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| KINSEY
REPORTS: WHAT DID THEY MEAN AND HOW ARE THEY RELEVANT TODAY? ©1997 By Gary Schubach, Ed.D., A.C.S. |
See
Also:
Doctor G Review of Kinsey, The Myriad Pictures
Movie by Bill Condon With Liam Neeson as Professor Alfred Kinsey
[Article] Kinsey the Film, Kinsey the Man:
Just Another Target of Juicy Media Conflict © by Marty Klein,
Ph.D
INTRODUCTION
Most people would
find reading Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female to be a formidable
task in any era. In it, there are over 1,700 pages of material complete
with numerous charts, graphs and tables. Understanding the meaning of
this material, with today's knowledge and philosophical and religious
perspectives about sex, would be completely different from reading this
material in 1948 or 1953.
The world has changed quite a bit in the last fifty years. Fifty years
ago, it was impossible to find educational material about human sexuality
in the public library, let alone, in radio, television or print media.
What little material that had been published over the course of time was
highly restricted and only available to members of the scientific community.
Today, information about human sexuality is available in every library,
most bookstores, over the internet, and in the mass media. It could be
argued that a lot of that change has come as a direct or indirect result
of the two Kinsey books.
To get an understanding of the significance of these works, it is necessary
to understand the perspectives that were in place at the time these books
were written. To judge them by what we know today does not give us a clear
picture of the true value of these works.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Alfred Kinsey was a University of Indiana zoology professor whose previous
work had been studying gall wasps, about which he was considered to be
the leading authority in the world. From examination and classification
of 150,000 specimens, he had discovered approximately 144 different types
of gall wasps. Some of the differences between one type of gall wasp and
another were really minute. Kinsey had to observe carefully and appreciate
the fine differences in order to see all the variations. Kinsey came from
a background in the physical sciences and didn't make moral judgments
on the gall wasps, that one was better than another. Instead, he just
observed what was and reported it . This perspective made him uniquely
prepared to objectively study and do research on human sexuality.
Kinsey was asked or he asked, depending on whose version you believe,
in 1937, to teach Indiana University's first class in sex education and
marriage. Upon assuming this position, he immediately decided that the
existing body of knowledge on this subject was inadequate and that it
would be necessary to begin research into what human sexual behavior truly
was. At the time, there was very little written information or research
data in the area of human sexuality available to the public or to academia.
With a few small exceptions, the previous research was done by doctors
who kept case histories on patients or on college students who were the
subjects of university research studies. The Male volume lists nineteen
studies that Kinsey felt were worthy of comment, but overall, Kinsey felt
that there was insufficient data so as to understand what people actually
did sexually, and that original research would have to be undertaken.
For this purpose, the University of Indiana and Kinsey assembled a team
of scholars, researchers and associates who crossed all of the specialties
involved and who were trained in a broad diversity of disciplines, including
both the physical and social sciences such as biology, mathematics, psychology,
sociology and anthropology. They were all pulled together for the first
time to determine what people were doing sexually and how they felt about
it, with as little judgment as possible. Their goal was "to accumulate
an objectively determined body of fact about sex which strictly avoids
moral interpretations of the fact. Each person who reads this report will
want to make interpretations in accordance with his understanding of moral
values and social significance; but that is not part of the scientific
method and, indeed, scientists have no special capacities for making such
evaluations." (Male Volume, page 5)
METHODOLOGY
There were some difficulties in the methodology of obtaining the information.
The first was the area of questionnaire construction. The Male volume
presents the skeleton of the questionnaire, listing the maximum number
of subjects covered, which included 521 items. However, since many of
the subjects interviewed had no knowledge or experience in some of the
areas, the actual number of items that were covered in an average interview
was about 300. The interviewers were allowed considerable latitude in
framing their questions to elicit factual information.
One of the greatest contributions of Kinsey and his associates was that
they raised interviewing to a fine art (with extensive systems for cross-checking
each other). Face to face interviews were done in all cases. They would
cross-check each other for accuracy with a different researcher retaking
a history on the same subject. They then calculated the variations and
differences so as to measure the reliability of the interviewers in uniformly
asking questions and recording answers. To measure the truthfulness of
the answers, they would compare appropriate responses in sets of relationship
partners.
