Virginia E. Johnson, 1925–2013
A sexological perspective
Virginia Johnson’s death on July 24, 2013, at The Altenheim nursing house (1) in St. Louis, Missouri, may be an occasion to review some of her achievements, trying to separate them from William Masters’ ones, with whom she signed all her books. Typically, in fact, people have kept talking about Masters and Johnson as a single entity despite its two-headed basis (2), and not without good reasons: you can only fully understand their works as the cooperation of both. Although this may sound like a cliché, it contains a deeper sense that Masters and Johnson rightly stressed: the object of the sexological intervention is not one individual nor the other, but the relationship itself (3). Furthermore: the work of two people is not the sum of both but the result of both’s interaction, one transforming the other and vice versa.
With this clarification in mind, and at the risk of incurring a premasterjohnsonian simplification, we can not resist the temptation to try a different perspective with regard to the recent biography (4) Thomas Maier (2009, 2013) has dedicated to Masters and Johnson – curiously (5), the only one to date- outlining the personality of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, and stressing what appears to be their individual contribution to their joint work. In this brief article we do not intend, of course, to do an analysis of all the books signed by Masters and Johnson. We shall make do with pointing out just some guidelines for the interpretation of their work, relying on three of their texts that we consider fundamental: Human Sexual Response, Human Sexual Inadequacy and The Pleasure Bond.
1957 is the year when the relation between Gini and Bill, as they were popularly known, begins. At age 32, Virginia was divorced three times and had two kids (Scott and Lisa) from her last marriage to a rocker, George Johnson, which finished the previous year. At that time Virginia leaves behind her musical aspirations (like mezzo and country singer on the radio) and her job as a business writer to go to work at the University of Washington medical school in the position of secretary of maternal University Hospital. Her job is to fill insurance forms for a doctor of the obstetrics and gynecology department; she does not even have a proper office: she works in the lobby (6).
That doctor is William Masters, renowned gynecologist and surgeon. He has been specializing in helping infertile couples, partly motivated by his wife’s difficulty in becoming pregnant (7). For this reason he found it crucial to obtain more knowledge of genital physiology.
The task was not to be easy. As Masters remarked later: “In medical research, there has always been a forbidden territory. Once it was the brain, then it was the heart. Today, the forbidden territory is sex”(8). The risk faced by Masters was clear: professional suicide.
Masters starts studying prostitutes, but he gives up when he realizes that they are too atypical a sample due to their chronic pelvic congestion. Moreover, he gets convinced that to understand women’s sexuality better he needs one as a research partner. A female doctor is out of reach: they are so rare and exceptional that none would risk jeopardizing their status linking themselves to such a potentially problematic research. That is how he ends up finding Virginia Johnson, who had just begun her studies in sociology (9), and with whom Masters will perform a Pygmalion task, as Maier remarked, teaching her anatomy and physiology so that she could be on par (10).
Virginia Johnson’s contribution at this stage appears to have been crucial. After almost a year of no progress in research since the halt with prostitutes, it is Johnson who convinces students, nurses, secretaries and even wives of doctors at the University of Washington to collaborate for a modest amount of money and, above all, for the sake of science, which may replace erroneous beliefs by facts. Her ability to relate to people and her way of being, simple, affable, warm, close and secure, inspired confidence and peace to the candidates, two thirds of whom ended up being research subjects (11). Masters’ character (antisocial, rigorous, taciturn, with a fine sense of humor, but not very smiling) would have significantly hindered to achieve this degree of collaboration (12).
What is the research that will lead to their first book, Human Sexual Response (1966)? Basically, it consists of measuring physiological variables that accompany arousal to orgasm, alone or with a partner. After a preliminary presentation of the results to colleagues of the department of gynecology, suspicion and animosity arose and, as a consequence, Masters found himself forced to resign from his professorship at the University.
For this reason he sets up, out of the university, the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation (name that does not include the word ‘sex’ in order to avoid further problems, and that will become the Masters and Johnson Institute in 1978). In the new Foundation, Masters promoted Johnson from assistant to associate researcher (13).
