Playboy Praises "Masters of Sex" in New Review

05/05/2009
By J.R. Nelson
Author: Thomas Maier
Publisher: Basic Books
Number of Pages: 432 Pages
Cover Type: Hard Cover
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If it's hard to imagine a truly adequate sex-ed class before William Masters and Virginia Johnson, it’s probably because there wasn’t one. Masters and Johnson literally wrote the book on how we get it on. Pioneers in the physiological study of human sexuality and the treatment of sexual dysfunction, their bestselling 1966 classic Human Sexual Response and its follow up, Human Sexual Inadequacy, were sparks that helped ignite the sexual revolution.
As Thomas Maier reports in his new biography of the duo, Masters of Sex, the journey of Masters and Johnson after that initial success was a hard one. Some of their work, including research on homosexuality and converting/reverting gays and lesbians and a later book on AIDS, have been justifiably controversial. In addition, the duo’s 40-year relationship was complicated; their marriage and professional partnership ended in bitterness. As Maier reveals in delicate detail, mysteries of the heart are not as easily solvable as those of the loins, even for the experts.
Famous as caricatures for their “white lab coat” exactitude and clinical prose, Masters and Johnson deftly informed and comforted millions. Maier offers an intimate, engaging look at a couple who helped free lovers from repression, suppression and Freudian myth and helped bring what was most human about us into the light.