Problems of Sex

Its language is deliberately dry and technical. Most of its passages would be Greek to Fanny Hill, hardly recognizable to Frank Harris. But the book, Human Sexual Response (Little, Brown, $10), published last week, is already a bestseller. Written for the medical-scientific community, by Gynecologist William H. Masters and Psychologist Virginia E. Johnson, it is being bought by the general public at the pace set by the late Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948; close to 300,000 copies to date) and the corresponding female volume (1953; more than 200,000).

The Masters-Johnson book is the first installment of their assembled findings from eleven years of research at what is now called the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation of St. Louis. Their work was supported by Washington University and its School of Medicine, where Dr. Masters, 50, is associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and where he started the first U.S. course in human sexual physiology.

It was the book's extraordinarily detailed account of the female's arousal and progression to orgasm (TIME, Jan. 7) that attracted the most immediate attention. The descriptions are based upon observations and color movies made of 10,000 orgasms, achieved by 382 women and 312 men, under laboratory conditions, sometimes in coition, sometimes by masturbatory techniques. The carefully collected data have a far more immediate application than Dr. Kinsey's massive addition to the libraries of sexology.

Dr. Masters ventured into detailed sex research after he found that many of his patients had sex problems ranging from frigidity and impotence to premature ejaculation and inability to achieve full mutual satisfaction in orgasm; from latent homosexuality to guilt feelings about masturbation, and worst of all, infertility. Because he believes in the institution of marriage and deeply deplores the frequency of divorce, Masters was convinced that only through understanding of the most basic physiologic processes could many of his patients' agonizing difficulties be resolved. And he was appalled to find that although medical scientists have thoroughly investigated abnormal sexuality, they have virtually ignored the normal. With Mrs. Johnson to help him, he set out to apply laboratory findings to his patients.

Polite Reproduction. Many of the physiologic details that Masters and Johnson have revealed may well be of primary interest only to other sexologists. But they are already being put to good medical use, helping to make it possible for supposedly infertile couples to have children, helping to prolong the enjoyment of a healthy and normal sex life for aging couples at least into their 80s. And other universities are already following Washington's lead in setting up programs for the study of what they politely call "reproduction," and treatment of associated problems.

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