After physiological studies, in 1959 they began another stage: how to intervene with couples with difficulties. Whereas Masters started researching on anatomy from a solid base, now neither him nor Johnson had therapeutic training. That turned out to be rather an advantage, as it allowed them to experiment freely. Apparently, Johnson’s contribution, with her understanding of couple intricacies and her sensitivity towards women’s point of view was decisive. “At least 70% of the therapy was her idea” Masters said (14).
In 1970, with the publication of Human Sexual Inadequacy (15), they will announce its proposal for intervention. Enthusiastically received in media (16), Masters and Johnson’s greatest popularity will come with this work, to the point that Time magazine dedicates its cover to them. Human Sexual Inadequacy presented a model of brief sex therapy, with a success rate of 90%, which represented a radical change compared with the low efficacy and long duration of psychoanalytic therapy (17).
In 1971, Johnson married Masters, who had divorced his first wife, Libby, with whom he had two children. The marriage lasted until 1993; in the same year Masters, already suffering from Parkinson, got married to an old love from his childhood (18).
Gradually, Johnson is becoming the main figure of the Foundation whereas Masters focuses more on data analysis for other publications (19). Finally, as a way to quell criticism that their approach was mechanistic (20), they publish a very different book, this time intended for the general public: The Pleasure Bond (1974).
Given the unavoidable need that their studies were accepted as rigorously scientific, and in order to avoid professional opprobrium and personal disqualification, both Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy were written using medical terminology and elaborated language, avoiding at all costs that the reader could feel aroused in any way (21). The Pleasure Bond, however, was written to be understood by ordinary people, following an educational line on which they were increasingly concerned (22).
The Pleasure Bond is about – as the subtitle states — “a new look at sexuality and commitment.” What is this commitment about? Although many have not noticed yet (23), it can not be said clearer:
[…] a man no less than a woman wishes to believe that his marriage partner values him and needs him and desires him.
(The Pleasure Bond, p. 13.)
Some made a pornographic reductionist caricature of Masters and Johnson (24), with the emphasis on erections, lubrication, orgasm and other elements of so-called “sexual function” and its concomitant dysfunction. But far from that, Masters and Johnson advocated in their sexological intervention the value of the encounter with the other in relations between the sexes:
Being together gives them satisfactions, including sex, that reinforce their decision to live together as a couple; these satisfactions, which are highly valued, must be safeguarded. Each partner, to protect his or her own happiness, tries to sustain the other partner’s happiness so that their relationship will flourish; and these reciprocal efforts intensify the satisfactions they find in living together -which further strengthen their wish to remain a couple. They live according to the commitment of mutual concern, and pleasure is the bond between them.
(The Pleasure Bond, p. 254.)
The usual lack of interest in the history of sexology; ever more pronounced in the United States and especially for whatever happened beyond their borders (25); and the increasing promotion of multidisciplinariety, has resulted in an interpretation of Masters and Johnson’s work based predominantly on other disciplines, such as medicine or psychiatry and psycho(patho)logy, ignoring the disciplinary tradition of sexology, which Iwan Bloch introduced in the early twentieth century as the result of focusing on a concrete perspective: sex (26).
It is worth pausing at this point in order to try to understand the different interpretations and evaluations that the three cited works of Masters and Johnson have received, depending on which discipline is used to analyzing them.
Thus, medicine states that sexology basically refers to genital physiology, as doctors have been primarily interested in the Human Sexual Response work. Psycho(patho)logy states that sexology basically refers to behavior, taking a behavioral and pathologizing view of Human Sexual Inadequacy. This is particularly striking for us since it seems that in these disciplines, in order to extract an idea of sexology from Masters and Johnson’s work, not all these authors’ publications have been used, nor even the latest ones. Instead, the publication that fits best each discipline’s background or historical knowledge has been used. Seen from the point of view of the whole work, those mutilated readings are shocking.
Ultimately, and in marked contrast, fully aware of the legacy of the first generation of European sexologists from the early twentieth century (27), substantive sexology has understood The Pleasure Bond as the hinge of Masters and Johnson’s work. In this book they express that the object of intervention is not physiology, dysfunction nor behavior, but the ars amandi (28).
