Alfred Kinsey

American sexologist

• Born: June 23, 1894
• Birthplace: Hoboken, New Jersey
• Died: August 25, 1956
• Place of death: Bloomington, Indiana

The greatest pioneer in sex research since Sigmund Freud, Kinsey revolutionized the study of human sexual behavior by applying to it the methodology of scientific empiricism.

Early Life

Alfred Kinsey (KIHN-zee) was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to a self-made, forceful father, Alfred Seguine Kinsey, who became a professor of engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. His mother, Sarah Ann, was extremely shy. The family had few friends and entertained sparingly. Alfred, Jr., was close neither to his parents nor to his younger brother, Robert. During his first ten years, he was troubled by rickets, a weak heart, and typhoid fever; the aftereffects of the last-named disease exempted him from military service in World War I.

The family moved to South Orange in 1903, and the frail boy developed a passionate, lifelong love for the out-of-doors, becoming an Eagle Scout and organizing his own troop. While in high school, he published his first article, “What Do Birds Do When It Rains?” based on hours of meticulous observation in fields and forests and presaging his penchant for detailed and precise analysis. Kinsey’s other compelling interest was the piano.

To please his overbearing father, Kinsey studied engineering for two years at Stevens Institute of Technology but then decided to attend Bowdoin College and major in biology. The father, outraged at his son’s defiance, refused him any financial aid once he had enrolled at Bowdoin. (The two were to meet only rarely in subsequent years.) Kinsey was a serious student who kept apart from most campus social activities; for relaxation, he played the piano, hiked in the woods, or starred on the debating team; he never dated.

After graduating magna cum laude in 1916, he entered Harvard’s distinguished Bussey Institute, majoring in taxonomy and serving as an instructor in biology and zoology while working for his Sc.D. degree, which he received in 1920. While at Bussey, Kinsey began collecting thousands of gall wasps, which fascinated him as living evidence of evolution. As he ranged over the country in his search for the insects, he encountered simple country residents with whom he developed empathy; in his later sex research he was to prove singularly skilled in interviewing people of rudimentary formal education. Moreover, he developed an intricate shorthand system for recording his findings concerning the galls; this system anticipated his intricate coding device for noting detailed sexual histories on a single sheet.

Indiana University offered Kinsey an assistant professorship in zoology, starting in the fall term of 1920. His decision to accept this bid over others was influenced by his having encountered, on the occasion of his job interview, a chemistry major named Clara Bracken McMillen. They married in June, 1921, had four children, and were harmoniously matched in their interests she was also fascinated by insects and joined him on his gall-wasp hunts. The Kinseys took pride in building their own home and cultivating a garden that many visitors considered Bloomington’s most beautiful.

Kinsey climbed the academic ladder smoothly, achieving a full professorship in 1929. He became the world’s leading authority on gall wasps, measuring and cataloging 3,500,000 specimens. He wrote a high school biology textbook, An Introduction to Biology (1926), which sold nearly half a million copies. In the 1930’s, he wrote three more biology texts and about twenty scholarly articles. Then came what proved the turning point of his career: He was asked by university administrators to coordinate a marriage course, initially to be taught in the summer of 1938. Kinsey was surprised to find no reliable statistical evidence regarding human sexual conduct. He decided that the empirical, taxonomic approach he had successfully used for his gall wasps and biology classes might also work well for sex research. He therefore began, in July, 1938, to take the sexual histories of those of his marriage course students who were willing to provide them.

Within a year, Kinsey had amassed 350 histories but in the process had aroused opposition among a few colleagues and within the conservative Bloomington community. The university’s president, Herman Wells, offered Kinsey the choice of continuing either the marriage course or his case-history project. As a trained research scientist, Kinsey naturally preferred to pursue his investigative studies, and he resigned from the course. He had found a second career that was to make this unassuming, modest Midwesterner world-famous.

