Education Quote by William Masters

Masters is doing something sly here: stripping sex of its mystical packaging while still admitting how stubbornly psychological it is. As a scientist who spent a career wiring human intimacy to monitors and clinical language, he rejects the idea that sex is a trick you can pull off through willpower, technique, or sheer performance. "You can't make it happen" punctures the whole self-help fantasy of control. Arousal and pleasure are not vending-machine outputs; they are emergent, contingent, and famously prone to collapse under pressure.

The pivot - "but you can teach people to let it happen" - is where his real agenda sits. Masters helped pioneer the therapeutic reframing of sexual difficulty away from moral failure and toward anxiety, inhibition, and learned scripts. "Let" is the operative verb: permission, safety, attentional shift. It's also an argument against a culture that treats sex as both compulsory and policed, demanding competence while punishing candor. If people are trained to monitor themselves, to chase outcomes, to fear judgment, their bodies do exactly what bodies do under surveillance: they tighten, they stall, they disconnect.

The line lands because it recasts sex as more like sleep than sport. You can’t force yourself to sleep, but you can build conditions that allow it: trust, relaxation, reduced performance demands. Masters is smuggling a humane ethics into clinical phrasing: better sex isn’t about mastering the body; it’s about unlearning the panic of not being in charge. In the era of the sexual revolution and its backlash, that’s both scientifically grounded and quietly radical.