answering the question

V ALFRED KINSEY AND THE KINSEY REPORT VERN L. B U L L O U G H

t:—..—ihe more I study the development of modern sexuality, the more I believe

J in the importance and significance of Alfred Kinsey. Although his research was on Americans, it came to be a worldwide source of information about human sexuality and set standards for sex research everywhere. In America and much of the world, his work was a decisive factor in changing attitudes toward sex. Within the field o f sexuality, he reoriented the field, moving it away from the medical model and medical dominance, to one encom­ passing a variety of disciplines and approaches. In short, his work has proved revolutionary.

To understand what Kinsey wrought, one must look at the field of sexuality when Kinsey began his studies. One must also look briefly at Kinsey as an individual to understand his accomplishments.

SEX RESEARCH, 1 8 9 0 -1 9 4 0

The modern study o f sexuality began in the nineteenth century, and these early studies were dominated by physicians. It was assumed that since physicians were the experts on body functions, they should be the experts regarding sexual activities. In a sense, this was a diver­ gence from the past, when sexuality had been regarded almost entirely as a moral issue. And although there were still moral issues involved, physicians were also judged as qualified to speak on these issues as well. Although few physicians had any specialized knowledge on most sexual topics, except perhaps for sexually transmitted diseases, this did not prevent them from speaking with authority on most aspects of human sexuality.

Havelock Ellis, one of the dominant figures in promoting sexual knowledge in the first third of the twentieth century, said that he sought a medical degree primarily because it was the only profession in which he could safely study sex. Inevitably, most of the so-called experts were physicians. Equal in influence to Ellis was Magnus Hirschfeld, another physi­ cian. Both Ellis and Hirschfeld compiled what could be called sexual histories, as Kinsey later compiled. Ellis, however, acquired almost all of his histories from correspondence o f volunteers and, as far as I know, never interviewed anyone. Hirschfeld, later in his career, compiled many case histories based on interviews, but early on he depended mainly on historical data and personal knowledge. Unfortunately, Hirschfeld used only a small portion of his data in his pub­ lished books, and before he could complete a comprehensive study of sexuality, his files were destroyed by the Nazis (Bullough, 1994).

Although some of the data physicians reported about sex [were] was gathered from their own practices, these [data] were usually interpreted in terms o f traditional views and were supple­ mented by historical materials or reports of anthropologists [in order] to increase their authenticity. Simply put, most physicians writ­ ing about sex were influenced more by the Zeitgeist of the time rather than by any special­ ized base of knowledge. A few early physician investigators, such as the American obstetrician

From “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: Historical Overview and Lasting Contributions" by Vern L. Bullough, Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 35, Issue 2, 1998, pp. 127—131. Copyright © 1998 Routledge, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf .co.uk/journals).

ALFRED KINSEY AND THE KINSEY REPORT 55

Robert Latou Dickinson (Dickinson and Beam, 1931, 1934), had over 1,000 case studies, but most had only a handful. As the twentieth century progressed, the ordinary physician probably was regarded as the easiest available authority on sex, but most of the medical writ­ ings on sexual topics came from psychiatrists, particularly those who were psychoanalytically trained (Bullough, 1997). Unfortunately, even the most comprehensive sex studies under­ taken by psychiatrists, such as that of George Henry, were flawed by the assumptions of the investigators interpreting data. For example, they assumed that homosexuals were ill. More­ over, whether the answers to their questions were valid for determining differences with het­ erosexuals is uncertain, as there was a lack of any comparative study o f heterosexuals (Henry, 1941).

Still, assumptions about medical exper­ tise remained. W hen the Com m ittee for Research in the Problems in Sex (CRPS), the Rockefeller-funded grant-giving body oper­ ating under the umbrella of the National Research Council, began to explore the pos­ sibilities of carrying out surveys of sexual behavior, they first sought out physicians. For example, Adolf Meyer of Johns Hopkins U n i­ versity was commissioned to complete a study of attitudes of medical students, but failed to complete his work. The only social scien­ tists funded in the first 20 years of the CRPS were psychologists, although anthropologi­ cal consultants and members of other fields provided occasional input. Lewis Terman, for example, was given funds to carry out studies on attitudes toward sex and marriage. Though his and similar studies were valuable, they depended on questionnaires rather than inter­ views to gather their data (Terman, Butten- weiser, Ferguson, Johnson, and Wilson, 1938), and the sexual part of their studies was sec­ ondary to other interests. Even though one of the major reasons the CRPS had been created

in 1921 was to complete such general studies, the com m ittee members were either unwilling or unable to find a person to carry out this kind of study. I suspect that the first factor was more important than the second: There is considerable evidence to indicate that the com m ittee members were uncomfortable with studies on actual sexual behavior and much preferred to fund what might be called bench (i.e., laboratory-based) scientists to social sci­ entists. I should add that this attitude was not shared by the Rockefeller Foundation or John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: both funded other survey projects dealing with sex, including that o f Katherine Bement Davis (1929).

