Their partnership of many years, their professional fulfillment together, was less important to Masters than the fulfillment of a fantasy. There is one final spoiler that further complicates the liberation: Masters eventually left Johnson. For all the bitter quotations that the real Johnson gives in Maier’s book-friends say, in fact, that the “hard things” Johnson had to say about Masters ultimately drove them from her company-they make up a more rounded personality than the one “Masters of Sex” presents. She becomes more like what the culture seems to want from “liberation”-a woman who has left the judgment of others behind, who doesn’t give a damn, who in her new omniscience sees both past and future clearly-and less like any recognizable human being who has ever lived. It’s being comfortable with ambivalence that has always made “Mad Men” seem more grown-up than your average prestige-cable show.īy contrast, the Johnson of this show never makes a misstep, never seems seized by either regret or indecision.
It’s not clear, when Bobbie leaves the picture, that she has played her hand correctly. It’s a powerful business, when done correctly,” the viewer was invited to raise an eyebrow. Even when Bobbie Barrett told Peggy Olson, “You can’t be a man. But somehow, “Mad Men” has managed to explain, implicitly, that its intelligent, even cunning female characters operated within sexual politics whose rules were not arranged for their benefit. “Mad Men,” the show that “Masters of Sex” owes a strong aesthetic and tonal debt, has addressed similar themes. It is a curious choice not simply because it goes against our modern views but because it actually flattens dramatic possibilities. In “Masters of Sex,” however, this quite serious situation is treated as a half-joke.
Not even in the context of sex researchers would we think it fair that having sex with your boss be an implicit condition of employment. She told him, “Bill did it all-I didn’t want him… I had a job and I wanted it.” No one “forced” her to agree to the arrangement, but it was one made within a matrix of consequences that few think acceptable any longer. Confronted with his observation by Maier, Johnson seemed to agree. A colleague of theirs speculated that had Johnson refused the proposition, she would eventually have been sidelined from Masters’s study. And yet, even in the nineteen-fifties, where we must rewind to some forgotten collective frame of mind before the sexual-harassment laws of the nineteen-seventies, the proposition still gives off a sour smell. The television show more or less mirrors Johnson’s account of his initial proposition, in the sense that Masters wrapped it up in clinical language about transference and scientific precision. But long before that, they were lovers, as the show addresses, though lovers as a matter of clinical investigation. Masters and Johnson married only in the late nineteen-seventies. Most relevant, to those who have been watching the show, is how Mary seemed to regret her involvement with Bill Masters. She was so busy working as Masters’s associate on his sex research that she never got the imprimatur of a university degree, an honorific that might seem ceremonial in retrospect but which meant a great deal to her personally. She worried that she’d missed her kids growing up. Some of her guilt was the ordinary kind, familiar to any working woman. … In retrospect, I ask myself, ‘Geez, did I lose myself that totally?’” As she’d tell the writer Thomas Maier, whose book “Masters of Sex” the series is based on, “I can remember saying out loud-and I’m appalled as I remember it-being very pleased that I could be anything any man wanted me to be. Instead, she was “Mary Masters,” another old woman in a nursing home with a story that only a few people listened to.
She was no longer going by the name she’d used professionally for her forty-odd years in sex research. Johnson died earlier this year, at the age of eighty-eight.
And by her own account, the real Virginia Johnson did not live the life relatively free of judgment and social cost that “Masters of Sex” has, so far, implied for her doppelgänger. Louis, Missouri, in the late nineteen-fifties, could enjoy the same nods of approval from her contemporary onlookers. But it’s much harder to believe that a woman in St.
Post-“sexual revolution,” there is general agreement that a woman who knows what she wants, in bed and in life, is a person to be admired. #0 /var/Illuminate\Foundation\Bootstrap\HandleExceptions->handleError(8, 'Undefined index.I am not the only one watching “Masters of Sex” who wonders if things could have been the same for the real-life woman whom Caplan is playing. ? Undefined index: reviewType ErrorException: Undefined index: reviewType in file /var/on line 33