There have been a lot of arguments over the years about the validity and
meaning of the statistics beyond the groups actually studied. Some people
claimed that these studies, particularly in the Male volume, were done
using too many prisoners, including sex offenders, because these were
the places where people had the time to sit for these histories. Others
maintained that they used too many college students and college educated
people, predominantly from the Northeast, which was the population center
of the U. S. at the time, with very little coverage of the West.
The Kinsey teams' first choice would have been to obtain a statistically
random sample. Hoever, Kinsey and his associates decided that that was
impossible due to the nature of the material and the sexual climate of
the times. They decided that the best substitute was to get as many total
histories as they could, focusing on homogeneous groups that came together
for non-sexual purposes. They tried to get 100% of the persons in each
group that was sampled, assuming that if they had enough of those, they
would get a broad enough cross section of the general population.
The Male volume was viewed by the Kinsey team as the beginning installment
in a twenty year project that had as its goal the obtaining of 100,000
individual sex histories. Also planned were volumes on: sexual behavior
in the human female; sexual factors in marital adjustment; legal aspects
of sex behavior; the heterosexual-homosexual balance; sexual adjustment
in institutional populations; prostitution; sex education; and other special
problems as discovered and identified.
In the Male and Female volumes, statistical calculations and adjustments
were made to try to cover the variations between the non-statistical randomness
of the sample that they got and the statistical norms of the 1940 census
for the Male volume and the 1950 census for the Female volume.
From July of 1938, when the first histories were taken, to 1947, when
the Male volume was being written, the Kinsey team took slightly over
12,000 histories. 3,104 of those (26%) came from 62 groups which were
100% sampled. 6,300 of these histories were of men and, of those, 5,300
were utilized in the Male volume. The other male histories involved 1,000
black men, about whom Kinsey and his associates felt they did not yet
have a sufficient sample to report in the initial Male volume. It was
anticipated that when the sampling of black men was considered sufficient,
they would be included in a revised Male volume.
In reality, only the Male and Female volumes were published before Kinsey's
death in 1956. 5,940 female histories were used for the Female volume
and, in all, 18,216 histories were taken using the interview devised by
Kinsey. After Kinsey's death, Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute
took a different direction than that envisioned by Kinsey and the additional
volumes that he planned were never published. However, the sex histories
were utilized in two Institute publications after Kinsey's death: Pregnancy,
Birth and Abortion (1958) and Sex Offender: An Analysis of Types (1965).
THE FINDINGS
Principal findings of the Male volume included: that 85% of the American
males sampled had experienced pre-marital intercourse; that 59% had some
experience in oral-genital contacts; that from 30 to 45% participated
in extra-marital intercourse; that 37% had some homosexual experience
to orgasm between adolescence and old age; 10% of the men studied had
lived at least 3 years of their lives between the ages of 16 and 55 being
exclusively sexual with the same sex; and that 17% of farm boys interviewed
had experienced intercourse with animals.
A major contribution of Kinsey and of the books, as introduced in the
Male volume, was the Kinsey Scale. For Kinsey, the choice between heterosexual
or homosexual was much too limiting in classifying behavior. He disliked
the use of the term "bisexual" to describe human sexual behavior
because of its previous use in biology to indicate the presence of the
anatomy or anatomical function of both sexes, similar to meaning as the
word "hermaphrodite". He felt that human sexual behavior was
really on a continuum with people having varying degrees of same and opposite
sex interest. This was quite revolutionary and a lot of it came from his
work on the gall wasps. If you look at gall wasps and create two or three
distinct categories of gall wasps, then choices would be based on larger
common denominators than if there is the potential of 144 different categories.
With people, using 7 different categories with variation expressible even
between the categories, allowed finer, more precise explanations of behavior
than just using 2 or 3 categories.
Another major contribution of the Kinsey scale was to "encourage
clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as
heterosexual or homosexual but as individuals who have a certain amount
of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience.
Instead of using these terms as substantives, which stand for persons,
or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to
describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or the stimuli to which
an individual erotically responds." (Male volume, page 617)
What they were saying in plain English is that the labels are used as
a judgment. They don't really tell us much, to think that a person is
a homosexual or a heterosexual, as opposed to saying that a person sometimes
engages in same sex behavior, or sometimes that a person engages in opposite
sex behavior. In fact, he found in using his 0 - 6 scale that there were
a lot of men and women who were 4's and 5's and still identified themselves
as homosexual, but had in their behaviors opposite sex contacts when that
felt perfect to them. It wasn't all black or white.
