Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (84 page)

In retrospect three of Kinsey’s findings were to have sustained social, psychological, and intellectual effects, for good or ill. The first was the finding that many – most, when considering males and females – indulged in extramarital affairs. A decade after the studies were published, as we shall see, people began to act on this finding: whereas hitherto people had just had affairs, now they didn’t stop there, and divorced in order to remarry. The second was the finding that there was a ‘distinct and steady increase in the number of females reaching orgasm in their marital coitus.’
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Looking at the age of the women in his sample, Kinsey found that most of the women born at the end of the nineteenth century had never reached orgasm (remember Simone de Beauvoir not achieving it until she was thirty-nine), whereas among those born in the 1920s, most of them ‘always achieved it [orgasm] during coitus.’ Although Kinsey was unwilling to equate female orgasm with a happy sex life, publication of his findings, and the solid size of his sample, clearly encouraged more women who were not achieving orgasm to seek to do so. This was by no means the only concern of the women’s movement, which gathered pace in the decade following Kinsey, but it was a contributing element. The third important finding that proved of lasting significance was that which showed a much higher proportion of homosexual activity than had been anticipated – a third of adult men, it will be recalled, reported such experiences.
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Here again Kinsey’s report seems to have shown a large number of people that the behaviour they thought set them apart – made them odd and unusual – was in fact far more common than they could ever have known.
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In doing so, the Kinsey reports not only
allayed anxieties but may have encouraged more of such behaviour in the years that followed.

Kinsey’s immediate successor was a balding, well-tanned obstetrician-gynaecologist based at the Washington University Medical School in Saint Louis, Missouri, named
William Howell Masters,
born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of well-to-do parents. Bill Masters’s approach to sex research was very different from Kinsey’s. Whereas Kinsey was interested in survey research, Masters was above all a biologist, a doctor, interested in the physiology of the orgasm and orgasmic dysfunction in particular, in order to discover how sexual physiology might affect infertile couples and what could be done to help them.
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Masters had been interested in sex research since 1941, when he had worked with Dr George Washington Corner at the Carnegie Institute of Experimental Embryology in Baltimore. Corner, the mentor of Alfred Kinsey as well of Masters, later discovered progesterone, one of the two female sex hormones.
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Masters carefully prepared himself for his career in sex research – he knew that he was playing with fire and needed to be, as it were, ‘above suspicion’ professionally before he even began in the area. Throughout the 1940s he collected degrees and academic qualifications and published solid research on steroid replacement and the correct dosages for men and women. He also got married. In 1953, after both Kinsey reports had been published, he finally approached the board of trustees at his own university to request that he might study human sexual behaviour. The university was not enthusiastic, but Kinsey had established a precedent, and on grounds of academic freedom Masters was given the go-ahead a year afterward. Early on, he established that there were few books to which he could turn, and so he was soon back before the university chancellor requesting permission to mount his own first piece of research, a one-year study of prostitutes (as people who knew something about sex). Again he was given the go-ahead, but only on condition that he worked with a review board that consisted of the local commissioner of police, the head of the local Catholic archdiocese, and the publisher of the local newspaper.
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Gaining their approval, Masters spent eighteen months working with both male and female prostitutes in brothels in the Midwest, West Coast, Canada, and Mexico, investigating a variety of sexual experiences, ‘including all known variations of intercourse, oral sex, anal sex, and an assortment of fetishes.’
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He asked the prostitutes how their sex organs behaved during intercourse, and what they had observed about orgasm. In the next phase of his research, and in the greatest secrecy, Masters opened a three-room clinic on the top floor of a maternity hospital associated with the university. Apart from the office, the two back rooms were separated by a one-way mirror through which, in time, Masters filmed 382 women and 312 men having sex, providing footage of 10,000 orgasms.
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As his researches continued, Masters realised he needed a female partner, the better to understand female sexual physiology and to ask the right questions. And so, in January 1957 he was joined by
Virginia Johnson,
a singer who had no degree, which Masters believed might help her frame different questions
from himself. She became just as dedicated to ‘the cause’ as he was, and together they devised many new pieces of equipment with which to further their research; for example, there was one for measuring blood-volume changes in the penis, and ‘a nine-inch-long clear Lucite phallus with a ray of cold light emanating from its glans so that the camera lens inside the shaft’ could inspect the vaginal walls for what that might reveal about female orgasm. At that stage the main mystery of sex was felt to be the difference in women – promulgated by Freud, among others – between the clitoral and the vaginal orgasm.
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Kinsey had come out against such a distinction, and Masters and Johnson, too, never found any evidence for Freud’s theory. One of their first findings, however, was confirmation that whereas the penis was capable of only one orgasm at a time, with a refractory period in between, the clitoris was capable of repeated climax. This was an important development, ‘on an almost Copernican scale,’ in John Heidenry’s words, for it had consequences both for female psychology (sexual fulfilment was no longer modelled on that of the male) and in sex therapy.
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In a highly contentious area, Masters and Johnson’s most controversial innovation was the employment of surrogates. Prostitutes were used at first – they were available and experienced – but this provoked objections from senior figures in the university, and so they advertised for female volunteers from among students.

