I've Had It Up to Here with These Heroic Sex Pioneers

Alison Rosen
Mon, 08 Sep 2014 21:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

"Masters of Sex" is a show I watch even though I spend most of the program rolling my eyes, yelling, "Oh, come on!" at the screen, or yelling at my husband about what I just yelled at on the screen, or imagining the writer's smug satisfaction upon writing a wholly unbelievable but "important" scene.

"No one would ever say that!" I find myself screaming.

Most recently, I lost my mind when a prostitute announced something along the lines of, "Look, I can't take your money. You aren't even enjoying this."
Updated: Tue Sep 09, 2014

"Masters of Sex" is a show I watch even though I spend most of the program rolling my eyes, yelling, "Oh, come on!" at the screen, or yelling at my husband about what I just yelled at on the screen, or imagining the writer's smug satisfaction upon writing a wholly unbelievable but "important" scene.

"No one would ever say that!" I find myself screaming.

Most recently, I lost my mind when a prostitute announced something along the lines of, "Look, I can't take your money. You aren't even enjoying this."

I'm neither a prostitute nor a prostitution expert, but in the history of people paying money for sex has a prostitute ever refused payment because she suspected the John wasn't enjoying it? I'm going to guess no. It's really not a satisfaction-guaranteed kind of business model.

The point of the scene was to illustrate a character's sudden frigidity; however, bending reality to the point where it's no longer believable takes me out of the program and lands me in my living room rolling my eyes. Moreover, this a program about Masters and Johnson, sex researchers and pioneers (lest you forget, the show hits you over the head with their pioneering spirit) so you'd think it would be extra important to make the sex — the raison d'etre of the enterprise — believable.

But it doesn't. Sex in the show is knowing and wry and manipulative and all the things people realize sex can be in hindsight but never really is in the moment. That's actually my problem with the whole show and a hearty cautionary tale for anyone doing heavily dramatized historical fiction. Just because we know how things turned out, just because we can place everything in historical context doesn't mean we should graft that knowingness onto the characters whose stories we're watching in real time. Otherwise you end up with humorless, self-important pioneers like the show's main characters who constantly reference "the work," which is held (by them) in the kind of high esteem only possible if they already know they'll end up in textbooks.

So then the question remains: Why do I watch it? If it makes me feel something in between depressed and annoyed, why do I persist? I have the same relationship with "The Leftovers." If these shows were men I were dating, I would have already realized that nothing good was coming from these relationships and that it was time to end them. And yet, when my husband says to me, "What should we watch?" because we have a thousand shows DVR'd and only a third of them are Jeopardy, I find myself begrudgingly suggesting "Masters of Sex." Immediately upon the annoying episode's ending, I want to watch the next episode.

I'm beginning to think the idea that familiarity breeds contempt is an outdated one. Nowadays, when there are countless programs, content streams, and distractions fighting for your attention, just spending an hour focusing on something, even if it's an annoying hour, creates an investment. I guess that's what's going on. Because even though I find the characters wholly unbelievable, and also super annoying, I still want to spend more time with them.

Clearly I'm conflicted. Is anyone else watching this show? How do you feel about these super annoying heroic sex pioneers?