William H. Masters, MD, the Vasco de Gama of the inner vagina, died last week, but his fraught sexological legacy lives on. He left a map of human sexual functioning that is gorgeously detailed in some respects, amazingly incomplete in others. A champion of the clitoris in one of the twentieth century's major sex wars and a vigorous opponent of the sexual double standard, Masters earned his stripes as a feminist hero. He insisted that people could not make assumptions about their sex partners' desires or pleasures, and the importance of his and Virginia Johnson's message — take responsibility for your own pleasure — cannot be overestimated as part of women's sexual emancipation. Yet, for all the talk about pleasure, Masters' research was all about new ways of measuring physical performance — a strain which helped set us on the path to today's gleefully mechanical sex research: the Viagrification of sexual relations.

Old news but a good read...