In Which We Routinely Roll Our Eyes At Institutional Sexism

For Sex and For Science

by RACHEL SYKES

Masters of Sex
creator Michelle Ashford

There is an awkward moment in the second episode of Showtime’s Masters of Sex, and it happens fully clothed. It’s October 1956 and a young woman, called Jane, is reading alone in the canteen of Washington University Hospital when she is approached by two men. The first is married and intent on beginning an affair which she, politely, declines. The second asks her to recommend the sluttiest girl in the room. Again, Jane declines, laughing at both parties as she pulls the book’s title into view. As she reads aloud, the audience is copied in on the joke. These men never had a chance: Jane’s reading The Second Sex. 

The prop department’s brief nod to philosophy would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sincere. Jane’s moment of triumph in the canteen is short, but the agenda bashing flash of The Second Sex is part of a disarming directness that runs throughout the show’s opening episodes.

Based on Thomas Maier’s 2009 biography, and inheriting its unenviable title, Masters of Sex is the True Hollywood Story of respected gynaecologist William H. Masters (Michael Sheen) and his secretary-turned-collaborator Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) as they begin their ground-breaking research into human sexuality.

This much history, and Google, can fill in: Masters and Johnson worked for nearly forty years to develop a scientific dialect for the various stages of copulation, tireless in their pursuit of a language for orgasm that moved beyond puritanism and witchcraft. From the first episode, we see the difficulties of turning sex into science; their work was in constant danger of being shut down, by every possible authority. Masters of Sex begins with their first tentative, illegal encounters as they trail brothels in search of willing subjects, and continues as Masters, a frigid but rigorous scientist, and Johnson, a sex positive anachronism, convince the chastened university to work in their (sexual) favour.

With this relationship at its heart, Masters of Sex can’t afford to stand on ceremony. It’s a tale of unravelling and revealing, of candour and seriousness, of reclaiming what is deemed unknowable as a field of potential discovery. Sex is the ultimate unmentionable and the clothes are off within the first few minutes. By the end of the pilot, Masters and Johnson are brandishing a vibrator/camera named ‘Ulysses’ as the provost of the university (a wonderfully perplexed Beau Bridges) internally monitors poor Jane’s climax.

To both anticipate and suppress the snickers, however, Masters of Sex offers up a sincerity which, it turns out, is the most disarming of their devices. Take Jane, for example. Despite the fact that her boss is sitting somewhere between her thighs, Johnson coerces her into staying with a series of grandiose and po-faced lies. “He’s not watching you,” she claims, “He’s watching science.” This is a line that Johnson peddles repeatedly and that people repeatedly buy, slowly building the idea that this study could be the greatest step for women since they obtained the right to vote.

Jane blithely and robotically chants about her contribution to science, and Masters, too, states motives of the highest order, ranting to the disapproving provost that he studies in the name of truth, unchartered territory, and, of course, the Nobel Prize. “Science!” is the show’s real battle cry, but it becomes more of a central thesis then the sex itself.

Masters of Sex was created by Michelle Ashford, the show runner on HBO’s The Pacific and John Adams. Ashford describes herself as “a perpetual student” and her loyalty to historical detail, to biography, make her shows oddly free of subtext. This is even more evident in Masters of Sex where the title gives up the game before any flesh has reached the screen; Ashford seems to embrace the fact that the story’s end is a foregone conclusion. This is a show refreshingly unafraid of spoilers, liberated by the fact that there’s no detail on Masters and Johnson that couldn’t be looked up online.

In other words, it’s a show without a climax, and a show about sex without a climax. Stripped of intrigue, it’s also markedly different from Mad Men to whom comparisons seem inevitable, if a little unfair. It’s not until midway through the pilot episode, as Caplan gamely juggles a mid-century secretarial pool and a wrathful ex-lover, that you realise how Draper might have ruined it for the rest.

When Sheen is introduced to the audience as Masters, at a lavish dinner in his honour, we can’t help but ask what’s wrong with him. But unlike Mad Men, where each episode is bound up in the slow reveal of hidden foibles, everything is already on display. To make this point more blatant, Masters proposes sex to Johnson, as part of their experiment, within the first episode. Is he attracted to her? More than likely. But Ashford knows there’s no point in keeping the audience guessing. 

What’s telling, though, is the weight of this hindsight. If we think about that moment with The Second Sex once more, we suppose that Jane can laugh as the men approach because she knows that the tide is turning. We, the audience, see change as inevitable because we live in the progressive future. But the bluntness of this technique is also a kind of double-bluff. Masters of Sex approaches sexism with the same sensibility of Mad Men, presenting it as so overwhelmingly pervasive that it constantly knocks you on the head. When we meet Virginia Johnson, we roll our eyes at the institutional sexism she faces just to enter the typing pool. Yet we only laugh at how times have changed before we realise how little they have. De Beauvoir hovers somewhere out of shot not from narrative ham-fistedness, but because it is still jarring to see her name in passing. And we can only laugh at the prudishness of the 1950s, until the instinct to giggle takes us over.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about the storm outside.

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The New Destitution

by DAYNA EVANS

2 Broke Girls
creators Michael Patrick King & Whitney Cummings

Not that anybody asked for it, but TV has finally filled an empty hole in the Monday night lineup with a hipster, Ponzi-scheme, young white female buddy comedy for the recession era. 2 Broke Girls stars Kat Dennings as the sarcastic “no funny business” Brooklynite Max, and Beth Behrs as Caroline, a washed-up Sex and the City rich girl.