Other major findings of the studies were the high accumulated incidence
and frequency of masturbation that were going on despite social and religious
taboos against it. Both volumes discussed the relative intolerance of
lower-class individuals toward masturbation and their relative tolerance
of pre-marital intercourse; and that intercourse was clearly the number
one sexual outlet among people of the lower classes and of lower educational
levels. Other types of non coital sexual activity, particularly oral sex,
increased in cumulative incidence and frequency with education.
Furthermore, there was a clear correlation in women between a greater
ease of reaching orgasms in heterosexual intercourse after marriage and
masturbation, increasing even further by how young they were when they
began. In fact, any kind of pre-marital sexual activity, including intercourse,
had a definite correlation with post-marital sexual satisfaction levels.
It was also Kinsey's theory that people's knowledge about sex and the
variety of sexual outlets would increase with their ultimate educational
level, and would not be tied to their social class level. So it wouldn't
make much difference if someone had started out in a lower class, with
little education, and worked his/her way into a lot of money. He or she
wouldn't have the sexual history of someone who was born into a wealthier,
better educated class. Change would not be noticed until their children's
generation stepped up in its educational levels. If correct, it would
suggest that the child learns most of his/her sex attitudes and behavior
patterns from his/her schoolmates of the same economic and educational
level, rather than from his home environment.
WHAT IS "NORMAL"?
Perhaps the most significant underlying issue with the Kinsey Male and
Female volumes is the question of whether there is such a thing as "normal"
in human sexuality and by what and whose terms and definitions. This is
true both in the way they have been interpreted by the public and their
perceived impact upon society, both then and now. Many people looked at
the median and mean figures and confused those numbers with claims of
social normality.
As was noted in the quote on page 3, from the beginning, the authors of
the Kinsey Male and Female volumes were clearly committed to a scientific,
objective and non judgmental look at the behaviors of the people that
were interviewed and to the subject as a whole. They methodically looked
at the question of normality from all viewpoints and presented many perspectives
including biological, psychological, religious and historical ones. The
authors seemed to, matter-of-factly and without judgment, appreciate the
diversity of sexual behavior that they found, much as Kinsey had appreciated
the variations in the gall wasps.
It should be noted that all societies do have patterns which they regard
as normal sexual behavior and punish deviations from these norms. Also,
all societies show some degree of difference between the ideal and real
patterns of behavior within the culture. The ideal patterns represent
the society's concepts of how people should behave in various situations.
They are conscious and verbalized and, as such, are transmitted from generation
to generation on very much the same basis as legends or riddles. They
come to constitute the proper verbal responses to particular situations,
but only the exceedingly naive take them at their face value.
The rare attempts by individuals in any society to live according to its
ideal patterns have been doomed to failure. People learn to express the
ideal patterns at the verbal level while modeling their actual behavior
on what they find that other members of their society are really doing.
What the Kinsey data exposed to the general public was the extraordinary
range of individual variation in male and female sexual behavior. No longer
was it possible for people to assume that the actual sexual behavior in
any society would conform even approximately with the culturally patterned
ideal norms.
At the human level, it seems exceedingly doubtful whether there are any
instincts, meaning genetically determined patterns of behavior, which
are operative after infancy. There may be tendencies toward certain forms
of behavior in certain circumstances but such tendencies are always shaped
by learning.
CRITICISMS
The books read very dryly and were clearly targeted to academia. They
are not popularized types of books, the charts and tables are difficult
to read and to follow, and they have never achieved a popular reading.
One of the problems that arose from this is that many people who didn't
read either book all the way through have made judgments on what the books
are saying and what the figures mean.
A lot of the criticism of the Kinsey volumes comes from the conservative
religious right who argue that Kinsey was, in fact, an advocate for sexual
promiscuity and a more open sexual lifestyle. I think that much of this
comes from moral problems they have with some of the data that he reported.
These were startling statistics for their time and have also been greatly
misinterpreted. People just seized onto the raw numbers without understanding
what the questions were.
For instance, the high incidence of subjects, up to 50% of the men and
up to 25% of the women, who were reported to have had some kind of same
sex contact or fantasy or thought after the onset of adolescence was not
saying that up to 50% of men and 25% of women had practiced homosexuality.
It was saying, that childhood and adolescent same sex play, as well as
having same sex fantasies that may or may not have been acted out, were
very common.
