sexscientists

Who Were Masters and Johnson? The Couple Who Put Sex in the Lab

A gynecologist, a former country singer and a lab full of wires. How two people in St. Louis turned sex into a science, invented sex therapy, then wrote two books they shouldn't have.

William Masters and Virginia Johnson were the St. Louis research team who, starting in 1957, watched and measured real people having sex in a laboratory, mapped the body's sexual response in four phases, and then used what they learned to invent modern couples sex therapy (Brown School, Washington University). He was a buttoned-up gynecologist. She was a former country singer with no college degree. Together they wrote two bestsellers, landed on the cover of Time, got married, got divorced, and left behind a legacy that is half landmark science and half cautionary tale.

They're back in the conversation for a reason. On October 10, 2026, a panel from the International Society for the Study of Women's Sexual Health presented an updated three-stage definition of the female orgasm at the Sexual Medicine Society of North America's fall meeting (SMSNA, Oct 10, 2026). Every model of arousal that gets revised today is, one way or another, revising the one that came out of a St. Louis lab sixty years ago. So here's the whole story, in order, with the deep dives linked as we go.

The pair at a glance

	William H. Masters	Virginia E. Johnson
Born	December 27, 1915, Cleveland	February 11, 1925, Springfield, Missouri (as Mary Virginia Eshelman)
Before the lab	Obstetrician-gynecologist at Washington University in St. Louis	Band singer, radio performer, business writer
Joined the work	Started sex research in 1954	Hired in 1957
Big books	Human Sexual Response (1966), Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970)	Same, as co-author
Married	1971 to 1993	1971 to 1993
Died	February 16, 2001, Tucson	July 24, 2013, St. Louis

Sources for the table: Becker Medical Library, Washington University; New York Times review of Human Sexual Inadequacy, 1970; Brown School; and the Wikipedia biographies of Masters and Johnson, which cite their New York Times and Guardian obituaries.

The odd couple

Bill Masters was about as unlikely a revolutionary as you could build. He joined the Washington University medical faculty in 1947 (Brown School), and his early research interest was infertility and female hormones. In 1954 he switched his focus to human sexuality (Guttmacher, New York Times, 1970). He was, his obituary noted, a churchgoing Episcopalian and a registered Republican (Wikipedia, citing the New York Times). Picture the most respectable man at the faculty club, then picture him asking for permission to watch people climax.

Virginia Johnson came from the opposite direction. She sang country music on Springfield radio station KWTO under the stage name Virginia Gibson, worked as a business writer in St. Louis, and enrolled at Washington University without ever finishing a degree (Wikipedia, citing her Guardian and New York Times obituaries). She applied for a job at the medical school and was hired to work with Masters in Obstetrics and Gynecology (Becker Medical Library). Their joint work began in 1957 (Kinsey Institute).

Her title said assistant. Her job turned out to be closer to co-founder. The longer version of how that partnership worked, and what it cost her, is in The Relationship That Was Also a Research Project.

What actually happened in the lab

Alfred Kinsey had already shocked the country by asking Americans about their sex lives, but his data came from interviews, not observation (Wikipedia: the team). If you want to know what people said, read The Numbers That Changed Everything. Masters wanted to know what bodies did.

The early observations used local sex workers, who were comfortable and experienced (Wylie, BJPsych Advances, 2021). The study then moved to volunteers from the community, mostly white, married and well educated (Wikipedia: the team). Between 1957 and 1965, Wylie's review notes, they observed nearly 700 people having intercourse or masturbating, recording heart rate, breathing rate and lubrication along the way. In the clinical phase, married women were often paired with a random male partner, one of several methodological choices that critics have hammered ever since (Wylie, 2021). The final count was 382 women and 312 men across what the researchers conservatively estimated as 10,000 complete sexual response cycles (Wikipedia: the team).

There's one more lab detail the biographies love. According to Thomas Maier's 2009 biography Masters of Sex, at Masters's request the two of them also had sex as subjects of their own study, and eventually became lovers while Masters was still married to his first wife (same source, citing Maier). That's a biographer's account, built largely on Johnson's later interviews, and it's the part the TV show leaned on hardest. The full origin story is in William Masters: The Doctor Who Decided to Watch.

What they found

Their 1966 book, Human Sexual Response, was written in dense clinical language and still became a national bestseller (Brown School). Here's what was in it that mattered:

Four phases. Excitement, plateau, orgasm, resolution. The human sexual response cycle was their most enduring idea (Wylie, 2021).
Freud was wrong about two kinds of orgasm. The body's orgasmic response was the same whether stimulation was clitoral or vaginal (same source). That one finding knocked a leg out from under decades of psychoanalytic scolding about "mature" orgasms.
Lubrication doesn't come from the cervix, which had been a widely held belief (same source).
Women can have multiple orgasms. Men hit a refractory period after orgasm; women, they reported, didn't have to, and the contractions of orgasm in both sexes started at roughly 0.8-second intervals before slowing (Wikipedia: the team).
Sex doesn't have an expiration date. They were among the first to study sexual response in older adults (Kinsey Institute), concluding that with reasonable health and an interested partner there was no fixed age at which sexual ability disappears (Wikipedia: the team).

If you want the physiology chapter by chapter, we did that in Human Sexual Response and the Body That Surprised Everyone.

Then they invented sex therapy

The lab was the warm-up. In 1959 they started treating couples (Becker Medical Library), and in 1964 they left the university to run their own nonprofit, the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation, renamed the Masters and Johnson Institute in 1978 (Brown School).

