years became synonymous with sex research and punctuated the headlines with revelations and eventually its famed clinic for those with sexual difficulties, and even earned a joke in a Woody Allen film.

Michael Sheen & Lizzy Caplan

But the TV series is set several years before their fame and many years before their clinic, when things were just getting started at the Washington University medical school in St. Louis, where Masters taught and practiced essentially obstetrics, and then branched into sex research. Johnson enters as a lowly secretary-factotum, at first jobless and in need of direction. She doesn’t even have a college degree, but has two children, and has been twice married and twice divorced.
    Not a great resume, it would seem, but it hides her ambition to do something with her life, to contribute in a public or private way, and especially hides initially her winning compassion and understanding. Without credentials, without even any standing at first, it turns out that Johnson knows, feels, understands, intuits, more about sexuality and men and women than just about anyone who crosses the screen. Eventually she manages to win over just about everyone, from her boss, and ultimately co-researcher and co-participant, Masters, to another gynecologist at the hospital, to Masters’s wife, to the only female gynecologist on the staff, who initially appears frosty and arrogant (for she has earned a degree and Johnson seems merely a clerk with too much authority), to—I suspect—most viewers.
    Perhaps Johnson’s appeal is best acknowledged by the script when this season’s finale climaxes with the initial failure of the study, dismissed by the puritanical responses of the male powers at the university after seeing some of its visual fruits (naked women experience orgasm, the interior of a shuddering vagina); Johnson emerges with two proposals of marriage almost simultaneously.

Another surprise is that despite all the sex going on and despite the intensity of the Masters-Johnson study itself, the basic subject matter of the series is essentially love and human emotion, or perhaps how sex often disguises or overlays love in various ways. Sure, there are a certain number of naked bodies—more female than male for the most part, and pretty much a guaranteed two-pairs-of-naked-breasts episode. But ultimately we are more interested in what people are thinking and feeling than in what their private parts are doing.
    Because it puts feeling and people first and suggests a perhaps detached, amoral attitude toward sex, there are essentially no heroes and no villains, and, as in the greatest literature, everyone is understood on his or her own terms, and given a full residue of humanity and our sympathy. I continue by citing but a few of the many ways in which the series provides perhaps unexpected sympathy and understanding, not only to under-represented groups (gays), but also to those often maligned or misunderstood via sexual politics or morality.

Julie Christie

    Take for example prostitutes. Though society generally frowns on prostitutes and treats them with disdain—though no society apparently can do without them and they are colloquially ranked the world’s oldest profession—there are certainly some prominent literary prostitutes who have been accorded degrees of sympathy. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is a kind of prostitute, and because she is a version of Dreiser’s own sister, he and we have sympathy for her. And Mrs. Miller in Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) is a prostitute. But played expertly by Julie Christie, she emerges as the smartest and most perceptive person in the Western town where the film is set, and is in some ways kind to her lover and partner and customer McCabe (Warren Beatty): but she is a victim too, doomed at the end to a life of opium addiction and apparent poverty.
    The prostitutes in Masters of Sex are the first local experts that Masters, a bit unknowingly, taps. After all, after he is temporarily exiled from the hospital grounds for research, he can find ready subjects among the prostitutes and some of their customers, for he is willing to pay. One of his methods of payment is offering free medical care. Because, with familiarity and intimacy and a business deal, they are often willing to be frank and factual, he learns from them; he learns that one of them who is responding enthusiastically and convincingly to his Ulysses (so named) artificial phallus is actually faking an orgasm—as she always has. Dr. Masters wonders aloud why she would do this, but Virginia Johnson knows and explains intuitively.
    The prostitutes are direct, and one in particular who is embarrassed to learn that her self-perceived deterioration is actually simply the lack of eyeglasses is direct in communicating her gratitude. The head prostitute, a kind of madam, clues the august doctor in that he should consult a woman (i.e., Johnson) who seems to know more about the whole process, emotion, and social interaction of sexuality. Later in the film, in a key scene, the wife (Allison Janney) of the medical school’s Provost Scully (Beau Bridges), who is frustrated and puzzled by her husband’s indifference and thinks he goes to a bar for assignations with prostitutes, goes to the bar herself and consults one. The Socratic discussion between the two of them leads the prostitute to conclude intuitively and correctly that Provost Scully is gay and has no sexual interest in Margaret.