Now, as William Masters focused his interest especially on physiological aspects (29), we think that the key contribution of Virginia Johnson in Masters and Johnson sexological intervention tandem was rightly focusing on the attraction that both sexes feel to each other, as men and women, and not on the genitals and their functions. In this sense, the literal and figurative contribution of Virginia Johnson joining Masters’ research was precisely that Masters and Johnson thought of sex in terms of two, thus they thought the sexes.
Sex therapy, as a device which promotes that both sexes find together a new ars amandi intimately satisfactory for both, consistent with their peculiar ways of enjoying themselves as a couple, has a debt of gratitude to the sexologist Virginia Johnson.
Juan Lejárraga y Samuel Díez Arrese
Notes
1. Proud and Lippmann, 2013.
2. Paul Robinson (1976, p. 122–123) even wondered what was the contribution of each one, but in the end, in his analysis of Masters and Johnson’s work, the author considered both as one author.
3.“The marital relationship is considered as the patient”, Human sexual inadequacy, p. 3. It may be important to recall the clarification Robert Levin, editor of The Pleasure Bond, makes on the preface: “(…) the word ‘marriage’ means more than the existence of a license. Throughout this book, a man and woman are considered united in the true sense of the word, whether or not they have a license to live together, as long as each is committed to the other. They are not committed because they are married; they are married because they are committed” (The Pleasure Bond, 1975, p. Xiii).
4. In 2013, Maier added a brief epilogue to the biography reissued on the occasion of the creation of Masters of sex television series, an adaptation of Maier’s book. Maier’s biography neither is, nor wants to be, an intellectual biography that analyzes the work of Masters and Johnson, except in the most superficial and bombastic way (“their view of human sexuality was simply revolutionary”, p. 167), not without basic errors (for example, on the sensate focus’ description, p. 182, as noted by Weiner, 2010). Maier has tried rather a moral and psychological portrait. We just want to add — romantic mythomaniacs will be pleased here — that even if in interviews with Maier in 2009 Johnson implied that she married Masters just for work without ever loving him, in the 2013 book edition the mess is sorted out: In the last interview with Maier in 2011, Johnson said he still loved Masters (Maier, 2013, p 379.).
5. Sexologists’ biographies have aroused considerable interest in general. Thus we have five biographies of Havelock Ellis (Goldberg, Collis, Calder-Marshall, Brome, Grosskurth), four of Magnus Hirschfeld (Wolff, Herzer, Dose, Mancini), one of Norman Haire (Wyndham) and four of Alfred Kinsey (Christenson, Pomeroy, Jones, Gathorne-Hardy). For a comparison of Kinsey’s biographies, see Capshew et al. (2003); for a more general reflection on the limits of biographies as history, see Brennan, T. and Hegarty, P. (2009).
6. Maier, 2009, p. 87.
7. Maier, 2009, p. 48, 59.
8. Medical Tribune, 1965, May 26, cit. In Ferguson, G. Genoa; Brandes, Steven B. (2007).
9. Demanding work hours, no weekends off and little vacation, prevented Virginia from getting a degree (Maier, 2009, p. 92). Neither did she study psychology, against despite what is common to read.
10. Maier, 2009, p. 92.
11. Maier, 2009, p. 105–107.
12. Maier, 2009, p. 48–9, 238, 266.
13. Maier, 2009, p. 144–145.
14. Maier, 2009, p. 179.
15. Incomprehensibly translated into Spanish as Human Sexual Incompatibility (Incompatibilidad sexual humana). In mathematics, where the term comes from, a system is incompatible if the equations have no solution; that is, for example, when two lines never cross. So if two (either people or equations) are incompatible, there is nothing to do. Nevertheless, if there is just an unsatisfactory adequacy, then there is room for adjustment and finding a new more satisfying ars amandi. Hence the importance of the concept of shareability (compartibilidad) instead of compatibility (compatibilidad) in the Sexes theory (Amezúa, 1999, pp. 209–210).
