I'm going to be honest with you, but only because I like you and you seem all dedicated to buy your project and your penguin suit and all with the charts and the timer.

But seriously, if you really want to learn about sex, then you're going to have to get yourself a female partner.

I'm Greta Johnson. I'm Trisha Bobita. And this is the Nerdat podcast. This week, an interview with Thomas Mayer. He's a journalist who wrote a book about Virginia Johnson and Bill Masters

of Sex. And we think Virginia Johnson

qualifies as a great lady nerd of history. Re, re, re, re, re, re, re, re, re, re, re. Too many rees?

I think just enough. We'll also hear from some Alaskan Halloween nerds. They'll share their

spooky wedding story with us. And homework from novelist and

Patchett. We'll also plant the seeds for a zombie debate you're going to need to call us about.

We're expecting some fervored voicemails on this one. Oh, good. But first, it's our next great lady

nerd of history. So in the 1950s, early 1960s, Virginia Johnson and William Masters at Washington University in St. Louis were doing

research that no one else had ever done. They were studying sex. And they weren't just like

thinking about these things theoretically. This was observing people in sexual acts, which was

pretty novel at the time. Virginia Johnson was integral in this work, but Dr. Masters was the only one with a degree.

I'll let author Thomas Mayer, who wrote the biography of Masters and Johnson, explain.

She was a 32-year-old woman on her second divorce with two children, going back to school at Washington University in St. Louis when she met Dr. Master.

She got a job at the medical school as a secretary. She literally was out in the hallway

filling out insurance form when she started there. So yeah, Masters and Johnson seemed to really

have complimented each other,

and they ended up actually both having a byline in their first publication in 1966 called

Human Sexual Response. This book changed everything. It made them famous. And as we learned in

our conversation with Thomas Mayer, the story of how they got there is as interesting as what it did.

Thomas Mayer himself first came across the story of Masters and Johnson when he was asked almost 20 years ago to write an article to mark the retirement of Dr. Masters.

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