Originally published 31 May 1993
When Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male came out in 1948, I was 11 years old and just beginning a long fascination with the mystery of mysteries.
Of course, the infamous book never appeared in our house, but it was impossible not to be aware of its publication. Kinsey’s name was on everyone’s lips. Within 10 days of the book’s release 185,000 copies were in print — and this an ostensibly scientific work. The so-called “Kinsey Report” was a best-seller.
Over the next few years, every adolescent boy in America managed to sneak a peek at the forbidden book. How long was the average penis? How often did boys masturbate? At what age did American males have their first coital experience? Science had proved we were normal after all — neither too short, too often, or too late.
With what seemed fortuitous timing, Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared five years later, when I was 16 and just beginning to pass from private fantasies to experiments with girls. The second volume was a revelation. Women, it turned out, were sexual creatures too, with many of the same preoccupations as men — and certain fascinating differences. Kinsey’s volume, thick with graphs and charts, pronounced a secular benediction upon our heavy-breathing pursuit of sexual bliss.
I was reminded of all this by David Halberstam, writing in the May/June [1993] issue of American Heritage about the men and women of the 1950s who instigated the Sexual Revolution. Halberstam begins with Kinsey, moves on to Pill-doctors Goody Pincus and John Rock, and then to Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner, Grace Metalious, and Betty Friedan. According to Halberstam, science lit the fuse that set the whole thing off.
Inspired by the American Heritage article, I went to the sex section of my college library, where I found Kinsey’s two red volumes, tattered, forlorn, showing their age, surrounded by a hundred glossy newer books cataloging and explicating every nuance of human sexual behavior. Could it really be 40 years?
When you think about it, it is quite astonishing that one of the most fundamental phenomena in our lives was for so long off-limits as a subject for scientific investigation. In the introduction to his book, Kinsey took note of the dearth of scientific information about human sexuality. He pointed out that more was known about the sexual behavior of farm and laboratory animals than of humans.
Kinsey compared the paucity of scientific studies with the vast wealth of philosophical, moral, literary, artistic, and pornographic materials on sex. He wrote: “It is, at once, an interesting reflection of man’s absorbing interest in sex, and his astounding ignorance of it; his desire to know and his unwillingness to face the facts.”
Alfred Kinsey was an unlikely revolutionary. He was a stolid Midwesterner with a crew cut and bow tie. As a kid he was an Eagle Scout. He married the first woman he ever dated and stayed married to her all his life. He collected stamps. He didn’t smoke, and rarely drank. He had more than 100,000 miles on the Buick that he drove most of his life. In a word, he was the typical boring old scientist.
He was, in fact, professor of zoology at Indiana University.
His wife, Clara, sometimes told friends, “I hardly see him at night any more since he took up sex.”
Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey’s scientific collaborator and a co-author of the Report, wrote: “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. Our grand design, in simplest terms, was to try to find out — by means of face-to-face interviewing followed by statistical analysis of the facts we had collected — what people did sexually.”
In the late 1940s and early ’50s, what people did sexually was a big, dark secret. And that, according to Kinsey’s critics, was the way it should stay. The Report was condemned by church groups, scientists, academics, conservatives, liberals — a testament to the universality of human ambivalence about sex. “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,” preached Billy Graham, and his words were echoed by an outraged chorus.
Few of the self-appointed guardians of American virtue were willing to admit that Americans were quite so sexually active, in such unapproved ways, as Kinsey’s statistics indicated. The graphs and tables of data were considered in themselves to be incitements to immorality. Kinsey’s volume on female sexual behavior was even more furiously condemned than the first book. Women, in particular, were not supposed to be sexually active.
In the face of the storm of criticism, the Rockefeller Foundation, headed by Dean Rusk, terminated funding for Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. Kinsey responded by working even harder. His health faltered. Three years after publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female he was dead, at age 62.
It was a case of killing the messenger for the message.
Alfred Kinsey carefully refrained from making moral judgments about sexual behavior. His attitude was that of detective Joe Friday: “The facts, Ma’am, just the facts.” Science described, he said, not prescribed. He would probably be surprised to find himself included by David Halberstam as one of the people who made the Sexual Revolution happen.
