George Tames/The New York Times
Sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson interviewed a couple at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis in 1969.
Virginia E. Johnson, a writer, researcher and sex therapist who with her longtime collaborator, William H. Masters, helped make the frank discussion of sex in postwar America possible if not downright acceptable, died on Wednesday in St. Louis. She was 88.
Her son, Scott Johnson, confirmed the death.
Dr. Masters was a gynecologist on the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis when he began his research into human sexuality in the mid-1950s. Ms. Johnson, who joined him in 1957 after answering an advertisement for an assistant, worked alongside him for more than three decades. She was variously his research associate, wife and former wife.
The collaborators burst into public consciousness with their first book, a clinical tome titled "Human Sexual Response." All about sensation, it created precisely that when it was published by Little, Brown in 1966. Although Masters and Johnson deliberately wrote the book in dry, clinical language to pre-empt mass titillation, their subject — the physiology of sex — was unheard-of in its day.
The book made Masters and Johnson an institution in American popular culture. They were interviewed widely in the news media, wrote for popular magazines including Playboy and Redbook, and on more than one occasion caused heated public controversy. Their work was discussed in rapt half-whispers at suburban cocktail parties and even inspired a band, Human Sexual Response, a Boston-based New Wave group of the late 1970s and early '80s.
Their other books, also published by Little, Brown, include "Human Sexual Inadequacy" (1970); "The Pleasure Bond: A New Look at Sexuality and Commitment" (1974, with Robert J. Levin); "Human Sexuality" (1982, with Robert C. Kolodny); and "Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving" (1986, with Dr. Kolodny).
The couple's work was therapeutic as well as scientific. The medical establishment had long treated sexual dysfunctions psychoanalytically, but Masters and Johnson took a more physical approach. They were credited with helping thousands of men with impotence and premature ejaculation, and thousands of women with difficulty in achieving orgasm, among other problems. In doing so, they helped establish the field of modern sex therapy, training a generation of therapists throughout the country.
The couple's research corrected many longstanding scientific misconceptions and overturned age-old cultural taboos. Much as the biologist Alfred C. Kinsey had paved the way for Masters and Johnson with his reports on human sexuality in the 1940s and early '50s, Masters and Johnson in turn helped make possible the mainstream careers of later authorities like Alex Comfort, the author of "The Joy of Sex" (1972), and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
It was an index of just how much their work had been accepted, Masters and Johnson told The Washington Post in 1978, that Johnny Carson had not made a single joke about them in the previous two years.
More than any investigator before them, Masters and Johnson moved sex out of the bedroom and into the laboratory, where it could be observed, measured, recorded, quantified and compared. While Kinsey had relied on interviews and questionnaires to elicit accounts of his subjects' sexual habits, Masters and Johnson gathered direct physiological data on what happens to the human body during sex, from arousal to orgasm.
Working with an initial group of 694 volunteers — 382 men and 312 women — Masters and Johnson hooked subjects up to instruments that recorded heart rate, brain activity and metabolism as they copulated or masturbated. Using a tiny camera placed in an artificial phallus, they were able to capture direct evidence, previously unseen, of what happens inside the vagina during female sexual arousal.
Among their findings were these:
■ Contrary to popular belief, there was absolutely no difference between a vaginal orgasm (the good kind, according to Freud) and a clitoral orgasm (the bad kind).
■ The length of a man's penis has no bearing on his ability to satisfy his partner.
■ For elderly people, a group long considered sexually demure if not altogether chaste, vigorous sexual activity was not only possible but normal.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 27, 2013
Because of an editing error, an obituary on Friday about Virginia E. Johnson, who collaborated with Dr. William H. Masters on pioneering research into sexual behavior, omitted her survivors. They are her son, Scott Johnson; her daughter, Lisa Young; and two grandchildren. The obituary also misstated the year their organization, the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation, in St. Louis, was renamed the Masters & Johnson Institute. It was in 1978, not 1973.
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