III) It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt

I’ve thought several times while watching the show about Ken Gire’s epigraph that he would rather be shown an R rated truth than a G rated lie. One of the things that Masters of Sex is very truthful about is the way people lie: both to themselves and to others.

I’ve argued in Part I of this essay that attachment invariably comes with sex. As such, lies, disappointments and failures surrounding sex can be particularly painful. Yes, we live in a culture that too often conflates the notions that “sex is pleasurable” (usually true) with “sex if fun” (not always). The truth is sex is dynamite, capable of rocking your world but equally capable of leaving you deeply injured. When I talk about wanting works of art to be “true,” that doesn’t always mean I want them to show me only that which noble, pure, lovely, and praiseworthy. It does mean that when it shows me something that isn’t, I want it to be honest about the consequences of thinking about, practicing, or pursing such things.

Many of the characters in Masters of Sex are laid bare, not just physically but emotionally. The incomparable Allison Janney plays Margaret Scully, the wife of the provost whose inconceivable secret has left his wife lonely and confused. When giving her sexual history, she admits her husband has not made love to her in six years. Despite her attempts to make herself available and attractive to him–she even offers to pay a female prostitute to give her pointers on what men like–she can’t shake the feeling of failure that has accrued over decades of not being able to make her husband happy, the one thing which she has accepted as her duty and primary purpose in life. When she is not allowed to participate in Masters’s study (where she hopes to learn what is wrong with herself)–ostensibly because she has never experienced an orgasm but really because Bill doesn’t want to face the ways her presence makes him uncomfortable–her dissolve into tears in the hospital elevator is as heartbreaking a moment as you’ll ever see on television. Another door has been slammed in her face. Another expert has labeled her a failure.

Ever since I saw Les Miserable on Broadway in 1988, one of the questions I’ve wrestled with as a critic and a teacher of literature has been why it is so much easier to feel and express compassion for fictional characters than for actual people. I am deeply grateful to Masters of Sex for reminding me of my own quickness to judge, particularly when I encounter friends or colleagues whose problems I don’t share. Your stuck in a loveless marriage? Hey, you made a vow. You feel rejected by that guy you opened your heart to without a marriage commitment? What did you think was going to happen? Because love and sex are areas we struggle to talk about, too often when we do, words come out in generalities or abstractions that fail to convey the depth of pain and brokenness that the person across from you may be feeling. If the show does nothing else besides making me think twice before I am glib or flip about another human being’s suffering, the twelve hours it took to watch Season One will be time well spent.