Funding for research projects when Kinsey began his work operated much more according to an old-boy network than it does today. There was little advertisement of fund availability and individuals were invited to apply, had to be nomi­ nated to apply, or had to have a connection. Certain universities and individuals dominated the disbursement of the money available. To an observer [today] examining most of the research grants given for sex research, the relationships look almost incestuous.

Unfortunately for the committee, sex activ­ ity could not be studied exclusively in the laboratory or even in the field by observing animals or gathering historical data. There had been nongrant-supported popular studies of sex, but their samples were not representative and the questionnaires were poorly designed. Moreover, in keeping with its reliance on aca­ demia, the committee seemed reluctant to give its imprimatur to individuals conducting such studies. What was needed was a person will­ ing to blaze new trails, dispassionately exam­ ining sex without the preconceived notions of most of the physicians then involved in writing about sex. The qualified individual or individu­ als needed an academic connection, preferably one with an established reputation for scientific studies.

56 INVESTIGATING SEXUALITY

KINSEY CO M ES O N THE SCENE

It was in this setting that Kinsey entered the scene. He was the right person at the right time; that is, a significant amount of money was available for sex research and there was an interest within the CRPS for some general kind of survey of American sex behavior. Who was Kinsey?

In terms o f overall qualification, Kinsey’s best asset was that he was a bench scientisf, a biologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, and an internationally known expert on gall wasps. But he was also a broad-based scientist. Unlike most research scientists today, who often are part o f a team, researchers in the 1930s in the United States were self-dedicated and carried a major teaching load. Kinsey, for example, simultaneously taught genera! biology, pub­ lished two editions o f a popular introductory general biology text, two editions of a work­ book, and a general text on methods in biology, and carried out major research. His entry into sex seems to have been serendipitous, taking place after he had completed his studies on gall wasps. Professors at the University of Indiana had discussed the possibility of an introduc­ tory cross-discipline course on marriage, then a topic beginning to receive some attention in academic circles. Kinsey was not only involved in such discussions but took the lead. In 1938, he was invited to coordinate and direct the new course on marriage and family. As a sign of the time, the course was taught by an all-male faculty from a variety of disciplines, including law, economics, sociology, philosophy, medi­ cine, and biology.

Before the appearance o f courses on mar­ riage and family, the academic discussion of human sexuality had been confined to lec­ tures in the hygiene-type courses that had been established on many campuses in the second decade of the twentieth century, largely through the efforts of the American Social

Hygiene Association. The approach to sex of these hygiene classes was quite different from that of the marriage and family courses, as they generally emphasized the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and masturbation. In a sense, these hygiene-type courses were con­ ceived to preserve sexual purity, whereas the sexual portions of marriage and family courses provided information, following the outlines of the better sex manuals of the time.

Kinsey went even further in his discussion o f sexuality than the sex-positive marriage manuals, and soon clashed with Thurman Rice, a bacteriology professor who had writ­ ten extensively on sex, primarily from the point of view of eugenics. For many years, Rice had delivered the sex lectures in the required hygiene course, where the males were sepa­ rated from the females when he gave his lec­ tures. Kinsey deliberately had not included Rice in his recruited faculty, which probably furthered Rice’s antagonism. Rice was typi­ cal of an earlier generation o f sex educators in that he considered moral education an essential part of sex education. He believed and taught that masturbation was harmful, condemned premarital intercourse, and was fearful that Kinsey’s course on marriage was a perversion of academic standards. For example, he charged Kinsey with asking some of the women stu­ dents about the length o f their clitorises. To show that his accusations were based on more than gossip, Rice demanded the names of students in Kinsey’s class so that he could verify such classroom voyeurism. Rice opposed Kinsey’s questioning of students because he believed that sexual behavior could not and should not be analyzed by scientific methods because it was a moral topic, not a scientific one. Rice’s perspective thus was perhaps typi­ cal o f the hygiene approach to sex.

