Masters of Sex is a new quality US drama about sexologists William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson. In the pantheon of twentieth century researchers who wrenched sexuality from the dark ages of shame and secrecy and shined a rational, humanist light on it (so we are told), Masters and Johnson are second only to Alfred Kinsey. Using electroencephalography, electrocardiography, blood pressure monitors and photography, the pair observed and measured what Kinsey gleaned mostly from interviews. Human Sexual Response (1966), their first influential work, consisted of the findings of over 1,000 orgasms, watched under laboratory conditions. Masters was Associate Professor and fertility specialist at the Obstetrics and Gynaecological Department of Washington University’s teaching hospital. Johnson was a night club singer who became his secretary and later research assistant.
Like Madison Avenue in Mad Men (to which Masters of Sex is relentlessly compared) at the key moment in the evolution of advertising, Masters of Sex is interested in investigating the birth pangs of contemporary culture. Whereas Mad Men focuses on the inventors of commodity fetishism, Showtime’s drama of origins is concerned with the inventors of modern sexuality. Sexologists, of course, did not invent orgasms–or the modern obsession with them for that matter–but they helped define how we conceptualise them and the emphasis we place on them. More broadly, they established many of the terms for what we consider sick and healthy, desirable and important in sex, and the methods we use to make those determinations.
Sexology was a key site in the emergence of a sexual modernity in which, as Annemarie Jagose argues in her recent book Orgasmology, orgasm ‘emerges as the privileged figure’ for newer understandings of sex and sexuality wedded less to the reproduction of kinship and dynasty and interested more in the pleasures and sensations of the body. Masters and Johnson also pioneered strands of sexual thinking–the four-stage human sexual response cycle (excitement; plateau; orgasmic; resolution) and the four categories of sexual disorders (disorders of desire, arousal, orgasm and sexual pain)–that permeate commonsense ideas about sex.
Suffice it to say, Masters of Sex is titillating. There are lots of nice breasts and faces flush with the beautiful agony of orgasm. And as Jagose would probably point out, the question of their authenticity–that is, the spectre of the fake orgasm–is posed from the very first sequence.
When we first meet Masters he’s peering through a peephole, watching a couple doing it doggy-style. In the next scene the straight-talking sex worker, Betty DiMello (Annaleigh Ashford), who has been letting him observe her work, tells him she faked her orgasm. Masters is dumbfounded. Why would someone do that? He poses the same question to Johnson. ‘To get a man to climax quickly,’ she explains matter-of-factly. These gently humorous exchanges provide an organising trope for the first three episodes that advertises the series’ enlightened sexual politics: those who define and administer the field of knowledge about human sexuality stand to learn much from the knowledge of those on the margins, most of whom are women.
Masters has to continuously make the case for an objective truth housed in the body, trying hard to get the hospital provost (Beau Bridges) to support ‘the study’. ‘What if we could just cut to the essentials? What if we could understand the basic physiology underneath all that nonsense?’ Masters argues. However, we get a sense from the outset that this noble mission–finding the scientific truth of sex–has already been subtly undermined, which distinguishes Masters of Sex from the turgid and much less sexy biopic, Kinsey (2004).
Scientific truth and enlightenment don’t quite account for the voyeurisms of the sex researcher. ‘He’s not watching you, he’s watching science’, Johnson explains to a woman about to masturbate in a brightly lit lab, on a gurney. You get the sense that this early subject knows they’re not just ‘watching science’, even if she’s covered in electrodes, giving the sex a somewhat unsexy, defamiliarising effect.
The performances are strong. The stern-faced genius doctor is played by the lovable Michael Sheen, the chap that played Tony Blair in The Queen. Lizzy Caplan, the sensible friend from Mean Girls, and more recently Jason Stackhouse’s V-addled free-spirited girlfriend in True Blood, plays Johnson. Johnson is so matter-of-fact, sex positive and liberated you can’t help but consider how anachronistic she is, but it barely matters as Caplan is luminous and critics are gushing over her. Emily Nussbaum describes Caplan’s character as ‘a fascinating conception of a female superhero: her libido is a superpower, one she tries to use for good rather than evil, with mixed results’. Nussbaum also calls the series ‘solid date night viewing’, ‘a serious turn on’ and ‘Mad Men with benefits’.
I found the pilot a bit humdrum and so much about the second and third episodes predictable, but as others have noted there’s something refreshingly earnest about this petri dish of sexual history that will keep me watching. Another critic makes the wild claim that from episode three Sheen ‘begins to give one of the most fascinating performances on TV, a man who shattered into pieces long ago but keeps acting as if he’s perfectly assembled’. From the sound of things it’s like sex: a few more episodes and Masters of Sex should get really good.
Dion Kagan is a Killings columnist, academic and arts writer who works on film, theatre, sex and popular culture. He lectures in gender and sexuality studies in the screen and cultural studies program at Melbourne University.
