Experiments and Therapy
The subjects of a 1968 Playboy interview, gynecologist Dr. William Masters and his psychologist associate Mrs. Virginia Johnson discuss their book, Human Sexual Response. For their groundbreaking work, Masters and Johnson conducted sexual experiments on participants to gain an understanding of the science behind human sexuality and sex organs. For example, they explored the function of the clitoris, and the introduction to the interview claims their work is a result of "the most unusual experiments ever conducted in the history of science." Their laboratory work and resulting book led to immense controversy, receiving great criticism from Ladies Home Journal. Masters and Johnson are referenced almost regularly in Playboy after this interview and are debated and commented on in the Playboy Forum for years. The comical medical cartoon in which a determined, naked woman sits on a lab table with the caption, “She says she wants to give her body to medical science now,” is surely based on this interview as they were published in the same issue of Playboy.
By 1974, Linda Wolfe investigates sex-therapy clinics in her article, "Take Two Aspirins and Masturbate." She discusses the practice of therapists training, then prescribing, women to masturbate and another method of using sexual surrogates to achieve the same goal. Wolfe points out, "Four years ago, we had no sex-therapy clinics," and contextualizes this within Masters' and Johnson's second book, Human Sexual Inadequacy.
Due to the Sexual Revolution, sex and sexuality became scientific studies that contributed to our knowledge unlike ever before. Such discoveries quickly led to the development of further practices like sex-therapy. Through Playboy, we clearly see the impact of the Revolution; these articles support the Philosophy by educating their readers and engaging them in such developments.