Life’s Work

Prior to the late 1930’s, little knowledge had been factually established regarding human sexuality. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, had studied the sexual lives of largely upper-class Viennese women. Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) had corresponded concerning sexual behavior with upper-class British men. In 1915, an American physician, M. J. Exner, had sent one thousand male college students questionnaires about their sex lives. By 1938, nineteen different studies on human sexual behavior had been reported, all of them sketchy in their topics and inadequate in their methodology.

Kinsey was particularly appalled by Freud’s moralistic judgments regarding masturbation, which the Austrian condemned as infantile and neurotic. Instead, Kinsey made one principle clear above all others throughout his sexual investigations: As a scientist, he registered no objection to any kind of sexual behavior in which a subject might be involved. The following written statement to a student was typical:

I am absolutely tolerant of everything in human sex behavior. It would be impossible to make an objective study if I passed any evaluation pro or con on any sort of behavior. . . . Moreover, . . . I have absolutely preserved the confidence of all individual records. . . .

In the early 1940’s, Kinsey recruited three able assistants for what was to be incorporated as the Institute for Sex Research. His chief aide was Wardell Pomeroy, a psychologist trained in penal work, who conducted approximately eight thousand sex history interviews to Kinsey’s eighty-five hundred. The group’s statistician was Clyde Martin, recruited from Kinsey’s biology laboratory. Last to be added was anthropologist Paul Gebhard, who often chafed at what he considered Kinsey’s excessively autocratic control of the project. However, all three lieutenants shared an intense devotion to their arduous work and an admiration for Kinsey’s integrity, energy, and intelligence.

Pomeroy recalls Kinsey as being remarkably warm and generous, radiating sympathetic understanding to interviewees and buying thoughtful and elaborate gifts for staff and their children. He literally worked himself to death, usually beginning his active day by seven in the morning and ending it at midnight or later, six and sometimes seven days a week. He never took a vacation. Of sturdy, stocky build, with his sandy hair like a shock of Kansas wheat, and with extraordinarily penetrating gray-blue eyes, Kinsey often made a profound impression on people. He was never selfish, shallow, cynical, petty, or malicious. He held his staff to the most stringent standards yet found himself unable to delegate important work, even after doctors had warned him of his need to ease the tremendous stress to which his ambitious undertaking subjected him. His grand dream was to establish the truth about people’s sexual lives through the statistical evidence of 100,000 histories; he had to settle for eighteen thousand. Pomeroy concludes: “We were working for a genius who maddened us, delighted us, drove us to the point of exhaustion, but most of all inspired us to share something of his total dedication.”

Beginning in 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation granted Kinsey’s project financial support that increased from an initial sixteen hundred dollars to forty thousand dollars by 1947 this figure remaining constant until the foundation severed its subsidy in mid-1954. By the end of 1942, Kinsey had collected thirty-four hundred histories, and Clyde Martin had devised one of Kinsey’s most scientific and controversial contributions: a zero to six scale measuring a subject’s homosexual behavior. Two hieroglyphic codes were devised: one for taking down case histories, the other for identifying them in the files. Neither was put on paper; both were taught, by rote, to Kinsey’s trio of key assistants. Each history covered a minimum of 350 items, a maximum of 521. The order of asking questions varied according to the subject’s social background, age, and educational level. Interviewers were trained to assume that their subjects had engaged in every possible sexual activity; they began by asking when their subjects had done it rather than whether. They were taught to look their subjects directly in the eyes and ask their questions as rapidly as possible. Interlocking questions were used to cross-check for accuracy. Among eighteen thousand persons, fewer than ten refused to complete a history they had begun.

The questions were grouped under nine major rubrics: social and economic data, marital histories, sex education, physical and physiological data, nocturnal sex dreams, masturbation, heterosexual history, homosexual history, and animal contacts. Each of these sets had subdivisions and subsections. The category of masturbation, for example, provided for information on twenty-nine points under seven subheads.