Homosexuality, of course, is only a subtheme of such a study, and we learn that Masters doesn’t really understand it very well, even its precise choreography, when one of his subjects offers to demonstrate with a partner. In fact, the actual history of Masters-Johnson research dismissed homosexuality as an aberration and encouraged therapy for the condition. However, in the teleplay, there is a far more sympathetic and informed portrayal. Nevertheless Masters does blackmail the Provost, letting him know that Masters has learned through his research that homosexuals, not as he had understood them to be—roustabouts, ruffians, and hanging about dark corners—are actually represented among professionals, doctors, and college provosts.
    This threat allows Masters to continue his investigative project and receive funding, though it clearly creates a gulf between the two former friends. Nevertheless, Masters is quite helpful and sympathetic when he realizes Provost Scully has been the victim of a random beating by a paid male prostitute; and he offers a referral to what seems to be the only form of therapy available for gay men at that time (aversion therapy through electroshock and painful drugs). But Masters still has sympathy for his friend and finds this approach dubious. The Provost’s wife (Margaret) is furious with her husband and hurt, when she finally discovers his sexual orientation—after many years of marriage—but he does love her, and he is willing to try the aversion therapy to “cure” his homosexuality and preserve his marriage. Still she cares for him enough not to want him to endure this. Besides, of course, we pretty much know this “cure” is not accepted by psychotherapists and has never been shown to work.

Teddy Sears

The series’ sensitivity and openness comes alive with its surprising support for an apparent butt of moral opprobrium. Perhaps the potentially sleaziest character, by some standards of sexuality morality and melodrama, is Austin Langham (Teddy Sears) the handsome young doctor who enlists in the study because he likes promiscuous sex and he sees the Masters study as a convenient and socially approved way to pursue his passion, and keeps coming back because he is attracted to sex with the random partners they pare him with (and vice versa). He is allowed or even encouraged to be promiscuous under the guise of scientific research.
    As a presumed moral retribution to Dr. Langham, he experiences impotence. He is puzzled and worried, but decides the researchers (i.e., Masters and Johnson) have pared him randomly, not with his desired sex object, but some other woman, and so it’s their fault. They switch his study partner to the attractive blonde: still impotent. He goes to another doctor for help, but the attractive blonde informs him, perceptively, that the problem is in his brain, not his penis. Moreover, Dr. Langham is married with three children, and seems fairly indifferent to his wife (giving her a vacuum cleaner as a birthday present). But he does respond to Margaret Scully, who is years older and not superficially so attractive as the blonde, but he intuitively sympathizes with her dilemma, and they recognize each other’s vulnerabilities.
    Meanwhile, after an initial demurrer, Masters and Johnson agree to have sex regularly at night in the lab, with sensors and wires attached, under the rubric of research: and both inform each other breathlessly of the stages in sexual response and what they have learned scientifically: they get off on this kind of intimacy. Masters, married to a loving wife (Libby, played by Caitlin Fitzgerald) desperate to get pregnant, decides to sever his sexual relationship with Johnson when he is warned by his mother, whom he avoids and detests, of how much his father’s infidelity hurt her and hurt her marriage. In his callous, awkward, and clueless way, he decides to return to marital fidelity and end the quasi-affair; he dismisses Johnson by giving her an envelope with cash for her services to the study—by treating her like a prostitute. Because, after all, she cares for him and wants more than the sex, she is devastated.

From all this, Virginia Johnson emerges as the most sensitive, the most versatile, the most accomplished, the most sexually and humanly astute of all those involved. She didn’t have a college degree, she ended up unmarried and died in a rest home, and her portrayal in the television series may not always square with the historical and biographical reality, but she is still a powerful character. Though the study (i.e., Masters and Johnson and the university) had contractually limited liability to participants (for sexually transmitted diseases, for potential offspring, though all participants used condoms), as anyone familiar with the politics and statistics of human (and especially sexual) interaction knows, there would be mistakes, omissions, emissions. And one of them results in a pregnant participant who in indigent, needy, and whose partner (as Ms. Johnson knows) was economically far better off. Dr. Masters disavows any responsibility and instructs Virginia to go no further. But, human and humane, she does: she contacts the woman and gives her a subsidy from the project’s expense fund to support an abortion or whatever the mother chooses. When Anna Freud comes to the university to give a lecture and spouts her father’s dictum that vaginal orgasms are superior to clitoral ones, Virginia Johnson from personal experience and intuition demurs, and the scientific investigation proves her right.

So, what are we to make of all this? In a way, the series simply reveals and reiterates an age-old truth that comes in various forms, but simply that love and affection trump sexuality every time, though it often takes time for any individual to discover this. For all the clinical investigation that the scientific team indulges in, we learn primarily that they are still subject to their own human entanglements, that the surrounding society disapproves of overt sexual investigation, that the characters crave affection and respect along with the interaction of sexual parts.
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Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Price

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