Word: zilbergeld
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...current furor, says Bernie Zilbergeld, an Oakland psychologist and longtime critic of Masters and Johnson, stems from what he terms their "chronic inability to be precise." For example, he asks, how do they know that their 400 nonmonogamous study subjects were not bisexuals or IV drug abusers? Epidemiologists long ago learned that people often admit to risky behavior only after they have been told they test positive. Yet Masters and Johnson did not extensively question their subjects about high-risk behavior...
...press conference followed the second attack in three years on Masters and Johnson by Psychologist Bernie Zilbergeld. In a 1980 article in Psychology Today, Zilbergeld and Psychologist Michael Evans charged that the phenomenal success rate claimed by sexology's first family is bogus. In the June issue of the sex magazine Forum, Zilbergeld repeats his critique. He also claims that Masters met him in a San Francisco bar and disclosed his lax standard for successfully treating lack of orgasm in females: one orgasm during the two-week intensive therapy treatment at the Masters & Johnson Institute in St. Louis...
More damaging, perhaps, has been sexology's seeming inability to shake its association with what is widely perceived as pornography. Editor Nobile's interview with Zilbergeld in Forum, which is published by Penthouse, appears along with sexual-aid ads and letters from readers describing their steamy sex fantasies. Another article in the issue argues that the relationship between Batman and Robin is probably homosexual. Nobile considers Masters' claim that Forum is an inappropriate place to debate Zilbergeld's charges to be "the last refuge of a scoundrel. Dr. Masters' work has appeared in Forum...
...panel meeting an hour before the press conference, Masters and Johnson released a printed version, perhaps the first, of criteria for their studies. Among the standards for successful treatment: three erections in every four attempts in cases of impotence; two orgasms in every four tries for anorgasmic women. Said Zilbergeld derisively: "After 13 years and all this pressure, their standards are finally on the record...
Such therapists would gratefully take guidance from Masters and Johnson's research; but while less harshly critical than Zilbergeld and Evans, they are frustrated by what they consider the inadequacy of Masters and Johnson's direction. "I would like to see the data," says Psychologist F. Paul Pearsall, on the staff of the Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Ind. "Until we can replicate their work, we will remain either awed, envious or suspicious of its validity...