As the 1960s rolled around, changing times and technology meant that much of the next act in the dramatic history of sex research was caught on film. Starting not long after Kinsey’s explosive book on women was published, American medical researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson began what would become their world-famous laboratory investigations. Their team would ultimately film hundreds of men and women engaged in sexual acts, including intercourse and masturbation. They would document more than 10 000 orgasms, measuring all manner of physiological responses, trying to gain insights into the nature of sex.17 Their work produced detailed descriptions of the major changes in the human body associated with sex, like blood flow to the genitals, vaginal lubrication and nipple hardening, as well as the celebrated phenomenon of the multiple orgasm. Based on their measurements, the pair described a ‘sexual response cycle’ that included the four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution. Their observations of the patterns of sexual arousal and orgasm, similar in men and women, played a key role in further developing scientific understanding of sex. They also influenced the controversial definitions of ‘female sexual dysfunction’ that would emerge decades later.
Masters and Johnson also did their bit to shatter myths about sex and older women. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ they observed, ‘than the oft-expressed concept that aging women do not maintain a high level of sexual orientation.’18 While older women experience physical changes like a thinning of the skin of the vaginal walls and a slowing in lubrication, these researchers found no decline in the functioning of the clitoris, which their observations had confirmed as central to the female orgasm.19 In other words, the changing frequency of sexual activity over a woman’s life, or the slowing down that can come during a long relationship, were not necessarily the same as a decline in the capacity to function sexually.
Like Kinsey, Masters and Johnson didn’t like the word ‘frigidity’, and they chose instead to use words considered then to be less judgemental like ‘inadequacy’ or ‘dysfunction’. As for the sources of people’s sexual problems, the couple saw a complex set of causes, including physical or biological factors. But even though they were working within a medical framework, they also emphasised the psychological, social and cultural causes of sexual problems—including forces like religions, responsible for so much guilt and shame. These cultural causes, they said, more often than not placed a woman in a position where ‘she must adapt, sublimate, inhibit or even distort her natural capacity to function sexually’.20
These comments about women ‘inhibiting’ and ‘adapting’ their sexuality foreshadowed debates that would appear much later about how to define women’s sexual troubles. Where drug companies are now trying to portray an individual with low desire as having a disorder to be fixed with pills, others see the normal behaviour of a healthy woman adapting to her surroundings, whether that might be an unhappy relationship, an early experience of abuse, or simply the pressures of trying to juggle the toddlers, the job and a chronic lack of sleep. No one dismisses the pain of a woman distressed by a debilitating lack of desire, or by the damage to her relationship that can come if her partner is saddened or angered by it. The question is how to best describe, understand and deal with it.
Delving into the debates about the causes of sexual difficulties can be both intriguing and frustrating. While one learns a lot about the reasons for dissatisfaction and discontent, it is rarely clear what the best ways to address them might be. Something receiving a lot of public attention at the moment is the decline in desire that can happen at different times during a relationship. It goes without saying that sexual interest waxes and wanes over time, depending on where you are in life, whether you’re single or with a partner, and the point at which you are in a relationship. But this specific challenge of maintaining a healthy and happy sexual life within a long-term relationship has been a key interest of many sex researchers, including Alfred Kinsey. His view was that men and women in relationships tend to want a range of partners and sexual experiences, a point emphasised colourfully in the Hollywood film of his life, Kinsey.
‘Reconciliation of the married individual’s desire for a variety of sexual partners and the maintenance of a stable marriage presents a problem which has not been satisfactorily resolved in our culture,’ says Liam Neeson, the actor playing Kinsey.21 The words are uttered during a presentation given to his peers, moments before he collapses under the combined weight of the attacks being waged on his work and the sheer enormity of the task of trying to understand human sexuality. Half a century later, though the idea of lifelong marriage has faded considerably since the 1950s, the issue of the waxing and waning of desire in a loving relationship remains resolutely unresolved. Couples obviously go through periods of more or less sex, depending on whether they’re relaxing on vacation or straining under the weight of work stresses. However, as Leonore Tiefer argues, the pharmaceutical industry is putting more focus on the waning of sexual interest as a problem, helping to construct the idea that a more constant and consistent level of desire is somehow the norm. ‘It’s sinister and it’s insidious,’ she says.22
Back when William Masters and Virginia Johnson were writing their books, Viagra, the blue pill for boys, wasn’t yet even a twinkle in a marketer’s eye. Back then, sex therapy was seen as one of the main solutions for sexual problems. Masters and Johnson’s influential model of couple therapy, developed at their clinic in St Louis, involved both members of the couple and two therapists working intensively for a matter of weeks. Masters and Johnson claimed that this approach was very effective, though they are known more for their research and publications than for the rigour of their scientific self-assessment, so we’re not really sure how well their sessions worked.
‘It is to be hoped that human sexual inadequacy . . . will be rendered obsolete in the next decade,’ Masters and Johnson wrote optimistically in the opening to a book they published in 1970.23 The hope of successfully battling the species’ sexual inadequacy in the space of a decade is certainly an honourable one, but it seems just a little unrealistic. It is worth reflecting, though, that these sorts of optimistic sentiments about treating, preventing and ultimately eradicating sexual problems are rarely heard any more, with corporations so reliant on selling drugs to people long term. If sexual problems were capable of being done away with via short bursts of intensive therapy, there would be no lucrative markets for the ongoing use of expensive drugs. In the 1970s, though, the pharmaceutical solutions were still some way off.
In 1976 the world’s understanding of female sexuality took another step forward with the publication of The Hite Report.24 Written by the feminist and educator Shere Hite, the report featured many explicit and engaging personal revelations about sexual experiences gathered from hundreds of women. Its key messages included that most woman could most easily reach climax through direct clitoral stimulation, that intercourse alone didn’t generally provide enough to do the job, and that women who were unable to orgasm vaginally were in no way frigid, inadequate or dysfunctional. Like most major works on sexuality, the report has been heavily criticised, not least for its unrepresentative sample; however, its influence is unquestioned. Hite’s book sold millions of copies, was translated into many languages and took pride of place on bookshelves all over the planet.
Needless to say, despite growing sexual awareness, the quaint hope that all our sexual inadequacies would be eradicated by the year 1980 didn’t come to pass. The emphasis on sex therapy and the benefits of counselling as a way of dealing with sexual problems continued, but by the early 1990s a monumental change was coming to the world of sexuality. Researchers testing an experimental heart drug accidentally discovered it could increase blood flow to the genitals, and men’s erections could be improved as a result. Viagra burst on to the scene and the biggest drug company in the world launched one of the most successful marketing campaigns in human history. Advertised at first by an aging politician as a treatment for a medical condition called ‘erectile dysfunction’, suffered predominantly by older men, the