[Music] from a lady this is biography [Music] to the blue Masters and Johnson when they began their work Americans were afraid to talk about sex and how we can't seem to shut up about we become a nation obsessed by sex it would seem talk show guests reveal their most intimate sexual problems magazine articles give tips on lovemaking techniques dr. Ruth advises how to achieve better orgasms the sexual openness we now take for granted is partly due to two researchers who later would become husband and wife William masters and Virginia Johnson they founded the field of sex therapy and turned human sexuality into a science their landmark book served as a handbook for the sexual revolution and turned a pair of unknown scientists Masters and Johnson international celebrities they were an unlikely pair of sexual revolutionaries William masters a gynecological surgeon and family man and Virginia Johnson a divorced mother of two with no training but the names Masters and Johnson became synonymous with sex the first couple of sex therapy pioneers in sex research they provided us the first real look at the nature of male and female physiological responses during the sex act there is no question that psychosexual therapy the way we know it today did not exist before them [Music] William Howell masters was born in 1915 a time when women's skirts were down to their ankles and men never went anywhere without a hat masters spent his early years in Cleveland the first son of a middle-class salesman and housewife as a boy masters was close to his mother but had a strained relationship with his father a man of violent temper so he may have welcomed being sent away to boarding school at 14 William masters spent his high school years at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey masters would later be known as a champion of female sexuality but according to his yearbook the teenager acted as if he disliked women bill is he claims a full-fledged misogynist but many are disinclined to believe this as the handwriting on some of his letters is that of a fair hand masters went on to Hamilton College in Clinton New York where he lettered in football and basketball baseball and track his athletic ability was fired by a fierce competitive spirit one that drove his later research and stiffened his backbone to the controversy and criticism he would face in later life masters would be known as a workaholic and that Hamilton in addition to sports he found time for the honor court the debate club and a fraternity on top of his studies here is the strange dark man with a future wrote the 1938 Hamilton senior yearbook has an easy time carrying three lab courses for the hard time catching up on lost sleep bill is a boy with a purpose and is bound to get what he is working for but Phil masters wasn't all work and no play at a fraternity open house freshman year he met a young woman named Elizabeth Packard Ellis a short time later they began dating and she became his steady girlfriend originally masters had planned to become an English teacher and won a fellowship to study at Cambridge University but with war looming in Europe studying in England didn't seem such a good idea masters had already spent a lot of time in the science labs at Hamilton so he decided to abandon English and go into medical research instead in 1939 masters entered the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry there he was able to work in the laboratory of a leading anatomist dr. George Washington corner would later become famous for his pioneering work with reproductive hormones he also published two small sex education manuals for boys and girls corner remembered masters as a very serious and intelligent young man of more independent character than many he fought the first year medical student to work on research projects in his laboratory Masters was inspired by dr. Korner and by the time he graduated in 1942 masters had decided on his life's work research into sex at the time there really was no such field and dr. Korner warned masters of the consequences of his decision Georgie's trying to tell me that I was committing professional suicide if I did this work so I was are they enthusiastic about sides prospect but if it had to be that Soviet dr. Korner gave his young Protege some heartfelt advice if masters wanted to do research in sex he should wait until he was at least 40 had earned a reputation in another area of research and could affiliate himself with a major medical school or university a masters took corner at his word he became an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in st. Louis in 1942 he married his freshman sweetheart Elizabeth Packard Ellis and two children were born in 1950 and 1951 dr. Masters published numerous papers on hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women conducted research into infertility and earned a reputation as a top gynecological surgeon he had established himself in a successful career but by 1954 he was ready to turn his back on it masters decided the time was right to begin his research into sex in many ways though the time couldn't have been more wrong then I can fit these were a very repressive time very conservative it was a period in which you did not talk openly in mixed company about sex your entertainment came from movies and television that were very much censored the post office took the official attitude that nudity was obscenity when I started Playboy we had to fight for our second class mailing privilege when the skirts went down instead of up in the nineteen fifties and ooh we were in trouble daddy yes why do babies have fathers well your child is inquisitive even sex education was often reduced to talking about the birds and the bees a male cat like other male