by Peter Watson
De Beauvoir relied on her own experience, supported by wide reading, and she also carried out a series of interviews with total strangers. The book is in two parts – the French edition was published in two volumes. Book I, called Facts and Myths, provides an historical overview of women and is itself divided into three. In ‘Destiny,’ the female predicament is examined from a biological, psychoanalytic, and historical standpoint. In the historical section women are described, for example, in the Middle Ages, in primitive societies, and in the Enlightenment, and she closes the section with an account of present-day women. In the section on myth she examines the treatment of women in five (male) authors: Henri de Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, André Breton, and Stendhal. She did not like Lawrence, believing his stories to be ‘tedious,’ though she conceded that ‘he writes the simple truth about love.’ On the other hand, she felt that Stendhal was ‘the greatest French novelist.’ The second volume, or book 2, is called Women’s Life Today and explores childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age.8 She writes of love, sex, marriage, lesbianism. She made use of her impressive gallery of friends and acquaintances, spending several mornings with Lévi-Strauss discussing anthropology and with Jacques Lacan learning about psychoanalysis.9 Algren’s influence is as much evident in the book as Sartre’s. It was the American who had suggested she also look at black women in a prejudicial society and introduced her not only to black Americans but to the literature on race, including Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Initially she thought of calling her book The Other Sex; the title used, The Second Sex, was suggested by Jacques-Laurent Bost, one of the premiers disciples of Sartre, during an evening’s drinking in a Left Bank café.10
When The Second Sex appeared, there were those critics (as there are always those critics) who complained that she didn’t say anything new. But there were many more who felt she had put her finger on something that other people, other women, were working out for themselves at that time, and moreover that, in doing her research, she had provided them with ammunition: ‘She had provided a generation of women with a voice.’11The book was translated into English very early, thanks to Blanche Knopf – wife of the publisher Alfred – whose attention had been drawn to the book by the Gallimard family when she was on a visit to Paris. Conscious of the great interest among American students in the bohemia of the Left Bank at the time, both Blanche and Alfred believed the book was bound to be a sound commercial proposition. They were right. When the book was released in America in February 1953, it was by and large well received, though there were several reviewers – Stevie Smith and Charles Rodo among them – who didn’t like her tone, who thought she ‘carried the feminist grievance too far.’12 The most interesting reaction, however, was that of the editors of the Saturday Review of Literature, who believed the book’s theme was too large for one reviewer and so commissioned six, among them the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, Margaret Mead, and another anthropologist, Ashley Montagu. Mead found the book’s central argument – that society has wasted women’s gifts – a sound one but added that de Beauvoir had violated every canon of science in her partisan selection of material. Above ad, however, de Beauvoir’s book was taken seriously, which meant that the issues it raised were considered soberly, something that had not always happened. De Beauvoir’s strange idea that women represented ‘the other’ in society caught on, and would much infuse the feminine movement in years to come. Brendan Gill, in a review entitled ‘No More Eve’ in the New Yorker, summed up his reaction in a way others have noted: ‘What we are faced with is more than a work of scholarship; it is a work of art, with the salt of recklessness that makes art sting.13
When Blanche Knopf had first come across The Second Sex, on her visit to Paris, her appetite had been whetted on being told that it read like ‘a cross between Havelock Ellis and the Kinsey Report.14 Havelock Ellis was old news; Studies in the Psychology of Sex, begun in 1897, had ceased publication as long ago as 1928, and he had been dead since 1939. The Kinsey Report, however, was new. Like The Second Sex, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male reflected a changed, postwar world.
The generation that came back from World War II settled down almost immediately. They took opportunities to be educated, they got married – and then proceeded to have more children than their parents’ generation: this was the baby boom. But they had seen life; they knew its attractions, and they knew its shallows. Living in close proximity to others, often in conditions of great danger, they had known intimacy as few people experience it. So they were particularly aware that there was a marked gap between the way people were supposed to behave and the way they did behave. And perhaps this gap was greatest in one area: sex. Of course, sex happened before World War II, but it wasn’t talked about to anywhere near the same extent. When the Lynds carried out their study of Middletown in the 1920s, they had looked at marriage and dating, but not at sex per se. In fact, though, they had chronicled the one important social change that was to alter behaviour in this regard in the 1930s more than anything else: the motor car. The car took adolescents out of the home and away from parental supervision. It took adolescents to meeting places with their friends, as often as not the movie houses where Hollywood was selling the idea of romance. Most important of all, the car provided an alternative venue, a private area where intimate behaviour could take place. All of which meant that, by the late 1940s, behaviour had changed, but public perceptions of that behaviour had not kept up. It is this which mainly accounts for the unprecedented reception of a dry, 804-page academic report that appeared in 1948 under the title Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. The author was a professor of zoology at the University of Indiana (not so far from Muncie).15 The medical publisher who released the book printed an initial run of 5,000 copies but before long realised his error.16 Nearly a quarter of a million copies were eventually sold, and the book spent twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Alfred Kinsey, the professor of zoology, became famous and appeared on the cover of Time magazine.17
The scientific tone of the book clearly helped. Its elaborate charts and graphs, methodological discussions of the interviewing process, and consideration of the validity of ‘the data’, set it apart from pornography and allowed people to discuss sex in detail without appearing prurient or salacious. Moreover, Kinsey was an unlikely figure to spark such controversy. He had built his reputation on the study of wasps. His interest in human sexuality had begun when he had taught a course on marriage and the family in the late 1930s. He found students hungry for ‘accurate, unbiased information about sex,’ and indeed, being a scientist, Kinsey was dismayed by the dearth of ‘reliable, non-moralistic data’ concerning human sexual behaviour.18 He therefore began to amass his own statistics by recording the sexual practices of students. He subsequently put together a small team of researchers and trained them in interviewing techniques, which meant they could explore a subject’s sex life in about two hours. Over ten years he collected material on 18,000 men and women.19
In their study Sexuality in America, John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman say, ‘Behind the scientific prose of Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male lay the most elaborate description of the sexual habits of ordinary white Americans (or anyone, for that matter) ever assembled. In great detail, Kinsey tabulated the frequency and incidence of masturbation, premarital petting and coitus, marital intercourse, extramarital sex, homosexuality, and animal contacts. Avoiding as far as possible the moralistic tone he disliked in other works, Kinsey adopted a “count-and-catalogue” stance: how many respondents had done what, how many times and at what ages. His findings proved shocking to traditional moralists.’20 His study of the male revealed, for example, that masturbation and heterosexual petting were ‘nearly universal, that almost nine out of ten men had sex before marriage, that half had affairs, and that over a third of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience.’ Virtually all males had established a regular sexual outlet by the age of fifteen, and ‘fully 95 per
cent had violated the law at least once on the way to orgasm.’21 A second volume in the series, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, was published in 1953 and caused a similar storm. Although the figures for women were lower (and less shocking) than for men, six out of ten had engaged in masturbation, half had had sex before marriage, and a quarter had had affairs.22 Taken together, Kinsey’s statistics pointed to a vast hidden world of sexual experience sharply at odds with publicly espoused norms. The reports became cultural landmarks.23 But perhaps the most interesting reaction was the public’s. In general there was no shock/horror reaction from middle America. Instead, opinion polls suggested that a large majority of the public approved of scientific research on sexuality and were eager to learn more. Undoubtedly, the revelation of a wide divergence between ideals and actual behaviour alleviated the anxiety of many individuals as to whether their own private behaviour set them apart from others.
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.’24 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.25 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.26 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.27
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.28 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.29 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.’30 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.31
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.32 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.33 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.34 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 300,000.35 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 yea
rs. 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.