Caroline is a lively but sharp Wharton grad (yawn) who has been rendered penniless by her father’s Ponzi scheme mistakes and now seeks validation from the only person who will begrudgingly have her. The pair toil as waitresses at a cheesy nondescript diner that Max would never actually work at if she were in fact a hipster Brooklynite. Chanel-baubled Caroline wouldn’t bother hailing a cab over the bridge to make poor-people jokes. Poor Max! As if her eight-packed boyfriend who strangely resembles the lead singer of Maroon 5 and the greasy Russian sex offending line cook didn’t cause her enough trouble, she now has a third nuisance to interrupt her already sorrowful life. Make that four — Caroline comes with a pet horse named Chestnut.

The two end up living together in what will be known in television history as the world’s largest broke-girl New York City apartment with the exception of Rachel and Monica's apartment on Friends. When she isn’t working at the diner, Max bakes cupcakes (sold for $1.50 — a savvy entrepreneur she is not) and nannies for a rich Manhattanite because cupcakes and nannying simply don’t seem to want to die in film and TV executives’ views of young-sassy-hip contemporary culture.

Poor Caroline in her new destitution is forced to endure the “smell” of Brooklyn, whatever the hell that could be given the fact that Brooklyn is larger than a square yard and can be as fragrant as a powder room in a townhouse on Gossip Girl, which it is important to note, is filmed in the great big smelly borough. Due to Caroline’s desire to return to wealth and unconvincing need to help Max reduce her level of snark, which she interprets as “bad self-esteem,” a business model is established to sell — but what else? — cupcakes.

The two require only $250,000 and if the viewer can try to make it to the end of each episode, an amount pops up on the screen to notify us of how much startup cash they earned. As it turns out, the curiosity to see this number go up or plummet down bears the weight of the entire show’s intrigue. That and the hopes to see the eight pack of Max's now ex-boyfriend just one more time.

Despite Max’s blazers, lipstick, and vintage t-shirts — such as the oversize Run DMC shirt she wears to bed — the show feels like it is written by people too old to actually “get it” or worse, too Manhattan to have ever set foot in the borough of Brooklyn. One can imagine a conference room and a white board on which buzzwords are splayed in geometric and sharp handwriting: Coldplay, fedoras, tweet, kale, beanies, riding the subway, plaid. I mean, Coldplay? That meeting was already off to a disastrous start if they think that self-identifying Brooklyn hipsters are actually listening to Coldplay.

The humor written for Dennings’ character takes a stab at “edgy” when she drops bombs about masturbating and drug dealing, but it doesn’t work when her counterpart reacts with sheer horror and naivete.

The two have a falling out by the second episode when Max’s boyfriend hits on Caroline. In a moment of sitcom catharsis, they scream what the viewer is supposed to be digesting without scripted help: that all the qualities that make them so wildly different and thus more endearing will magically transform them into besties. It is as annoying as it sounds. Once the two kiss and make up by way of drunken late-night apology, Max is all of a sudden out buying Caroline organic juices and expressing interest in their “business.” Girl fights can all be resolved over a little cleansing pomegranate wheatgrass nu-health blend, you know?

Only five minutes into the third episode of the series, Max and Caroline, counting their tips at the diner after closing, have an extended conversation about facebook. We learn that Max does not check hers because she has no interest in seeing people update their statuses about the weather. Though this joke feels like a natural thing that two young women might talk about, the moment lasts too long and it is ruined. When Max and Caroline go shopping, as newly cemented besties are wont to do, and Max finds a “dope Strokes tee” at Goodwill, this marks both the first time Caroline has been to a thrift store and the first time the words “dope Strokes tee” have been uttered since 2001 or — scratch that — ever.

Physically, the two are mismatched and unnatural together. There is the weird way that Max talks while holding her hand over her belly and Caroline’s tendency to mug and gesture violently about as Max deadpans, unmoving. It's not that the chemistry isn’t there — between them, there is a determinate energy. But it is the energy between two people who simply would never be friends, making the moments when they are being girlfriend-y severely uncomfortable to watch and believe. Caroline enters the living room of their apartment wearing short-shorts and stilettos, booty-dancing to Nelly’s "Hot In Herre," which she sings with an inexplicable Latina lilt. Max makes a face that isn’t so much "Ugh, you're so not like me!" as much as it is registered indifference.

At a bar, we are introduced to JPEG, Max’s bartender/street artist friend who is the variety of attractive man fit for a rodeo in the Midwest, not a bar in New York. To mask this poor casting, he wears a pair of black Buddy Holly frames and a T-shirt with numbers on it. If that man is a street artist, then I am a marine biologist.

After one more catty fight over something more mundane than the last, we see Max’s soul for the first time, which has been glaringly and intentionally absent as a cheap way of showing how totally jaded she is. She slinks into their backyard, finds a shovel, and takes Chestnut for a walk as a favor to Caroline. While they walk, she talks to the horse lovingly and the animal nuzzles her in response. Her hand grips the shovel and the depth of Max’s feelings about her friendship with Caroline is revealed in hushed tones between young woman and quadruped. They reach a vacant lot, brick walls emblazoned with graffiti, and the horse relieves himself while Max waits, taking in the smells of Brooklyn.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Bangladesh. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about live tigers.

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