mammals as testicles and a penis when mating a male gets up on the rear part of the female cat's body even doctors received no education in sex in the 1950s a survey of graduating medical students at a major university showed that 1/3 of them believed masturbation caused mental illness and what was worse twenty percent of the faculty thought so too there was one major crack in the repressive 50s facade Alfred Kinsey a biologist at Indiana University stunned the nation by revealing what Americans really did in the bedroom Kinsey and his researchers conducted interviews with thousands of subjects about the most intimate details of their sex lives he published the results in two books sexual behavior in the human male in 1948 and sexual behavior in the human female in 1953 many readers were shocked the notion that significant numbers of normal men and women masturbated had extramarital affairs and even occasional homosexual experiences flew in the face of prevailing moral standards Kinsey was severely criticized and saw much of his funding canceled it is very clear that Kinsey paid a heavy price for particularly a second book was a much more controversial simply because it was women and women in that conservative time were not supposed to be sexually active a double standard was alive and well in spite of the shock and outrage they provoked poorgrass because of it Kinsey's books became bestsellers and helped liberalize public attitudes about sexual behavior Kinsey success gave William masters confidence that he could finally begin his own research into sex candy was vital to us he puddin's our he gave me the afternoon those who worked with us to kick the door right of it which I think we did in a plain brick building at the Washington Google masters launched the sex research project in 1954 the first obstacle was finding subjects in those days it one didn't walk up to mrs. Smith and say by the way on Tuesday afternoon we'd like to have some information from it masters assume that no respectable people would participate in such a project so at first he turned to professionals he took histories from almost a hundred and fifty prostitutes and about a dozen of them served as the first guinea pigs in the laboratory but ultimately the prostitutes proved unsuitable in part because many of them were migrants unavailable for follow-up studies the prostitutes did give them a number of professional tips on dealing with sexual problems as well as one suggestion of crucial importance when the prostitutes tradoc's regulator got very irritated with it she said you know you're never going to know anything about the female sex why don't you catch yourself at a writer or an interpreter or whatever you want to call it and then when I thought about - - - a great idea so in late 1956 dr. masters placed an ad in The Washington university placement Bureau for a mature woman who was good with people a suitable candidate had just registered with the bureau a recently divorced mother of two named Virginia Johnson Johnson was born virginia Eshelman in Springfield Missouri in 1925 she grew up on a family farm and from an early age showed a strong interest in music while in high school Johnson took piano lessons at brewery college but her real dream was the singing opera she enrolled at Missouri University and majored in music a brief marriage to a lawyer brought her to st. Louis followed by a second marriage in 1952 a local band leader George Johnson Virginia Johnson sang with her husband's Orchestra her face appearing on publicity skills for the band on the side she posed for local modeling assignments she gave birth to a son in 1952 and a daughter in 1955 but Virginia Johnson found her musician husband to be an irresponsible father and in 1956 they parted as a nearly divorced mother of two Johnson needed a more secure career than singing her first idea was to get a doctorate in sociology at Washington University I don't know what I was going to do with it in all truth I I don't think I thought it through but I knew that I had to be educated I knew that I wanted to achieve but the realities of supporting her children led her to register for a job at the University instead of pursuing a degree there a position at the Medical School was open with an obstetrician-gynecologist and all I knew about him was that he was an associate professor and he was known for his work in infertility basically I'd been hired as his assistant and to assist in what I wasn't absolutely certain now with the help of his new assistant William masters was ready to turn his long-held dream into reality in [Music] the straight-laced 1950s with its stress on family values and puritanical morals conducting research into sex presented some daunting challenges for example when Masters and Johnson began their work at Washington University in 1957 they wondered where they would find volunteers for the project but to their surprise they discovered that many ordinary people were willing to serve as subject curiously enough getting research subjects was easy if you waited you had to wade through the the fraternities that sent their pledges into to be interviewed and you know the poor dears were stammering stuttering and so on because they didn't come of their own free will and that was very easy to screen out of course and kind of fun and in a way so Masters and Johnson embarked on the first major scientific study of sexual response ever conducted Masha's & Johnson had since destroyed the films they made of their early studies but later researchers repeated their work including films such as these over a 10-year period Masters and Johnson observed and took measurements from 700 male and female subjects masturbating or having intercourse in the laboratory they once estimated