16. Maier, 2009, p. 213.
17. Kolodny, 2001, p. 274.
18. Keene, 2008.
19. Maier, 2009, p. 247–251.
20. Maier, 2009, p. 262
21. In an interview, Masters ironically remarked: “You must remember that in publishing this book we were concerned primarily interested with acceptance – that is the reason that it wasn’t in English to start with” (Maier, 2009, p. 174).
22. Already in the preface of Human Sexual Inadequacy (p. v) they wrote: “It is to be hoped that human sexual inadequacy, both the entity and this book, will be rendered obsolete in the next decade. We would like to contribute to the project.” (p.v) In fact, they thought that “so much of the therapy is but a simple direct educational process.” (Human Sexual Inadequacy, p. 15). We think that such phrases, widely overlooked, along with an analysis of what they really did in their therapy, according to Amezúa’s view, are what truly helps to understand the pathologizing medical terminology used in their work as a mere disguise to earn the legitimacy of the medical establishment.
23. The lack of interest of the scientific community for this book seems to confirm their suspicions that the presence of tables, numbers and technical language are the condition for something to begin to be considered scientific and worthy of discussion. (In Google Scholar [Accessed 29 September 2013], The Pleasure Bond yields 155 citations against 4661 in Human Sexual Response and 3883 in Human Sexual Inadequacy.)
24. Classics in this distortion are Le Nouveau Désordre Amoureux (1977) by Bruckner and Finkielkraut, Sex by Prescription (1980) by Szasz and “The power of sexologists and sexual democracy” (1982) by Béjin. Countless have been uncritically repeating these truisms until today.
25. On the Americanization of official sexology in Spain, see “The Spanish twentieth century sexology” Yearbook of sexology, 0, 1994, p. 16.
26. “The name and the concept of an encompassing ‘Sexology’ was coined by me in the year 1906 and introduced to science, where it has quickly conquered its rightful place and it has been acknowledged by those entitled to as the most appropriate expression for a science absolutely independent, beyond those already born out of the medical framework”
(Bloch, 1912, p. v, quoted in Llorca, 1996a, pp. 156–157).
“The author of the present work . . . is . . . convinced that the purely medical consideration of the sexual life, although it must always constitute the nucleus of sexual science, is yet incapable of doing full justice to the many- sided relationships between the sexual and all the other provinces of human life. To do justice to the whole importance of love in the life of the individual and in that of society, and in relation to the evolution of human civilization, this particular branch of inquiry must be treated in its proper subordination as a part of the general science of mankind, which is constituted by a union of all other sciences — of general biology, anthropology and ethnology, philosophy and psychology, the history of literature, and the entire history of civilization.
In so far as so comprehensive a mode of treatment is possible to one individual, the author has endeavored, in his investigation of the sexual life, to do justice to all these widely divergent points of view, in order to facilitate a comprehensive and objective consideration of all the relevant problems . . . Hitherto there has existed no single comprehensive treatise on the whole of the sexual life . . . The time is indeed fully ripe for an attempt to sift . . . the enormous mass of available material, and to present the result from a centralized standpoint.”
(Bloch, 1907, preface; English version by Paul Eden, cit. por Haeberle, 1985 http://www.sexarchive.info/GESUND/ARCHIV/HISTORY.HTM).
27. Amezúa, 1992.; Llorca, 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1997; Oosterhuis, 1999; Wettley, 1990.
28. Efigenio Amezúa (2000) is the author who has understood Masters and Johnson’s work more shrewdly in its sexological historical continuum and has placed it in the framework of the Sexes theory.
29. “That is not my cup of tea -that’s Gini’s business, not mine.” “I am a research scientist, interested in physical behavior. Sexual attitude readjustment doesn’t interest me”, said Masters (Maier, 2009, p. 265).
(Translation: Javier Valera)
Suggested quotation:
Lejárraga, J.; Díez, S. (2013) Virginia E. Johnson, 1925–2013, sexóloga. Sexología en redes sociales, [blog] September 30.
http://sexologiaenredessociales.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/virginia-e-johnson-1925-2013-sexologa/
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