{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021972884525479196, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005142589995324918, 'mean_word_length': 5.114285714285714, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 2, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love by Thomas Maier (review)

Since Paul Robinson’s pivotal but now dated Modernization of Sex, interest in Alfred Kinsey has eclipsed that in William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Kinsey’s 1948 and 1953 reports on human sexual behavior enter historical narratives as landmarks in the sexual revolution and queer visibility. Kinsey himself arouses perpetual interest; castigated by Andrea Dworkin, applauded by Thomas Waugh, and even played on film by Liam Neeson, the Indiana entomologist turned sex researcher has taken on symbolic value as a sort of American sexual Prometheus. Memory has been less kind to Masters and Johnson, and they bear a fair portion of the blame. They amassed no massive historical sex archive to keep their names afloat to historians. Their landmark Human Sexual Response is turgidly written, with key findings disputed at best. In contrast to Kinsey’s counternormative rejection of antigay moralizing, they willingly and foolishly enlisted in misguided sexual-conversion endorsements and AIDS-era fear mongering that continue to sully their reputations. None of this has inspired historians to come calling, and it is thus left to biographer Thomas Maier to excavate the Masters and Johnson story. From the subtitle’s awkward claim of their having “taught America how to love” through the loose reference style, it is clear this is not a formal scholarly endeavor. Yet Maier has accessed new sources, including interviews and internal documents from their clinic, and historians will want to read this for the information if not always the analysis. While scholars and lovers of good prose may wince at an opening tale in which “two teens lost their innocence,” Maier effectively reconstructs the lives of both the rambunctious Johnson, who openly “enjoyed sex” despite initially lacking a lexicon to articulate her desires, and the more reserved Masters, as clinical in his personal relations as in his work in obstetrics and gynecology (4, 17). On matters of methodology, Maier says little that