By the mid-1940’s, Kinsey felt ready to begin writing the first institute volume, on male sexual activity. He insisted that all income derived from this and subsequent books, as well as all lecturing fees he or his staff would receive, be returned to the institute. Kinsey did the actual writing of both Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He solicited suggestions from his staff but did not hesitate to override their judgments. He placed publication of both books with an old, respected medical house, W. B. Saunders; most unusual, he refused advance royalties on either text, submitted an entire typescript, ready for copyediting and the press, and made virtually no changes on the page proofs.

On January 5, 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published. Even though the book’s prose was deliberately dry and academic and its accompanying charts and tables highly technical and specialized, the work sold more than 200,000 copies in its first two months and had eleven printings by Kinsey’s death eight years later.

The sample for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male covered fifty-three hundred American whites, 63 percent of whom were college graduates. These were some of its most significant findings: Some 83 percent had had sexual intercourse before marriage; 50 percent had had extramarital relations; early-maturing adolescents maintained higher sexual frequencies than late adolescents for thirty-five to forty years; socially upper-level males tended to rationalize their sexual behavior on the basis of morality, while lower-level males rationalized their behavior on what they considered natural or unnatural; and 96 percent engaged in masturbation, to no apparent ill effect. Perhaps of greatest interest was the conclusion that 37 percent of males had or would have at least one homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age. Probably of greatest importance was the discovery that sexual conduct differed enormously from one individual to another and from one social level to another, with petting, for example, largely an upper-class preoccupation, while lower-class males minimized foreplay prior to intercourse.

The general public’s response to Kinsey’s investigation was overwhelmingly favorable: According to a 1948 Gallup Poll, only 10 percent were hostile. However, the scientific and lay professional reactions were far more mixed: Some moralists, such as Henry Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary, were displeased that the study had been done, in the first place, and that the Rockefeller Foundation had supported it, in the second. Some psychologists, such as Stanford’s Lewis Terman, thought that they could infer, behind Kinsey’s stance of empiric neutrality, a slanting of the evidence “in the direction of implied preference for uninhibited sexual activity.” An endless debate arose over the validity of the institute’s interviewing samples. Were homosexuals and college graduates overrepresented? Were devout Roman Catholics and orthodox Jews underrepresented? Why were blacks excluded? Why were the subjects not evenly distributed geographically? After all, Kinsey had to take his volunteers where he could find them. He responded that his sampling was stratified rather than proportional, “in order that we shall have enough cases even in the less common groups to make a good statistical calculation.” Possibly the most far-reaching objection was related to the social consequences of scientific inquiry. Kinsey’s response was,

I think there is wisdom in keeping a research investigation rather separate from clinical or social application. When one becomes interested primarily in the application of data, it is too liable . . . to play too large a part in the decision as to what ends of the research should be undertaken.

The eagerly awaited companion volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was published September 14, 1953. Five chapters of this text compared male and female reactions (the female sample comprised 5,940 American whites) in the areas of anatomy, physiology of sexual response and orgasm, psychological factors in sexual response, neural mechanisms of sexual response, and hormonal factors in sexual response. As in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the core of the book covered types of sexual activity. The institute found that frigidity was far less common among women than folklore had supposed, and that 90 percent of the subjects were orgasmic by the age of thirty-five. Kinsey contradicted many psychoanalysts by stating that the areas involved in females’ sensory responses were the clitoris and labia and not the vagina; William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson’s research, presented in Human Sexual Response (1966), has since confirmed this claim. The institute further found that women’s sexual responsiveness peaked in their late twenties and could then be maintained at or near top level to old age, while men’s maximum responsiveness was in their late teens and then inexorably declined. About 50 percent of females had premarital sex; about 26 percent had extramarital sex; three out of five single women had had sex by the age of forty. Female homosexuality was considerably lower than males’, ultimately reaching 28 percent. Three-fourths of the females who had experienced premarital or extramarital sex had no regrets regarding their conduct. Females responded to orgasm as quickly as if not more quickly than males.

