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Hollywood has always played fast and loose with the phrase "based on a true story," so it'd be understandable if you take the bawdy (and excellent!) Showtime drama Masters of Sex with a grain of salt. All things considered, though, the series tries hard to portray the work of pioneering sex researchers Dr. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson. (The pair demonstrated that women can have multiple orgasms—who'd have thunk?) But how many of the show's titillating escapades are real and how many are small-screen embellishments?
As it turns out, more often than not, the writers aren't faking: Masters and Johnson really did watch hundreds of real, live humans have sex in their lab starting in the late 1950s. Strangely enough, when the show does take liberties, it's often to make events seem less strange rather than more. Here are some instances where reality, for once, was often stranger than fiction.
Nathan Reese is a News Editor at Complex. He tweets here.
Therapy was pricier.
Masters and Johnson paved the way for couple's sex therapy, and due to their near-celebrity status they could charge an arm and a leg (or possibly another appendage) for their services. A two-week course for what they called “dual therapy” cost up to $10,000 for just two weeks. Then again, that's a small price to pay for a healthy sex life.
They partied harder.
After gaining national notoriety for their research by the late '60s, Masters and Johnson started living the high life. Part of the perks, aside from regular media appearances, was the support of high profile public figures—among them Playboy Editor-in-Chief Hugh Hefner. (Hefner once said that "Masters and Johnson showed tremendous courage in their research.") In fact, when Masters and Johnson visited Chicago they often stayed and hung out at the original Playboy Mansion. According to the nonfiction book on which the show is based, Johnson loved the fact that Hef would leave cookies out for his guests. Apparently when you watch hundreds of people bone down for a living, a good-old-fashioned oatmeal raisin starts to look like a treat.
Some results were dubious.
While the show presents Masters as a fairly progressive and empathetic guy in terms of homosexuality—the subplot story of the closeted dean is truly heartbreaking—he had a complicated relationship with his gay and lesbian patients, to say the least. From the late '60s to the early '70s, Masters and Johnson claim to have treated or "converted" many gay patients. Their controversial 1979 book Homosexuality In Perspective was positive in that it didn't portray homosexuality as mental disorder per se, but further pushed their belief that homosexuality is a choice and not an orientation. (Masters' research has been accused of being entirely falsified.) The American Psychiatric Association now condemns conversion therapy and virtually all reputable medical professionals agree that it unethical. There's no avoiding the fact that this is a disturbing black mark on Masters and Johnson's legacy.
Masters' son is a pervert.
Masters may have been notoriously clinical in his attitude toward sex, but it seems being constantly surrounded by sexuality may have had the opposite effect on his son. William Masters' son, William H. Masters III, has had run-ins with the law for publicly exposing himself in both New York's Central Park and a Michigan river. "A completely nude William H. Masters III yelled for the attention of the two female kayakers on Saturday, then made obscene gestures from the bank of the Pinnebog River," reported Huffington Post. While it's perhaps dubious to draw conclusions between the father's research and the son's prurient behavior, it's definitely a strange footnote on Masters' life.
Their relationship was stranger.
While the show would have us believe that Masters and Johnson's affair slowly evolved under the pretense of "research," the true story is quite different. Apparently, when Masters hired Johnson to be his research assistant in 1957 he made it clear from the beginning that sex was part of the deal. Later, however, Masters claimed that their partnership and marriage was largely to enhance his notoriety. According to biographer Thomas Maier, "The thing that was most important to him was not his family, not even necessarily his relationship with Virginia — it was that work that they were doing, that brand name of Masters and Johnson. And so Masters ended his long marriage, told his kids that he was divorcing their mother, and got married to Virginia." Masters eventually divorced Johnson for a medical school crush in the early '90s. So, yeah, dude was kind of a dick.
The amount of sex was staggering.
Masters of Sex does not shy away from the "sex" part of the story, but it's still worth taking a look at the actual number of subjects Masters and Johnson watched getting down. Over the course of their research they watched 382 women and 312 men copulate for a cumulative 10,000 "complete cycles of sexual response." That is an enormous amount of orgasms.
"Ulysses" was downright dangerous.
Ulysses, the infamous camera-equipped dildo from the show, was indeed real. However, the prop designers had to recreate it using vintage catalogs from the time. While the characters joke about losing an eye on account of the substantial phallus, one medical researcher did in fact get poked in the eyeball when he was looking to closely into the camera. The name Ulysses is a pun relating to the ancient Greek hero's battle with the Cyclops—get it? Also related: The conscientious Johnson would always warm the tool with a hot towel before subjects put it to use.
The university was actually cool with the research.
Contrary to the show's portrayal of the stodgy faculty's battle with Masters' controversial research, in reality Masters had support from the academic community. Though there was some resistance due to the explicit subject matter, it wasn't the underground research operation that the show makes out. (The part of about Masters spying on prostitutes through a peephole, however, is true to the facts.) Masters was relatively well respected, but he did feel slighted by the academic community—if not persecuted. As Thomas Maier explained to NPR, "It was always [a] problem for them that the subject of sex was something that medicine, they felt, should get involved in, but medicine wasn't really willing to do so."
The sex was kinkier.
While it's true that Masters had members of the public engage in sexual activity for his experiments, the actual interactions were far more bizarre than the show lets on. Aside from assigning people partners, Masters had his subjects wear paper bags on their heads to preserve anonymity. That's right, two electrode-covered strangers would fuck in a research lab with actual bags over their heads. It doesn't get any weirder than that.