Kinsey had probably been doing at least some of the things that Rice mentioned because he had approached sex as a taxonomist—as one

ALFRED KINSEY ANDTHE KINSEY REPORT 57

interested in classifying and describing— as a dispassionate scientist and not as a reformer or politician. In a sense, he was a political inno­ cent. He believed that science could speak for itself, and he criticized his faculty colleagues who took any kind of political stand, He refused to join organizations that he felt had any kind of political agenda, including the Soci­ ety for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) in its early years.

There is, however, much more to Kinsey’s interest in sex than the dispassionate scien­ tist. In his personal life, he was not inhibited about body functions. Even before starting his course on marriage, he had sought information about the sex life of his students. His openness about sex (see Jones, 1997: 1997a) was what Rice objected to.

It might well be that when Kinsey began teaching the sex course, he was undergoing a kind of midlife crisis, feeling that he had come to know all he wanted to know about gall wasps and needing to explore new fields. Sex to him represented an unexplored new field where comparatively little was known, and where there was much information to be gleaned. He began his study as he had that of gall wasps: finding out what was known and, in the process, build­ ing up a personal library of serious books on sex (hardly any of these had found their way into university libraries) and reading extensively. He also sought first-hand information by ques­ tioning his students about topics such as their age at first premarital intercourse, frequency of sexual activity, and number of partners.

All this gave fodder to Rice and his allies, including a number of parents who, perhaps at Rice’s urging, complained about the spe­ cific sexual data given in the course and par­ ticularly about questions that Kinsey asked of his students. The president of the university, Herman Wells, a personal friend of Kinsey who had appointed him coordinator of the course, counseled him and gave him two options: to

continue to teach the course and give up some of his probing of student lives, or to devote more time to his sex research and not teach the course. Because Kinsey had already begun to extend his interviews off campus, the answer was perhaps inevitable. Although Kinsey con­ tinued to teach courses in biology, his load was reduced, and much of his life came to be devoted to sex research.

Because Kinsey was already well connected to the scientific establishment, his initial efforts to study sex received encouragement from the CRPS. He received an exploratory grant from them in 1941, during which time he would be evaluated as to suitability for a larger grant. George W. Corner, a physician member and later the chair of the CRPS, visited Kinsey as one of the grant investigators to determine whether Kinsey deserved further funding. He was tremendously impressed and reported that Kinsey was the most intense scientist he had ever met. He added that Kinsey could talk about little besides his research. According to Corner (1981), Kinsey was an ideal person for a grant to study sex:

H e was a fu ll professor, married with adolescent chil­ dren. W hile carrying on his teaching duties in the zool­ ogy department he worked every available hour, day a n d night, traveling anywhere that people would give him interviews. H e was training a couple o f young men in his method o f interviewing. Dr. Yerkes a n d / subm itted separately to his technique. I was astonished a t his skill in eliciting the most intim ate details o f the subject’s sex­ ual history. Introducing his queries gradually, he m an­ aged to convey an assurance o f complete confidentiality by recording the answers on special sheets printed with a grid on which he set down the information gained, by unintelligible signs, explaining that the code h a d never been written down a n d only his two colleagues could read it. H is questions included subtle tricks to detect deliberate misinformation, (p. 268)

Important to the continuation of the grant was the support of the university administration and its president, which Kinsey received despite

58 i n v e s t i g a t i n g s e x u a l i t y

sniping by some fellow faculty members such as Rice and others who regarded Kinsey’s inter­ est in sex with suspicion. As Corners reference to Kinsey’s family indicates, the committee wanted to make certain that the researcher had no special agenda except, perhaps, to establish some guides to better marriages. Kinsey satis­ fied them on this account and was well aware that any indication otherwise might endanger

IS grant. Thus, his own sex life remained a closed book, only to be opened by later gen­ erations o f scholars (Jones, 1997). The CRPS

committed to Kinsey that by the 1946-1947 academic year, he was receiving half of the com m ittee’s total budget.

