B-8
THE NEW MEXICAN Friday, July 26, 2013
Along with William Masters, her longtime research partner, Virginia Johnson became a celebrity as she built on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Kinsey to erase the taboo surrounding human sexuality. COURTESY PHOTO
VIRGINIA JOHNSON, 1925-2013
Researcher’s focus was sex By Emily Langer
The Washington Post
V
Today’s talk shows 3:00 p.m. KASA Steve Harvey KOAT The Ellen DeGeneres Show Actor Jude Law; Blind Pilot performs. KRQE Dr. Phil KTFQ Laura KWBQ The Bill Cunningham Show KLUZ El Gordo y la Flaca KASY Jerry Springer CNN The Situation Room FNC The Five 3:30 p.m. CNBC Options Action 4:00 p.m. KOAT The Dr. Oz Show KTEL Al Rojo Vivo con María Celeste KASY The Steve Wilkos Show FNC Special Report With Bret Baier 5:00 p.m. KCHF The 700 Club KASY Maury FNC The FOX Report With Shepard Smith 6:00 p.m. CNN Anderson Cooper 360 FNC The O’Reilly Factor
7:00 p.m. CNN Piers Morgan Live FNC Hannity MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show 8:00 p.m. E! E! News FNC On the Record With Greta Van Susteren 8:30 p.m. KNME Washington Week With Gwen Ifill 9:00 p.m. FNC The O’Reilly Factor 10:00 p.m. KTEL Al Rojo Vivo FNC Hannity 10:35 p.m. KOB The Tonight Show With Jay Leno Katy Perry; Cris Collinsworth; Kacey Musgraves performs. KRQE Late Show With David Letterman Actor Adam Sandler; Joseph Arthur performs. 11:00 p.m. KNME Charlie Rose KOAT Jimmy Kimmel Live Maggie Gyllenhaal; Dean Norris; Empire of the Sun performs.
HBO Real Time With Bill Maher Author Reza Aslan; former Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio); former Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D-N.Y.). 11:37 p.m. KRQE The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson Actress Lisa Kudrow; comic Michael McDonald. 12:00 a.m. KASA Dish Nation E! Chelsea Lately Snoop Lion is promoting Turbo; Thomas Dale; Kerri Kenney-Silver; James Davis. FNC The Five 12:02 a.m. KOAT Nightline 12:07 a.m. KOB Late Night With Jimmy Fallon Liev Schreiber; Anthony Anderson; Imagine Dragons perform. 12:30 a.m. E! E! News 1:00 a.m. KCHF The 700 Club FNC Red Eye 1:07 a.m. KOB Last Call With Carson Daly Singer Pete Wentz; No Place on Earth; Tift Merritt performs.
TV
1
top picks
6 p.m. on TNT Movie: Shooter Mark Wahlberg plays tough in this 2007 action tale as former military sniper Bob Swagger, who learns about an assassination plot on the U.S. president. He ends up being framed for the attempt and is forced to go on the run, but never fear: Swagger will have his revenge. Michael Pena, Danny Glover, Kate Mara, Rhona Mitra, Elias Koteas and Tate Donovan co-star. 7 p.m. on ABC Shark Tank A third-generation cattleman from Peoria, Ill., approaches the Sharks for seed money for his line of gourmet meats, while a San Diego man has an innovative filtered bottle that makes dirty water potable. A chemical engineer from New Orleans pitches a spandex bodysuit that he hopes to turn into the next big thing, while two Las Vegas men seek investment in their creation, a cooler with interior LED lighting. 7 p.m. on CBS ACM Presents: Tim McGraw’s Superstar Summer Night Not for country fans only, this special has McGraw performing with and introducing a diverse lineup of artists that includes Nelly, Ne-Yo, Pitbull and John Fogerty. The Band Perry, Keith Urban, Lady Antebellum, Taylor Swift,
Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley and McGraw’s wife, Faith Hill, are also in the lineup. 8:30 p.m. on TNT 72 Hours Talk to anyone who lives in the Rocky Mountains, and he’ll tell you about “nature’s snow shovel” — aka the 80-degree days that can often follow major snowfalls. In the new episode “Rockies,” those are the types of unpredictable conditions the teams must face as they make their way through the range’s towering southern peaks. 9 p.m. on KRQE Blue Bloods As Jamie (Will Estes, pictured) comes to grips with the consequences of his actions on the job, Erin (Bridget Moynahan) questions Mayor Poole (David Ramsey) on the witness stand. Susie Essman (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Annabella Sciorra guest star in “Front Page News.”