The 1970 book Human Sexual Inadequacy laid out the method. Treatment was given by a man-woman team of therapists, both partners had to attend, and couples from out of town lived in a hotel and saw the therapists daily, seven days a week, for two weeks. Over 11 years they treated 510 married couples plus 57 single people (Guttmacher, New York Times, 1970). It was a talking therapy. Couples in the program were never observed having sex (Wikipedia: the team). The core technique, which they called sensate focus, replaced years on a psychoanalyst's couch with structured touching exercises, and it remains central for many sex therapists today (Wylie, 2021).

"Fear of performance is the biggest factor in sexual dysfunction, and once there is no premium on performance, we can get a lot of work done," Masters told The Atlantic in 1970 (The Atlantic, December 1970). Half a century of sex-advice columns are footnotes to that sentence.

The numbers were spectacular. They reported failing in only about 20% of 790 cases, and only 5 of 186 men treated for premature ejaculation couldn't get it under control (same source). Notice the framing: they reported failures rather than cures, because failure was easier to define. A 1981 paper from the Institute later clarified that the "failure" bucket mixed outright failures with partial improvements (Journal of Sex Research, 1981). Modern reviewers note that nobody since has matched those results (Wylie, 2021). Make of that what you will.

On May 25, 1970, the two of them were on the cover of Time (Time cover archive). How the clinic turned into a franchise is its own story: The Sex Therapy Empire.

The two books that aged badly

Homosexuality in Perspective (1979). From 1968 to 1977 the Institute ran a program to "convert" gay men and lesbians to heterosexuality and reported a 71.6% success rate (Wylie, 2021). Thomas Maier's reporting tells the backstage version. Most clinic staff never met a single conversion case. When the Institute's top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and hear the tapes, Masters refused, and Kolodny came to suspect the cases were composites at best and fabricated at worst. Johnson shared his doubts privately. "That was a bad book," she said decades later, and at worst, "Bill was being creative in those days" (Maier, Scientific American, 2009). The book landed just six years after psychiatry had voted homosexuality out of its diagnostic manual, a story we tell in The Night They Voted Homosexuality Out of the DSM. Our full account is The Conversion Therapy Betrayal.

Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS (1988). Written with Kolodny, it claimed the virus was "running rampant in the heterosexual community" and could, at least in theory, spread through things like toilet seats and kissing. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called it "irresponsible" and accused them of scare tactics (Time, 1988). Public-health experts also attacked them for releasing the claims in a mass-market book instead of a peer-reviewed journal (UPI, March 6, 1988). For the wider story of how AIDS reshaped the field, see What the AIDS Crisis Did to Sex Research.

The marriage, the divorce, the ending

Masters divorced his first wife and married Johnson in 1971. They divorced in 1993 but kept working together until the Institute closed in 1994, when Masters retired (Becker Medical Library). He died in Tucson in 2001 of complications from Parkinson's disease. She died in St. Louis in 2013, at 88 (Wikipedia: William Masters; Wikipedia: Virginia E. Johnson). Her family donated her papers to the Kinsey Institute, which is a nice bit of closure for the two biggest names in American sex science (Kinsey Institute).

Two months after her death, Showtime premiered Masters of Sex, based on Maier's biography, with Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan (Wikipedia: the team). It ran four seasons, through 2016 (Washington University Journal of Law & Policy). Sheen has said he didn't know what the real Masters was like and played his own interpretation (Wikipedia: William Masters). Treat the show as a drama, not a documentary.

What held up, and what got rewritten

The four-phase model was a starting line, not a finish line. Helen Singer Kaplan added a desire phase in 1974, and later circular models changed the shape again (Wylie, 2021). The biggest was Rosemary Basson's 2000 model, in which desire often shows up after arousal starts instead of before (Basson, 2000, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy). Even their physiology got edited: the physiologist Roy Levin argued that the first sign of female arousal is increased blood flow in the vaginal wall, not lubrication (Wylie, 2021).

The sharpest cultural critique came from Shere Hite and later the philosopher Elisabeth Lloyd, who challenged the assumption that thrusting during intercourse should give women enough clitoral stimulation to orgasm, and the idea that when it didn't, the woman was "dysfunctional" (Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm, Harvard University Press, 2005). We dig into why that argument still isn't settled in The Female Orgasm Is Still Scientifically Controversial.

And now the October 2026 definition swaps the old emphasis on "intense pleasure" for three stages, pre-orgasm, orgasm and post-orgasm (SMSNA). Sixty years on, the field is still arguing over the map they drew first. That's what a foundation looks like. For the full 2026 scorecard of what's settled and what isn't, read What We Actually Know About Sex in 2026.

Our verdict: they were brilliant observers and better clinicians, they were sometimes wrong, and twice they were badly wrong in ways that hurt people. All of that is true at once. In 2005 the World Association for Sexual Health gave them both a Gold Medal for their careers (Wylie, 2021), and the honor and the asterisks belong on the same page.

FAQ

Were Masters and Johnson married? Yes, from 1971 until their divorce in 1993. They kept working together afterward until the Institute closed in 1994 (Becker Medical Library).

Was Virginia Johnson a doctor? No. She never earned a university degree, and critics noted she often didn't correct people who called her "Dr. Johnson" (Wikipedia: the team).

What are the four stages of sexual response? Excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution, from Human Sexual Response (1966).

Did they really watch people have sex? Yes. Nearly 700 people were observed in the lab between 1957 and 1965 (Wylie, 2021). Couples in their later therapy program were not observed.

Is Masters of Sex accurate? Loosely. It's based on Maier's biography but dramatized, and the lead actor has said he played his own interpretation.

Want the rest of the cast? Start at the series hub, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson: The Weirdos Who Built Sex Science.