Masters and Johnson

Good.

And in that sort of showcasing a continuum of sex work and sort of the unique confluence of sex work and psychotherapy that is SPT, which was a part of like the Masters and Johnson, their research, right? A lot of modern sex therapy is actually directly linked to original surrogate partner therapy, which was problematic at the time, but it really did create this unique modality and paved the way for what we do now, which is evolved.

But with that, I want to make sure that I really asterisk how sex work has shaped sex therapy inherently.

You cannot separate the labor and the insights and the expertise of sex workers, many of whom were erased from a lot of research, who helped shape what people benefit from now today in our extremely sex work hostile culture.

And there's responsive desire and spontaneous desire.

You're probably familiar with those, right? So we have spontaneous desire, which is the traditional research by Masters and Johnson back then in the 60s.

But this is a very linear model of like, oh, yeah, there is a...

Touch.

But first, let's take a look at what we were taught.

So what we were taught goes all the way back to Masters and Johnson.

William Masters and Virginia Johnson studied thousands of individuals and they came up with what was called the sexual response cycle or the sexual response.

It's called the sexual response cycle.

So the sexual response cycle was essentially based on men and women who could experience orgasm.

And it's a physiological process of how they experienced it.

So those of you who have heard of Masters and Johnson, this, and those of you who haven't, because it's 1966.

So I was a kid.

And it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.

In fact, it's so common that the pioneering sex researchers, Masters and Johnson, they gave it a name back in the 1970s.

They call it spectatoring.

It means watching yourself from the outside instead of actually being in the experience of it all.

So let's go down here a Prior to the interventions developed in the last 30 years, and this is 1997 that this was published, there is no research documentation that psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy was successful in treating the problem, the orgasm problem.

Sensate focus exercises, which were developed by Masters and Johnson, were the development, okay, by Masters and Johnson in 1970 and consists of exchanging physical caresses, moving from non-sexual to increasingly sexual touch of one another's body over the course of assigned sensual experiences at home.

Okay.

So we want to continue through here.

And I'm gonna show you what the dominant models are.

Here's a detail of them.

Masters and Johnson's model in 1966, and they made an incredible contribution to the sexual medicine field.

In fact, their model of excitement, plateau, orgasm resolution, you can Google it online and you'll see excitement, plateau, orgasm, then you come down, right? Kaplan, I can't think of her first name, Kaplan in 1979, she added desire, that you would have to have basically desire, arousal, and then orgasm.

Topics like response and orgasms and, you know, what is actually, you know, how do we enjoy pleasure and why is pleasure an important part of our lives? And how do we actually understand what pleasure looks like? Right.

I mean, Masters and Johnson brought.

people into their lab in the 1960s to study this very question.

And people at the time wondered, well, why do we really need to know that? Well, if you look at just all of the sexual difficulties that about a third of people will face at some point in their lifetime, understanding response and orgasms and yes, touch and techniques and all of these things, it's not just frivolous.

Now, the sexual response cycle.

Those of you that are familiar with Masters and Johnson, 1966, they came up with a sexual response cycle.

And that sexual response cycle is a linear physiological cycle process that includes, actually Kaplan added in 1979, desire, arousal, orgasm, resolution.

And Masters and Johnson used terms like plateau, the plateau phase.

But in general, it says, if you stimulate your clitoris, if the clitoris is stimulated, or if you're sexually, genitally stimulated, and you have arousal, that that will produce an orgasm.

And that, my friends, that spot right there, that spot implicitly assumes, and you're going to see this as we get through this research, it implicitly assumes that a woman is going to transition into an altered state of consciousness.

So the research samples of non-orgasmic women in clinical reports and empirical investigations are heterogeneous with regards to disruption of earlier phases of the sexual response cycle, meaning they may not have desire, they may not have arousal, and emotional concomitance of the dysfunction.

The major treatment models, this is the highlight of what I want to share here.

So what does this all have to do with sex, desire, and intimacy? [laughs] Everything, I think.

So back in the 1970s, the sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson gave a name to something that they saw again and again.

They called it spectatoring, and it describes the experience of watching yourself during sex, almost from the outside, like you're evaluating how you look, how you're doing, whether you're responding in the way that you think you're supposed to.

Later research has linked this kind of self-monitoring with lower arousal and less satisfaction, and women in particular often describe being distracted by worries about how their bodies look.

And so really in trying to figure out how to get on the other side of that issue, I really began to educate myself.

I read Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and Shere Hite.

Mm.

So it really launched my career as a sex therapist just trying to be in the world as a lover.