A half-century ago, the researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson brought sex into the laboratory. For thousands of years, sex had been the object of philosophical inquiry and religious stricture, occupying everyone from shamans to psychoanalysts, and giving the world an oceanic supply of marital and extramarital strife. But it hadn’t really been studied, not in the clinical, moment-by-moment manner that Masters proposed. The problem, believed Masters, a stern ob-gyn at Washington University in St. Louis, was that you couldn’t study sex solely by asking people about it, because they were so often unaware of – or dishonest about – what was going on in their own bodies. Along with Johnson, an assistant who soon rose to the rank of co-researcher, Masters brought people, singly and in pairs, into examining rooms and observed them closely with the tools and technologies of modern medicine as they passed into and out of sexual arousal.
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