2
4
3
5
irginia Johnson, the female half of the Masters and Johnson scientific research duo that in the late 1960s redefined sex as a quantifiable, perfectible pleasure of human life to be pursued without guilt or fear, died Wednesday in St. Louis. She was 88. The cause was complications from heart disease, said her son, Scott Johnson. Johnson grew up on a Missouri farm, had no college degree and by the end of her career was nationally recognized as one of the most daring researchers of the postwar era. Along with William Masters, her longtime research partner and onetime husband, Johnson built on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Kinsey to erase the taboo surrounding human sexuality. Kinsey, the author of the Kinsey Reports on sexual behavior published in the late 1940s and early ’50s, had largely focused on personal accounts of sex for his work. Masters and Johnson took a different approach: They took sex into a laboratory setting, where it could be studied with scientific rigor. Their findings, first published in 1966 in the bestselling book Human Sexual Response and later explored in volumes such as Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), impressed academics and titillated a nation in the throes of the sexual revolution. Of Masters and Johnson’s early readers, the oldest were born in the Victorian age. The youngest came of age in the era of Marilyn Monroe. Those not scandalized by the duo’s candid remarks found a measure of comfort in the material. In the mid-1950s, Masters was a gynecologist working in St. Louis at Washington University’s medical school on a study of sex that ultimately would include 694 volunteers — 312 men and 382 women ranging in age from 18 to 89. The project was initially funded by the National Institutes of Health and later by private donors, including the Playboy Foundation. Masters instinctively understood that, to work, the project would need a woman with him at the helm. So it was that in 1957 he hired Johnson, a former country singer and divorced mother of two who was looking for work while she studied sociology at Washington University. At a time when many scientists did not consider sex a legitimate field of scientific inquiry, Masters risked his professional reputation to pursue the project. But by one interpretation, Johnson risked even more. Ladies of her generation had not been brought
up to discuss — much less seek — sexual satisfaction. Over time, she ascended from assistant to co-director of the Masters and Johnson Institute, as it became known. She was said to have brought a more inviting, welcoming manner that compensated for Masters’ scientific bearing. She pushed for them to appear on television and in other mass media outlets such as Playboy and Redbook magazines. Besides outraged moralists, their detractors included critics who resented the fact that Human Sexual Response seemed to overlook the mystical nature of love. The book was read by some, Time magazine wrote, to “suggest that good sex, like golf, is a matter of technique.” Johnson flatly denied that such was the intention. “I hope the whole mechanical myth will go down the drain,” she told Time. “I’m tired of it.” Mary Virginia Eshelman was born Feb. 11, 1925, in Springfield, Mo. “I grew up with the sense,” she once told The Washington Post, “that accomplishment and talent were marvelous, but that marriage was the primary goal.” She showed early promise as a singer, and she studied music, sociology and psychology. Her early jobs included stints as a radio country music singer, a newspaper reporter covering business, and a market research assistant for a CBS affiliate in Illinois. With musician George Johnson, whom she married and later divorced, she had two children. Survivors include her son, Scott Johnson, and her daughter, Lisa Young, both of St. Louis; and two grandchildren. Johnson and Masters were married in 1971 and divorced in 1993. He died in 2001 at 85. Their later books included The Pleasure Bond (1974), written with Robert Levin, and Homosexuality in Perspective (1979). With Robert Kolodny, they wrote Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving (1986). In 1988, also with Kolodny, they wrote Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS, which U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop criticized as “irresponsible” for what he called its use of “scare tactics” in addressing the spread of AIDS. Johnson said the work of destigmatizing sex would be long. “We’ll need two generations,” she once told an interviewer, “who grow up believing that sex is honorable and good for its own sake, and not something to be kept hidden away in a jewel box to be taken down for festival occasions on Friday and Saturday nights.”