As they developed their studies, and techniques of therapy, some of the early results were published in professional journals such as
Obstetrics and Gynecology —
they planned a large book later on. In November 1964, however, the secrecy they had maintained for a decade was blown away when they were attacked in the pages of
Commentary
by Leslie Farber, a psychoanalyst who sniggered in print, questioning their motives.
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Their response was to bring forward publication of
Human Sexual Response
to April 1966. The book was deliberately written in a nonsensationalist, even leaden, prose, but that proved no barrier; the first printing sold out in a week, and eventually sales topped 300,000.
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Fortunately for them, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
pronounced their work worthwhile, and so most of the mainstream press treated their findings with respect. The long-term importance of Masters and Johnson, coming on top of Kinsey, was that they brought out into the open the discussion of sexual matters, throwing light on to an area where there had been darkness and ignorance before. Many people objected to this change on principle, but not those who had suffered some form of sexual dysfunction and misery for years. Masters and Johnson found, for example, that some 80 percent of couples who sought treatment for sexual dysfunction responded almost immediately, and although there were relapses, the progress of many was excellent. They also found that secondary impotence in men – caused by alcohol, fatigue, or tension – was easily treated, and that one of the effects of pornography was to give people exaggerated expectations of what they might achieve in the sex act. Far from
being
pornography,
Human Sexual Response
put pornography in its place.

The Second Sex, the Kinsey reports, and Human Sexual Response all helped
change attitudes. But they were themselves also the fruit of an attitude change that was already taking place. In Britain, this change was particularly acute owing to the war. During wartime, for example, there was in Britain a marked rise in illegitimate births, from 11.8 percent in 1942 to 14.9 percent in 1945.
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At the same time, a shortage of rubber meant that sheaths (as condoms were then called) and caps were both in short supply and substandard. Simultaneously, the main problem in the family Planning Association was subfertility. There was so much concern that, in 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast to the nation about the need to encourage ‘our people … by every means to have large families.’ This worry eventually led to the appointment, in 1944, of a Royal Commission on Population. This did not report until 1949, by which time concerns – and behaviour – had changed. The commission found, for example, that in fact, after falling continuously for half a century, family size in Britain had been comparatively stable for twenty years, at about 2.2 children per married couple, which meant a slow population increase over time.
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But it also became clear to the commission that although central government did not seem concerned about birth control (there was no provision in the new National Health Service, for example, for family planning clinics), the population at large, especially women, did take the matter very seriously indeed; they well understood the link between numbers of children and the standard of living, and they had accordingly extended their knowledge of contraception. This was yet another area of sexual behaviour where there had been many private initiatives, though no one was aware of the wider picture. In particular, the commission concluded that ‘the permeation of the small family system through nearly all classes had to be regarded as a fundamental adjustment to modern conditions in which the most significant feature was the gradual acceptance of control over the size of one’s family, particularly by means of contraception, as a normal part of personal responsibility.’
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Artificial contraception was an issue that split the church. The Anglican Church voted to approve it in 1918, but the Roman Catholic Church has not done so yet. So it is an especially poignant fact that Dr John Rock, the chief of obstetrics and gynaecology at Harvard Medical School and the man who, in 1944, became the first scientist to fertilise a human egg in a test tube and was one of the first to freeze a human sperm for up to a year without impairing its potency, was a Catholic. His initial aim was to effect the opposite of contraception, and help infertile women conceive.
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Rock believed that administering the female hormones progesterone and oestrogen might stimulate conception but also stabilise the menstrual cycle, enabling all religious couples to use the theologically sound ‘rhythm method.’
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Unfortunately the action of these hormones was only partly understood – progesterone, for example, worked because it inhibited ovulation, but exactly how was not clear. But what Rock did notice was that when he administered progesterone to a number of so-called infertile women, although the progesterone didn’t appear to work at first, a substantial number became pregnant as soon as the treatment was stopped.
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Enlisting the aid of Dr Gregory Pincus, a Harvard biologist also interested in infertility, he eventually established that a combination of oestrogen
and progesterone suppressed gonadotrophic activity and consequently prevented ovulation. Conception therefore could be prevented by taking the chemicals on the right days, so that the normal process of menstruation was interfered with. In 1956 the first clinical trials were organised by Rock and Pincus among two hundred women in Puerto Rico, since birth control was still unlawful in Massachusetts.
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When the nature of his work became known, there were attempts to have Rock excommunicated, but in 1957 the Food and Drug Administration in the United States approved the Rock-Pincus pid for treating women with menstrual disorders. Another trial followed, this time with a sample of nearly nine hundred women, the results of which were so promising that on 10 May 1960 the FDA sanctioned the use of Enovid, a birth-control pid manufactured by G. D. Searle & Co. in Chicago.
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The development rated two inches in the
New York Times,
but it was enough: by the end of 1961 some 400,000 American women were taking the pid, and that number doubled the next year and the year after that. By 1966 six million American women were on the pid, and the same number across the rest of the world.
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Some idea of the immediate success of the pid can be had from the British statistics. (Britain had a long tradition of family planning, with well-informed and proselytising volunteers, a residue of the benign end of the eugenics movement in the early years of the century. This made its statistics excellent.) In 1960, in family Planning Association clinics, 97.5 percent of new birth control clients were advised to use the cap (the pid wasn’t available in Britain until 1961); by 1975, 58 percent were advised to use the pid.
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What the research into sexual statistics showed above all was that public perceptions of intimate behaviour were, by and large, wrong, outdated. People had been changing privately, silently, in countless small ways that nonetheless added up to a sexual revolution. This is why de Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson had sold so wed; there was the thrill of recognition among the hundreds of thousands who bought their books.