WORDS: Meadhbe McGrath
In the pilot for Masters of Sex, we see researcher William Masters (a fascinating yet chilling performance from Michael Sheen) and his assistant Virginia Johnson (a spectacular and immediately arresting Lizzy Caplan) struggling to get funding from his university for their study of human sexuality. The university provost (played by the amusingly prudish Beau Bridges) and the rest of Masters’ peers in 1956 are horrified by his “perverted” proposal. To Masters, it’s just science: “There are libraries on how babies are born,” he complains, “and not a single study on how babies are made!”
However, Masters is more interested in recreational rather than reproductive sex. Masters was a very typical man of his time, in that he kept his wife at home, attended church every Sunday and held politically conservative views. In spite of that, Masters’ work with Johnson helped fuel the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. The disparity between his almost clinical, passionless relations with his wife in the first few episodes and his passionate attitude to his work is quite jarring.
Sheen has discussed Masters as an unlikely feminist hero: “He was fairly typical, and yet the work that he did played a part in creating a whole new era of female sexuality and gender politics. It was quite surprising that his work was so progressive and led to so many changes that we’re still living through, in terms of how women are perceived in our society and in our culture, and yet he was even more than typical — he was quite extreme in how he personally dealt with women.”
Despite its terrible and shamelessly attention-grabbing title, the show treats sex more seriously than its fellow primetime cable shows. With sex as its subject, it could be expected that the show would provide graphic sex scenes and nudity merely for viewers’ titillation. However, the show is just the right amount of sexy — rather than fetishising sex and nudity, Masters of Sex considers sex as natural and pleasurable. Since the show focuses on researching and demystifying sex, the scenes are frequently awkward and funny rather than erotic.
Unlike many shows that privilege the heterosexual male gaze and male sexual experience, such as Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones (of which we have come to expect graphic sex scenes as a crucial part of their formula), Masters of Sex explores female sexuality from a definitively sex-positive position, portraying women as dynamic sexual beings. The show treats sex and masturbation as things to be experimented with and discussed, rather than dismissed as vulgar and shameful.
It seems fitting that Masters of Sex premieres so close to the finales of Dexter and Breaking Bad, two of the key purveyors of the violent anti-hero. Although TV is undoubtedly nowhere near finished with violence or anti-heroism, Masters of Sex suggests an exciting new route for cable dramas, offering an intriguing storyline and an original protagonist neither classically heroic nor anti-heroic, as well as an ambitious subject matter that remains relevant today, fifty years on.
