David Allyn identifies extraordinary conservatism and little science in the medical profession’s approach to sex.  This from his 2000 book Make Love not War, The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History  Little,Brown and Company, New York:

(William) Masters and (Virginia) Johnson deserve much credit for having attempted to study bodily processes objectively and scientifically.  There were plenty of self-appointed experts running around in the late sixties and early seventies willing to make claims about sex without having done any research whatsoever.  For instance, following the success of Masters and Johnson’s books, and the subsequent flood of newspaper and magazine reports about sex therapy, medical experts discovered “The New Impotence,” a supposedly high incidence of men reporting the problem.  In October 1972, Esquire magazine quoted a member of the New York Community Sex Information telephone help line: “You get the feeling that every man in the city is impotent or sufferes from premature ejaculation.”  the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality published a round table discussion on the subject in its October 1971 issue, in which four out of the five experts on the panel concurred that rates of impotence were increasing.  The clinician credited with discovering the problem, George Ginsberg, associate director of psychiatric services at New York University Hospital, cited one major cause for the trend: the new sexual assertiveness of women.  “When we explored these sexual failures, we found a common male complaint: Newly freed women demanded sexual performance.”  Apparently, sexually assertive women threatened men’s sense of masculinity.  Accordingly, women bore the responsibility for mitigating the impact of their newfound strength.

“Unconscious transmission of feminine revenge by an aggressive manner and over-assertiveness may enhance a man’s castration anxiety with consequent fear of the vagina.  This must be seen in an adaptational and social framework rather than as a purely psychological and particularly intrapsychic phenomenon.” (Ginsberg)

The New Impotence caused Ginsberg and fellow experts to reevaluate the sexual revolution.  “Although for some the new ‘sexual freedom’ may indeed be liberating, for others it merely induces different symptoms rather than improve mental health.”

Ginsberg was only one of many doctors who regarded feminism with suspicion and the sexual revolution with disdain.  Strangely enough, when it came to sex, the medical establishment as a whole was often willing to settle for ignorance and superstition instead of rigorous thought and concrete facts.  Masters and Johnson were far from model scientists, but compared to contemporaries like George Ginsberg, they had much to offer the cause of sexual freedom.  If nothing else, they gave journalists the opportunity to write about important aspects of human sexuality without euphemism or vulgarity.  Whether their own research was objective or not, Masters and Johnson increased the scientific credibility of the idea of separating fact from opinion in the study of sex.