Before the interviews stopped with Kin­ seys death, about 18,000 individuals had been interviewed, 8,000 by Kinsey himself. Kinsey strongly believed that people would not always tell the truth when questioned about their sexual activities and that the only way to deal with this was through personal interviews in which the contradictions could be explored. He did not believe that self-administered questionnaires produced accurate responses- He regarded them as encouraging dishonest answers. He also recognized that respondents might he even in a personal interview, but he provided a variety o f checks to detect this and believed his checks were successful. Subjects were usually told that there were some con- radictions in their answers and were asked to

explain them. If they refused to do so, the inter­ view was terminated and the information not used. Kinsey was also aware of potential bias Of the interviewer. He sought to overcome this hias by occasionally having two people conduct the interviews at different times and by relying mainly on four interviewers, including himself o conduct the study. Ifthere was a bias, it came

to be a shared one. The questions, however were so wide-ranging that this too would limit

a n v tn ‘he data in c i l \ " T ' prin­ciples, he wanted to gather data from as many

subjects as possible, and he hoped initially to

sTrfnn ‘ “ d later to conduct 80 000 more H e did not live to achieve this.

efore he died, the funding sources had dried up tor such research, and other methods based on statistical sampling grew more popular.

WHAT KINSEY DID

Kinseys major accomplishment was to chal­ lenge most o f the assumptions about sexual activity in the United States. In so doing, he aroused great antagonism among many who opposed making sexual issues a matter of pub­ lic discussion and debate. One reason for the antagonism is that he brought to public notice many sexual practices that previously had not been publicly discussed. Although Kinsey prided him self as an objective scientist, it was bis very attempt to establish a taxonomy of sex- ua behaviors-treating all activities as more or less within the range o f human behavior— that got him into trouble. Karl Menninger for example, said that “Kinsey’s compulsion to orce human sexual behavior into a zoological

frame o f reference leads him to repudiate or neglect human psychology, and to see normal­ ity as that which is natural in the sense that It is what IS practiced by animals" (quoted in Pomeroy, 1972, p. 367).

M ost sex researchers today accept the fact that total objectivity in our field is probably i^mpossible. Some o f Kinsey's difficulty resulted from his belief that he could be totally objec­ tive. He did not realize that the way he orga­ nized his data sometimes could challenge his objectivity, even though the organization seemed logical. For example, Kinsey developed a seven-point bipolar scale, which was one of the standard methods of organizing data in social science research at that time. He did not trust people’s self-classification as homosexual or heterosexual. Therefore, he decided that regardless of how they might have classified themselves, the only objective indicator that he

ALFRED KINSEY AND THE KINSEY REPORT 59

could use was to define sex in terms of outlet— namely, what activity resulted in orgasms.

In most seven-point scales, the extremes are represented by 0 and 6 (or by 1 and 7, depending upon the number with which the scale starts). Most people tend to respond using the middle of the scale. When one rates heterosexual orgasm as 0 and homosexual orgasm 6, a logical decision in terms of taxonomy, he in effect weights the scale by seeming to imply that exclusive heterosexual­ ity is one extreme and exclusive homosexuality the other. Although his data demonstrated that far more people were identified as exclusively heterosexual than as any other category, his scale also implied that homosexuality was just another form of sexual activity, something that 1 think Kinsey believed was true. For his time and place this was revolutionary. His discussion of homosexuality and its prevalence resulted in the most serious attacks upon him and his data (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, 1948).

Kinsey was a trailblazer, openly and will­ ingly challenging many basic societal beliefs. It was not only his dispassionate discussion of homosexuality that roused controversy, but also his tendency to raise questions that soci­ ety at that time preferred to ignore, In his book on males, for example, he questioned the assumption that extramarital intercourse always undermined the stability of marriage and held that the full story was more complex than the most highly publicized cases led one to assume. He seemed to feel that the most appropriate extramarital affair, from the stand­ point of preserving a marriage, was an alliance in which neither party became overly involved emotionally. Concerned over the reaction to this, however, he became somewhat more cau­ tious in the book on females. He conceded that extramarital affairs probably contributed to divorces in more ways and to a “greater extent than the subjects themselves realized” (Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gebhard, 1953, p. 31).

Kinsey was interested in many different sex­ ual behaviors, including that between genera­

tions (i.e., adults with children or minors). One of his more criticized sections in recent years is the table based on data he gathered from pedophiles. He is accused of not turning these people over to authorities, although one of the major informants was already serving time in jail for his sexual activities when interviewed. Kinsey gathered his data wherever he could find it, but he also reported on the source of his data. H is own retrospective data tended to show that many individuals who experienced intergenerational sex as children were not seri­ ously harmed by it, another statement that got him into trouble,

Kinsey is also criticized for his statistical sampling. Although his critics (even before his studies were published) attempted to get him to validate his data with a random sample of individuals, he refused on the grounds that not all of those included in the random sample would answer the questions put to them and that, therefore, the random sample would be biased. It is quite clear that Kinsey’s sample is not random and that it overrepresents some segments of the population, including students and residents of Indiana. Part o f the criticism, however, is also due to the use and misuse of the Kinsey data without his qualifications. This is particularly true o f his data on same-sex rela­ tionships, which are broken down by age and other variables and therefore allowed others to choose the number or percentage of the sample they wanted to use in their own reports.

