1925-
Sex Researcher

Sexual Revolution.

In the 1970s Virginia Johnson and her partner William Masters were a focal point for debate about what contemporaries called the sexual revolution. They published a study of sexual dysfunction, Human Sexual Inadequacy, in 1970 and ran seminars and therapy groups to treat or prevent sexual problems. They also contributed regularly to Redbook magazine. They discussed such issues as women's liberation, "swinging" (married couples exchanging sexual partners), impotence, premature ejaculation, and situational orgasmic dysfunction. Reviews were uneven. They were accused of fostering infidelity by some critics. Germaine Greer, in her book The Female Eunuch (1970), criticized them for promoting "standard, low agitation, cool-out monogamy." If that were not confusing enough, another critic accused them of "creating the end of sex." Johnson herself insisted that the couple (who married in 1971 after more than a decade of scientific collaboration) was conservative. "It's a coincidence...