they had studied over 10,000 orgasms they were the first to film a woman's orgasm internally using an artificial penis of clear plastic that contained a light and camera in the late 50s and early 60s this kind of research would have scandalized many if they had known it was going on I couldn't think of any way that I could prepare the public for it for the shock value of finding out that such research existed there is superbly prevention of doing something against the stream of society and to add elevate to some kind of study about a taboo topic topic something between the waist of the knees and not only the test earlier they observed it so from the beginning Masters knew it was imperative that the research be conducted in relative secrecy and he was very careful to shield the project from outside criticism by lining up support from the University and from local clergy in 1964 masters moved the project off campus establishing the reproductive biology Research Foundation it was financed by a few private donations and some small Foundation grants masters himself took no pain from the foundation or the Medical School supporting himself solely from his gynecological practice Masters and Johnson attempted to report their findings to the medical community but the most prestigious journals rejected their research papers by 1966 though after 12 years of work Masters and Johnson were ready to publish their research in book form at the time America's attitudes about sex were becoming more liberal but little new information had become public in the mid 1960s we knew more about how to get a man to the moon and back than we knew about what was happening inside the vagina of a sexually stimulated woman even in the mid 1960s some people thought anything related to sex was pornographic Masters and Johnson knew that so when they brought out their book human sexual response they did everything they could to control the potential for sensationalism does it concern you that thrill-seekers the people of that sort will make it a point to try to get a copy of your sight you know I don't really think so if they are looking for pornography or that type of material they're going to be disappointed because I can assure you that every effort was made to remove this type of material from the next masters and johnson wrote the book as a medical textbook in deliberately dense scientific language they chose a conservative Boston publisher little brown and held briefings for small groups of science writers in a Boston hotel suite just before publication we weren't marketing we just didn't want the books burned we just didn't want them to be ignored for what they were or misunderstood the book a sensation Little Brown released 15,000 copies and they sold out in one day how is the demand but running wonderful beyond our front and those that you put it in the window so you have no it's a hot property I want to sell it human sexual response went on to sell over 250,000 copies in just the first year it held firm on the bestseller list for six months the people apologize for ordering it or try to pass themselves own on Jordans or anything on the contrary I mean this isn't this an enlightened age and people interested in sex first of the 1950's it was an enlightened age as America's sexual mores were changing if the Masters and Johnson book had arrived in 55 or 1960 it would have been blasted it arrived at almost the perfect time it arrived at a time in which people were throwing off a lot of the taboos and repression related to their own sexuality in human sexual response Masters and Johnson identified four phases of orgasm and detailed the physiological responses in each some of their findings overturned popular misconceptions particularly in regard to female sexuality the book publicized the ability of many women to have multiple orgasms and it showed that physiologically a woman's orgasm was the same no matter what the stimulation this overturned Sigmund Freud's notion that there were vaginal orgasms from intercourse which were proper and mature and clitoral orgasms which were neurotic and immature and this notion that there were two kinds of orgasms and one with superior psychologically emotionally to the other was very much prevalent in the culture at the time but masters and Johnson's work what they said essentially is that an orgasm is an orgasm however achieved what it did is it gave women a sense of both entitlement and a sense of inclinations pursue it so that women became much more eager to achieve and experience orgasm human sexual response became a best-seller but not everyone was thrilled with an explicit textbook about sex the book is published on a Monday and by Friday the mail began coming in and Saks I mean that's a bit early we had to employ three secretaries on a part-time basis to answer the mail and about 80% of mail was dropped dead previously dr. masters had received numerous offers to chair medical departments at teaching hospitals around the country now the offers disappear what was worse the negative reactions went beyond the professional to the personal it was easy for our children and we naively were unaware of just how hard it was for them you know the comments that would be made when they walked across the gym floor and joined a some group well I guess we can get started here comes the sex expert this for a twelve-year-old child it was bad enough for a while then I often wondered if I had the opportunity to repeat my life would I do the same thing again and unless I'm not sure that I would in spite of the cost to themselves and their families Masters and Johnson continued their work they were now ready to move from sex research to a revolutionary new sex therapy one that would help countless people all over the world