A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening

On a January day in 1948, a hefty book filled with turgid scientific prose, and scores of tables and charts, landed amid an unsuspecting American public. The tome reported, matter-of-factly and without judgment, that American men were up to all manner of sexual exploits behind closed doors, and that the minds of huge numbers of them were churning with taboo desires.

The book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by biologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University, was an utter revelation for a populace living in a time when masturbation was frowned upon, oral sex (even between husband and wife) was illegal in some states, and homosexuality was considered an extremely rare, criminal deviance.

Overnight, millions of American men realized that they were not lone freaks for doing what they did.

Based on thousands of exhaustive, confidential interviews with churchgoers, college students, prison inmates and more, Kinsey reported, for example, that 92% of men had masturbated and half of married men had had extramarital affairs. A full 37% of men said they had had some form of homosexual experience at some point in their lives.

Five years later, Kinsey’s second volume — Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — came through with more revelations. A full 62% of women, for instance, reported they had masturbated, about half of the women said that they had engaged in premarital sex, and two-thirds of participants said that they had experienced overtly sexual dreams. The book was widely attacked as an affront to the dignity of womanhood.

Kinsey’s work did more than reassure people they were not alone: It highlighted a disconnect between certain laws of the land and actual sexual practice. “Everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin,” Kinsey once said.

Sex researchers say Kinsey’s biggest contribution was the sheer cataloging of variation. But his most-famous findings revolve around the issue of homosexuality. He devised the famous Kinsey scale — a numerical gradation of levels of homosexual orientation, with 0 representing those who were exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual. The scale is still used by researchers.

Kinsey also reported that 10% of the men he interviewed said they engaged in predominantly homosexual activity between the ages of 16 and 55. “That changed the thinking about homosexuality,” says Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York psychoanalyst. “If it was more common than people thought it to be, then perhaps it was what we would call a normal variation of sexuality rather than a form of mental illness.”

Perhaps above all, researchers say Kinsey’s work and the later studies it inspired showed social scientists, public health workers, therapists and geneticists just how much there was and still remains for them to study.

Based on work such as Kinsey’s and Evelyn Hooker’s, the American Psychiatric Assn. voted in 1973, after intense debate, to drop homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Today, experts believe that Kinsey’s precise numbers were inflated, partly because the people he interviewed to draw his conclusions — especially in the book on males -- were not nationally representative. A posthumous reanalysis of his massive dataset found that when interviews from prisoners and other sources likely to over-sample the number of homosexual participants were removed, the percentage of those with exclusively homosexual experiences fell to 3%; another 3% reporting that such experiences were extensive but not exclusive. Those figures are in line with more recent studies.

Kinsey, meanwhile, has been accused of, or credited with — depending on one’s point of view — doing more than laying the groundwork for a new field. He radically altered the way society thinks of sex, and ushered in far greater sexual freedom.

“His influence was tremendous — it opened up the field,” says Vern Bullough, founder of the Center for Sex Research at Cal State Northridge, and author of Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research.