Article: Experts Among “SEXperts”

Posted by MTI on Nov 9, 2001

Winter 2001

FRANKLIN & MARSHALL MAGAZINE

Experts Among ‘SEXperts’

by Brenda Murphy-Niederkorn

Sex. The mere mention of the word might still be enough to grab readers’ attention today, but it certainly doesn’t shock them as it did when the world-renowned Masters & Johnson Institute in St. Louis first came to public attention in the early ’60s.

There’s no way it could, says Mark F. Schwartz, Sc.D., ’72, codirector with his co-therapy partner, Lori Galperin, of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in Chesterfield, Mo., a St. Louis suburb. “Since the introduction of the birth control pill [in the early 1960s], the changes have been huge,” says Schwartz.

Schwartz and Galperin are heirs to the Masters and Johnson legacy. They took over the clinic from their predecessors in 1991. A year later, a Vanity Fair writer dubbed Schwartz and Galperin as “the new sexperts.”

Today, says Schwartz, the media bombards us with sex. During the past decade alone, we’ve been introduced to the pharmaceutical benefits of Viagra by former Sen. Bob Dole, and to the extramarital escapades of President Clinton, including details of oral sex, a previously taboo topic. These events may have made society more tolerant to discussions of sex in public, but they haven’t altered our puritanical views about the subject, says Schwartz.

The work of William H. Masters, M.D., and Virginia E. Johnson, Ph.D., was focused on changing society’s attitude about sex to view it as a natural function. Schwartz can chronicle the changes by decade that he’s seen since he began his association with Masters and Johnson in 1975: (more…)