Another assumption of American society that Kinsey also challenged was the asexual- ity o f women. This proved the issue of greatest controversy in his book on females. A total of 40% o f the females he studied had experienced orgasm within the first months of marriage, 67% by the first six months, and 75% by the end of the first year. Twenty-five percent o f his sample had experienced orgasm by age o f 15, more than 50% by the age o f 20, and 64% before marriage. On the other hand, he also reported cases in which women failed to reach

60 INVESTIGATING SEXUALITY

orgasm after 20 years of marriage. In spite of the controversies over his data on orgasms, it helped move the issue of female sexuality on to the agenda of the growing women’s movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s, and to encour­ age further studies of female sexuality.

In light of the challenges against him, Kinsey ignored in his writings what might be called sexual adventurers, paying almost no attention to swinging, group sex, and alternate lifestyles such as sadism, masochism, transvestism, voy­ eurism, and exhibitionism. H e justified this neglect by arguing that such practices were statistically insignificant. It is more likely that Kinsey was either not interested in them or not interested in exploring them. He was also not particularly interested in pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. However, he demystified discussion of sex insofar as that was possible. Sex, to him, was just another aspect of human behavior, albeit an important part. He made Americans and the world at large aware of just how big a part human sexuality played in the life cycle of the individual and how widespread many kinds of sexual activities were.

Kinsey was determined to make the study of sex a science, a subject that could be stud­ ied in colleges much the same way that animal reproduction was, with succeeding generations of researchers adding to the knowledge base. He succeeded, at least in the long run. He had a vision of the kind of studies that still needed to be done, some of which were later done by his successors at Indiana and elsewhere, but he himself died before he could do them and the funds dried up.

Another of his significant contributions was to establish a library and to gather sources about sexuality from all over the world. He blazed a trail for future sex researchers; The library he established at Indiana University served as an example that helped many of us to persuade other university libraries to collect works from this field. Although there are now

several impressive collections o f this kind in the country, Kinsey's collection is still tremen­ dously important.

In sum, Kinsey was the major factor in chang­ ing attitudes about sex in the twentieth century. His limitations and his personal foibles are appropriately overshadowed by his courage to go where others had not gone before. In spite of the vicious attacks upon him during his last few years of life, and the continuing attacks today, his data continue to be cited and used (and mis­ used). He changed the nature of sexual stud­ ies, forced a reexamination of public attitudes toward sex, challenged the medical and psychiat­ ric establishment to reassess its own views, influ­ enced both the feminist movement and the gay and lesbian movement, and built a library and an institution devoted to sex research. His reputa­ tion continues to grow, and he has become one of the legends of the twentieth century... .

REFERENCES Bullough, V. L. 1994. Science in the bedroom: A history of sex

research. New York: Basic Books. Bullough, V. L. 1997. American physicians and sex

research. Journal o f the History of Medicine, 57, 236-253. Corner, G. W. 1981. The seven ages of a medical scientist.

Philadelphia; University of Pennsyivania Press. Davis. K. B. 1929. Factors in the sex life o f twenty-two

hundred women. New York: Harper. Dickinson, R. L., and Beam, L. 1931. A thousand marriages.

Baltimore: Wiliams and WIkins. Dickinson, R. L., and Beam, L. 1934. The single woman.

Baltimore: Wiliams and WIkins. Henry, G. 1941, Sex variants: a study o f homosexual patterns

(2 vols.). New York: Hoeber. Jones. J. H. 1997, August 2 and September 1. Annals of

sexology: Dr. Yes. New Yorker, pp. 99-113. Jones, J. H. 1997a. Kittsey: A Public/Private Life. New York:

Norton. Kinsey, A., Pomeroy, W., and Martin, C. 1948. Sexual

behavior in the human male. Philadelphia: Saunders. Kinsey, A.. Pomeroy, W., Martin, C., and Gebhard, P. 1953.

Sexual behavior in the human female. Philadelphia: Saunders. Pomeroy, W. B. 1972. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex

Research. New York: Harper and Row. Terman, L,, Buttenweiser, P.. Ferguson. L., Johnson, W. B.,

and Wilson, D. P. 1938. Psychological factors in marital happiness. New York; McGraw-Hill.