Masters and Johnson presented a sexual problem-solving book that quickly became the spark for an entirely new form of couples therapy. In Human Sexual Inadequacy and in The Pleasure Bond, they suggest techniques for slowing men down and speeding women up in their sexual response. They present sensate focus, a technique for learning to touch and be touched, and describe the “tease technique” and the “squeeze technique” to help with impotence and premature ejaculation respectively. Their diagnostic categories are based on time, on coming too soon, taking too long, or not spending enough time. Women may have problems having orgasm, but men are always orgasmic if they ejaculate, preferably “on time” for the female. For the first time, we had individual diagnosis based on two people; men were premature, but women were never postmature. Sex clinics proliferated following their work, as Masters and Johnson gave unwilling birth to the Arthur Murray “sex” studios of the seventies. While Masters and Johnson trained only a few teams, their educational programs were offered to hundreds who in turn felt themselves to be “Masters and Johnson” qualified, franchised sexperts. Unlike the first and second perspectives, this third perspective was being directly interpreted for us on talk shows and in popular magazines, each preaching the same “time-frame sex” of this third view of sexuality. Perhaps a society that now had more time to recreate and less need to procreate was more than ready for a perspective on sex that stressed efficient, effective use of our sex time.
There is no question that Masters and Johnson made a significant and lasting contribution to “democratizing” sex. Their treatment program was for couples, and even though their sexual-response model was based on the individual, they treated couples with treatment teams, and saw marriage as much more than a natural state or convenience. They saw it as a challenge, a potential for pleasure and sexual satisfaction as well as companionship, a place where time could be better controlled. In my view, the most significant contribution of Masters and Johnson was not their flawed sexual-response model, which modified the original Ellis model. Their contribution was to focus on a system, an interaction. They were a team, a man-and-woman team, and that allowed the feminist balance so lacking in the first two perspectives. They started the systerns approach to sex that I emphasize in the super marital sex perspective.
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