All the Ways Lizzy Caplan’s Virginia Johnson Makes Your Favorite TV Character Look Like a Coward

Lemme guess: your favorite TV show character is struggling with a zombie apocalypse. Yawn. He or she is just trying to raise some pigs or maintain a thimble of dignity in a world where human life isn't valued much. Cool story, Rick.

Lizzy Caplan's Virginia Johnson, on Showtime's Masters of Sex, is trying to fashion a life for herself in the face of overwhelming social structures that doom you from your first breath, son! These structures seek to keep all of us in the dark about how our private parts work! These structures trap women, gays—anyone that's not a white heterosexual male who's been told he can hump any chick he wants and then roll off and go to sleep—within strict roles and then allow for no deviation. You're someone's soon to be wife and any needs beyond having an apron and a roof over your head will not be attended to. Or you're closeted but will not be allowed to express your real desires except in shameful secret. It's some bullshit.

That's where Johnson comes in. Like some kind of time-traveling agent of liberation, she's able to see the structures that everyone else takes for granted, that everyone else has been conditioned to not see. She chips away at the illogical cracks in those structures with her great transparent dildo of truth. She's standing up for everyone's inalienable right to sexual pleasure. (Thomas Jefferson left that one out of the Declaration because he was a punk.) Do not get it twisted. We are all marching on the path to the brave new world of Virginia Johnson. It's gonna be a healthy, happy, humpful place.

This is why Caplan's Johnson makes your favorite TV character look like a coward.