Katherine Watson teaches art history in 1953 at the respectable all-female Wellesley College. She encourages her conservative students to question and disregard the outdated societal mores for women.

Though a childhood bout with polio left him dependent on an iron lung, Mark O'Brien maintains a career as a journalist and poet. A writing assignment dealing with sex and the disabled piques Mark's curiosity, and he decides to investigate the possibility of experiencing sex himself. When his overtures toward a caregiver scare her away, he books an appointment with sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene to lose his virginity.

A man in an iron lung who wishes to lose his virginity contacts a professional sex surrogate with the help of his therapist and priest.