looking good ledy

                                       What do we learn about women's roles through this story?

ST: In talking about the show, we always talk about the sexual revolution. I think someone said it's in Tom’s book somewhere that the three legs of the sexual revolution were the pill, the Beatles and Masters and Johnson's study. But beyond the sexual revolution, you could look at the feminist movement and see a relationship between the work that they were doing and what feminism was setting out to accomplish.
Masters and Johnson's work debunked a lot of previously conceived notions about women and sexuality and the nature of female orgasm. I think the biggest finding was that it could be argued that women are greater sexual athletes than men. That was a huge thing for someone to say in 1957. They debunked some of Freud's ideas about female sexuality and about female orgasm.
There had been a notion that only a vaginal orgasm was a mature experience of female sexuality, so it kind of implied the need for male participation. Dr William Masters and Johnson spent a lot of time looking at masturbation and whether one orgasm is better than another.
People who walk into the writers' room are shocked at the conversations taking place. Which shows you that Dr William Masters and Virginia Johnson were so ahead of their time that they’d be ahead of their time in some way today. Things that were taboo then are still taboo and there's a kind of puritanical strain in American culture that makes it very difficult for people to delve into subjects that they very unabashedly approached.
It's exciting from a storytelling standpoint because people talk about things in very sophisticated terms. There is nothing salacious in our approach to the material. I think it has enormous integrity and intelligence and sophistication and wit. There couldn't be a better creator for this show than Michelle Ashford, who I think has a genius at bringing historical material to life.
All of the things that were provocative about their work in 1957 continue to be enormously provocative and groundbreaking even today. It's all very much unresolved because it's about human experience in a very fundamental way. sources