Also, the Kinsey Male volume came up with the figure of about 10% of men
who had lived at least 3 years of their lives between the ages of 16 and
55 being exclusively sexual with the same sex. That was then interpreted
by much of the general population and by gay liberation forces as meaning
10% of men were self-defined as homosexual. That wasn't what Kinsey was
saying in any of his same sex numbers. He was simply reporting the responses
to his questions regarding behavior.
There has also been a fair amount of criticism in recent years about the
information regarding adolescent sexuality and how it may have been gathered.
A very large proportion of the world's societies permit premarital relations
between adolescents, and there is some reason to believe that this is
an aid to the individual in making the adjustment to their adult sexuality.
In the Male and Female volumes, Kinsey refers to observations of the orgasm
cycles of boys and girls at various age levels that were made by people
that they had interviewed, some having kept notes of their observations.
However, since we are currently in a more repressive period in which the
concept of childhood sexuality is under attack, some critics in recent
years have accused Kinsey of being a closet pedophile, drawing inference
that experiments had been done at the University of Indiana on children,
with and without parental consent.
In reality, there is no evidence that the Kinsey Team or the University
of Indiana ever conducted these kinds of tests. Where Kinsey got most
of this information was from detailed interviews with individuals, mostly
adults but some children, regarding their recollections of their experience.
A small number of members of groups involved in the support of adult-child
sexual relationships, had, in a pseudo-scientific sort of way, kept notes
on their observations. They observed these physiological reactions of
adolescent and pre-adolescent boys and girls and while, through our current
filters, this may not be something we support, nobody else was doing this
type of research and it was worthy of consideration.
Recently, there have been new attacks on the validity of Kinsey's work
through disparaging stories about Kinsey's personal sex life. Even if
these charges are true, and it will be difficult to prove them to any
certainty after all these years, it still does not overshadow the fundamental
truths, separate from the validity of the statistics, that arose from
the Kinsey studies.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
The sexual beliefs, morality, attitudes and laws of Kinsey's time represented
a concealed conflict. This conflict was between stern Puritanism, which
for economic survival in past times, had felt compelled to deny the congruity
of sexual behavior and joy, and evolving religious movements, which at
least in theory, tried to tie together the assumed sexual relation within
marriage for joy with the duties of procreation.
Freedom of scientific inquiry and the free exchange of information in
the area of human sexuality are not unrelated to a profound faith in the
right of all people to see, to hear, and to read material that may be
essential to their growth, happiness and fulfillment as human beings.
In this nation we have taken one fundamental gamble: that in the free
marketplace of thought, by the matching of ideas, truth has a better chance
of winning than any other method known to man.
Perhaps Kinsey's most valuable accomplishment was that, in an authoritarian
age with a rising conflict between the religious and secular segments,
he reaffirmed the rational pragmatic values of experimental science in
a field of human existence previously given over to dogma and fear. The
work which Professor Kinsey and his associates pioneered ultimately led
other researchers to a body of comparative data on the sexual behavior
of all mankind that was appreciably more realistic and dependable. With
enough scientifically gathered facts, American society finally began to
approach the subject of human sexuality with something more than shame
or feigned self-righteousness.
In today's world, two of our biggest human problems are overpopulation
and the spread of AIDS. Solutions in both of these areas would include
a broadening of people's sexual activities to activities other than coitus.
The clear message from Kinsey and those who followed is that the frequency
of non-coital sexual activities increases with education and knowledge
about human sexuality. This has never been seriously refuted. Given this
fact, it seems obvious how important the encouragement of a more thorough
and objective sexual education beginning at the earliest possible age
is for the future and survival of humankind. Ultimately, this is the meaning
and legacy of the Kinsey volumes and the real reason for the attack on
Kinsey by the religious right and other moral conservatives.
Kinsey Academy Award-winning Bill Condon (GODS & MONSTERS, CHICAGO) explores the life of the pioneer of human sexuality research, Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson). Spanning six decades from his childhood in the early 1900s to his death in 1956, the film turns the microscope on the man whose landmark studies on the sexual behaviors of the common man rocked a nation. Two-Disc Special Edition Extra
Features |
Kinsey: American Experience (2004) PBS documentary assesses Kinsey's achievements, while examining how his personal life shaped his career, through interviews with his research assistants, his children, his biographers, and historians. |
See our Press Release on Kinsey, the Movie Review
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