The Sex Scientists: Everything You Know About Sex Came From These Weirdos
The researchers who studied the unspeakable; broke American mythology; and paid for it. Kinsey interviewed 18000 Americans. Masters and Johnson watched people have sex in a laboratory. Then both legacies got complicated.
Nobody elected them. Nobody asked for volunteers. The researchers who built the modern science of human sexuality were a bug taxonomist from Indiana, a gynecologist from Missouri, and a woman with no advanced degree who turned out to be the smartest person in the room. They broke every rule the culture had about what you could study, what you could watch, and what you were allowed to say out loud about what Americans actually did with their bodies.
The data came first and the outrage came second
Alfred Kinsey spent the first half of his career counting gall wasps. Millions of them. The man was a taxonomist to his bones; he believed that if you collected enough specimens, the data would tell you what was true whether you liked it or not. When he turned that method on human sexuality in the 1940s, the results detonated polite society. Thirty-seven percent of American men reported at least one homosexual experience to orgasm. Masturbation was near-universal. Premarital sex was the norm, not the exception. The country had been lying to itself, and Kinsey had the interviews to prove it. Eighteen thousand of them.
Then someone decided to watch
William Masters was a gynecologist who convinced Washington University to let him observe people having sex in a laboratory. In 1954. In St. Louis. He recruited Virginia Johnson, a woman without a PhD or medical degree, and she became the intellectual engine of the operation. Together they mapped the human sexual response cycle, proved that Freud’s clitoral-vaginal orgasm distinction was nonsense, documented multiple orgasm in women as physiological fact, and invented sex therapy as a clinical discipline. Their 1966 book sold out its first printing in a week.
Both legacies got complicated
Kinsey filmed participants. He recruited staff into sexual relationships. His sampling methodology had real problems that his defenders still struggle to address honestly. Masters published a book in 1979 claiming homosexuality could be converted through therapy. It was fraud. Johnson knew it was fraud. The two people most responsible for normalizing the scientific study of sex produced work that was used to harm the people they had helped liberate.
The field they built is still under siege
Every generation produces a new attempt to discredit Kinsey. Every funding cycle puts sex research back on the chopping block. The female orgasm remained scientifically under-mapped until 2005. The clitoral anatomy was not fully described until the twenty-first century. We have better maps of Mars.
This series covers what they found, how they found it, what it cost them, and what it means that eighty years later the country still cannot decide whether understanding sex is a public good or a public threat.
The Series
