Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer Of Sex Research

ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL Americans of the 20th century, Alfred Charles Kinsey conducted landmark studies of male and female sexual behavior that helped usher in the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in Hoboken, NJ, on June 23, 1894, the son of Alfred Seguine Kinsey and Sarah Ann Charles. His father, a zealously religious and intimidating man, and a teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, insisted that his son put aside his early interest in biology and instead enroll in Stevens to study engineering. After 2 lackluster years, Alfred rebelled and left for Bowdoin College in Maine, where he enrolled as a biology student. Father and son never reconciled; when Alfred graduated with high honors in 1916, his father refused to attend commencement.1

Alfred became a student of applied biology at Harvard, where he came under the influence of William Morton Wheeler, an eminent field biologist, staunch Darwinian, and confidant of the irreverent H. L. Mencken. With Wheeler as his mentor, Kinsey jettisoned most of his religious ideas—although not all of his repressive upbringing—and embarked on a massive and meticulous Darwinian case study of the evolutionary taxonomy of the gall wasp. After identifying several new species, Kinsey received his doctor of science degree in 1919 and joined the faculty of Indiana University the following year. In 1924, he married Clara Bracken McMillen, then an outstanding chemistry student at Indiana University. Alfred and Clara had 4 children, 3 of whom survived into adulthood.

Kinsey advanced up the academic ranks, becoming full professor in 1929.2 In 1936, he published The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study of the Origin of Species in 1930 and The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips. Although both were well received by specialists, Kinsey was deeply disappointed that he was not offered a professorship at a more prestigious university.

Perhaps because of this disappointment, Kinsey made an unusual career move in 1938: he agreed to lead a team-taught course on marriage and the family instituted in response to a student petition. High points of the course were Kinsey’s illustrated lectures on the biology of sexual stimulation, the mechanics of intercourse, and the techniques of contraception, as were his spirited denunciations of repressive laws and social attitudes. He also attempted to replace conventional ideas of normal sexual behavior with a new biological definition: “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality.”3(p333) As his recent biographer James H. Jones observes, Kinsey was using the marriage course to “transform his private struggle against Victorian morality into a public crusade” and to “protest issues that had bedeviled him for decades.”3(p335) The Indiana students responded enthusiastically, and his course enrollments grew to 400 by 1940.

Kinsey now shifted his research focus as well, transferring his obsessive concern with variation among gall wasps to the varieties of human sexual experience. He required students in his marriage course to have private conferences in which he took their sexual histories. On weekends and vacations, he conducted similar interviews in nearby communities, and later in such cities as Gary, Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. Kinsey received research support from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, which allowed him to hire research assistants, expand the geographic scope of his work, and found the Institute of Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947.

In January 1948, Kinsey and his collaborators published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the source of the excerpt reprinted here. It made the best-seller list within 3 weeks, despite its 804 pages, generally dry scientific style, and ponderous weight of statistics, tables, and graphs. By mid-March, it had sold 200 000 copies. The book, based on over 5000 sexual histories, provided a series of revelations about the prevalence of masturbation, adulterous sexual activity, and homosexuality. One religious leader attacked Kinsey for publishing “the most anti-religious book of our times.”4 Some criticized his methods (and conclusions) because of inadequate sampling techniques; others extravagantly praised him as another Galileo or Darwin.

Kinsey’s next major project was Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953. Based on almost 6000 sexual histories, this book contained many revelations about such matters as women’s masturbatory practices, premarital sexuality, and orgasmic experiences. As before, Kinsey documented an enormous gap between social attitudes and actual practices. Also as before, the book was a media sensation, but this time the counterattack was so ferocious—including a congressional investigation of his financial support—that the Rockefeller Foundation terminated its funding.

Kinsey’s health deteriorated under the strain of public attack and uncertainty about the future of his institute. He suffered from heart disease and, after a brief hospitalization for pneumonia, died in Bloomington on August 25, 1956. In his own mind, his principal legacy was to have brought scientific rigor to the study of human sexuality. But as his biographer James H. Jones points out, Kinsey was not only a scientist; he was a reformer who sought to rid himself of his personal sexual demons, while at the same time revolutionizing the repressive society in which he had grown up:

His formative years were spent in a home and in a nation where many middle-class parents enshrouded sex in shame, heaping more than enough guilt on young people to mangle and twist them. This was particularly true for those like Kinsey who aspired but failed to achieve moral perfection. His great accomplishment was to take his pain and suffering and use it to transform himself into an instrument of social reform, a secular evangelist who proclaimed a new sensibility about human sexuality.3(p772)