Sexes: Sexology on the Defensive

New questions about the research of the pioneers

It might have been a scene from a TV courtroom drama. At the Sixth World Congress of Sexology in Washington, pioneering Sex Therapists William Masters and Virginia Johnson called a press conference to defend themselves against charges that their sex research is cryptic, slipshod and so vaguely defined that other experts cannot tell how many patients have actually been cured of their sexual woes. Have the two ever revealed their criteria for successful sex therapy? asked a reporter. "Innumerable times," answered an exasperated Masters. Did he ever reveal—sotto voce in a San Francisco bar—that a woman who has one orgasm in five years is cured of anorgasm? "I never said it," he snapped.

The press conference followed the second attack in three years on Masters and Johnson by Psychologist Bernie Zilbergeld. In a 1980 article in Psychology Today, Zilbergeld and Psychologist Michael Evans charged that the phenomenal success rate claimed by sexology's first family is bogus. In the June issue of the sex magazine Forum, Zilbergeld repeats his critique. He also claims that Masters met him in a San Francisco bar and disclosed his lax standard for successfully treating lack of orgasm in females: one orgasm during the two-week intensive therapy treatment at the Masters & Johnson Institute in St. Louis and one more orgasm at any time during the next five years. To record such minimal performance as a success flabbergasted Zilbergeld: "I was so floored that I didn't say anything more."

Questions about the credibility of Masters and Johnson's impressive clinical cures have led some sexologists to view their once hallowed work with increasing skepticism. "The foundations of sex therapy, as designed by Masters and Johnson, are shaken," says Forum Editor Philip Nobile. "The field can no longer look with certainty at the bible. The whole thrust of human sexual inadequacy is in question."

That bible is, of course, Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Inadequacy. Published in 1970, the book revolutionized the fledgling discipline of sexual therapy with its unprecedented clinical prescriptions for treating frigidity, impotence and premature ejaculation. Faultfinders contend that both Human Sexual Inadequacy and a subsequent Masters and Johnson study of homosexuality are marred by vague language and fail to provide basic criteria and measures to assess the actual number of patient failures and relapses. In cases of low sexual desire, for example, M & J report a "nonfailure" rate of 80% without explaining precisely what that means. By contrast, other sexual therapists report a success rate of less than 50% for the disorder.