lizzy caplan

Masters of Sex Just Set Itself Back Another Few Decades

lizzy caplan

Photo credit: iDominick, Wikimedia Commons

For the first ten minutes of Sunday’s episode of Masters of Sex, it looked as if the unthinkable was about to happen: a character was going to have an abortion because it was the right choice for her. There would be little debate or dramatics over the matter, and the show would, as they say, go on. The abortion, it seemed, would be presented as a practical choice, not a plot twist. Yet with a quick cut, Virginia Johnson (played by Lizzy Caplan) had rethought the abortion, and by the end of the hour-long episode, she’d given birth. So much for that.

In its two-plus seasons so far, Masters of Sex has imbued itself with progressive, feminist values: its lead characters, Johnson and Bill Masters (played by Michael Sheen), are fictionalized versions of the real-life Masters and Johnson researchers, who produced groundbreaking research on human sexuality and, some would argue, helped spark the sexual revolution of the 1960s. So far on the show, Caplan’s portrayal of Johnson has in fact been so forward-thinking that the character is often remarkably out of step with her generation, discussing sexuality in terms that one might expect to hear today, but certainly not in the 1950s. Without even a bachelor’s degree, she embarks on an ambitious career in a field dominated by men and refuses to let her gender or the fact that she is a single mother get in her way. The show has spent two seasons making Johnson a spokesperson for gender equality—and effectively undermined those efforts in just one episode.

This is not to say that Johnson necessarily should have gotten an abortion, or that keeping the baby will prove to be a horrible mistake. It is a woman’s choice to see a pregnancy to term or not (though, it’s worth noting, abortion was not a legal choice at the time in which this episode was set). Johnson’s choice just seems inconsistent with the character as established thus far, and this episode offered little explanation. Her moment of reconsideration happened off-screen: one moment, we were watching her settle onto the abortion provider’s table; the next, she was visibly pregnant. Other than some mentions here and there about wanting to be a better mother, there was no concrete reason given for her change of heart—one that essentially puts her on house arrest for the remainder of her pregnancy.

That’s right: pressured by Masters, who is terrified that a visibly pregnant Johnson will draw attention away from the publication of their research and instead cause people to speculate as to whether he is the father (he’s not), Johnson ceases the work she has fought so hard for the right to perform, and instead spends the duration of her visible pregnancy hardly leaving the house. She effectively serves a prison sentence, during which her motivation for keeping the baby and abandoning her work for the foreseeable future does not become much clearer. The entire nine-month pregnancy is skimmed over in just this one episode; as a result, not much attention is given to the impact that cloistering herself this way has on her sense of identity. Yet for a woman who has thus far defined herself largely by her career, one can only assume that it’s demoralizing, to say the least.

What’s especially frustrating here is that this did not happen to the real Virginia Johnson. She had two children, a boy and a girl, with her husband George, whom she later divorced. Unlike her fictional counterpart, she did not reunite for a lakeside tryst with George some sixteen-odd years after her daughter’s birth and conceive another child. Indeed, Masters of Sex has been so keen to cast its dramatization of Masters’ and Johnson’s family lives as fictional—likely for legal reasons—that it has included disclaimers asserting as much. Thus the onscreen Virginia’s unplanned pregnancy and decision to have the baby is not an unavoidable biographical detail that would have been erroneous to omit. It is pure fiction.

For a show that has been remarkably forward-thinking so far—not just for the time in which it’s set, but for ours as well—this plot twist seems astoundingly backwards and poorly thought-out. The episode did not even address the question of birth control, which it is hard to believe Johnson would not have been using in some form; when it did discuss abortion as a realistic option, the word was never once uttered. Rather than shatter the abortion taboo, as Masters of Sex has done for sexual pleasure and dysfunction, the show reinforced it, and offered no satisfactory explanation. Maybe the show will redeem itself in episodes to come, but as of right now, the period piece seems to have set itself back another few decades.

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

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Miranda is a New York-based writer, currently interning at The Nation magazine. A recent graduate of Wesleyan University, she focuses on feminism, tech, and politics.

Miranda is a New York-based writer who watches too much TV.

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