This time the cannonading of adverse criticism was even more intense, though it represented a small minority of scientific opinion. (In one survey, 95 percent of respondents among members of the American Psychological Association considered Kinsey’s project worthwhile.) Clerical condemnation of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female ranged from organized pressure by the National Council of Catholic Women to individual denunciations by Billy Graham and Reinhold Niebuhr. Karl Menninger, who had championed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, now pronounced himself “disappointed” by the later book. Franz Alexander vehemently urged his fellow psychiatrists to reject every conclusion reached in both volumes.

Worst of all for the institute, a number of angry protest letters from moralistic critics caused a powerful right-wing congressman, Carroll Reece, to open an investigation into tax-exempt foundations. Reece was determined to discredit two targets with one attack: Kinsey and the Rockefeller Foundation. Without giving Kinsey a hearing, the foundation withdrew its financial support from the institute in August, 1954. Indiana University took up as much of the support burden as it could but lacked the means to replace most of the foundation funding.

Kinsey’s spirit was severely depressed, with his increased anxiety and tension reflected in deteriorating health. He had difficulty sleeping, often felt exhausted, yet kept working at a compulsively furious pace. In June, 1956, he suffered a minor heart attack, was ordered by his physician to restrict his daily work schedule to no more than four hours, but disobeyed his doctor. He died on August 25, 1956, of a cardiac embolism complicated by pneumonia.

After his death, the institute published two more of the texts he had planned but had not lived to write: Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion (1958), by Gebhard, Pomeroy, Martin, and Virginia Christenson, and Sex Offenders: An Analysis of Types (1965), by the same authors. After 1965, the institute changed its structure to that of a coordinating umbrella organization and an archive, sheltering a number of researchers pursuing a diversity of sexual studies, such as sexual deviance, the personalities of child molesters, and homosexuals in the military forces. Kinsey’s most direct descendants have been the sexual physiologists Masters and Johnson, authors of Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970).

Significance

Kinsey and his colleagues compiled and published a monumental amount of information regarding sexual behavior in the United States. Despite some dubious sampling techniques and perhaps an overweighting of homosexual histories, his work became the standard achievement in the empirical investigation of human sexual patterns. The tremendous scale of the research opened previously closed doors of a culture constrained by Puritan and Victorian inhibitions. Kinsey took sex research out of the realm of subjective speculation and placed it on a scholarly and respectable scientific foundation.

Bibliography

Brecher, Edward M. The Sex Researchers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. This is a clearly written, popular account of the contributions made to the knowledge of human sexual behavior from Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) to Masters and Johnson. It dispenses much important information in direct, plain prose.

Christenson, Cornelia V. Kinsey: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Christenson was a research associate at the Institute for Sex Research from 1950 to 1967, where she became a friend not only of Kinsey but also of Gebhard. Her style is pedestrian, but the book includes a number of superb photographs and other illustrations.

Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things, a Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998. Insightful study of Kinsey’s life, work, and his own sexuality.

Jones, James H. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Jones was the first biographer to frankly describe Kinsey’s own sexuality. This biography offers new information and insight about Kinsey’s life and work.

Pomeroy, Wardell B. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. This is a splendid biocritical study by Kinsey’s closest associate. Pomeroy writes both knowledgeably and admiringly of his mentor, without hiding such warts as Kinsey’s controlling and occasionally thin-skinned character. The prose is lucid, compact, and assured. An indispensable source on its subject.

Trilling, Lionel. “The Kinsey Report.” In The Liberal Imagination. New York: Viking Press, 1950. A distinguished critic of culture and literature analyzes Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and worries that it may “do harm by encouraging people in their commitment to mechanical attitudes toward life.” He insists that the report is by no means as objective as it proclaims to be, since it is biased in favor of quantitatively measuring sexuality, thereby reducing sex to no more than the discharge of physical tensions. An elegant statement of the antiempiricist position.

Wolfe, Linda. Kinsey: Public and Private. New York: Newmarket Press, 2004. This book was released as a companion to a film about Kinsey. The book’s first part contains an essay on Kinsey written by Wolfe and Kinsey biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, and the second part is the final shooting script for the film written by Bill Condon, who also directed the motion picture.