Kinsey Reports

Kinsey's scale of heterosexual and homosexual responses, as outlined in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

The Kinsey Reports are two books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and others and published by Saunders. Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University and the founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction (more widely known as the Kinsey Institute).

The Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was based on personal interviews with nearly 6,000 women. Kinsey analyzed data on the frequency with which women participate in various types of sexual activity and looked at how factors such as age, social-economic status and religious adherence influence sexual behavior. Comparisons are made of female and male sexual activities. Kinsey's evidence suggested that women were less sexually active than men in all aspects of sexual life but that they were still more sexual than traditional views allowed. By the time the book on female sexuality was published, it appeared that Kinsey seemed to feel that women and men are more alike in the biology of their sexuality than he had previously thought, and that both men's and women's sexuality seemed shaped, not merely repressed, by social and cultural forces.

The publications astounded the general public and were immediately controversial and sensational. The findings caused shock and outrage, both because they challenged conventional beliefs about sexuality and because they discussed subjects that had previously been taboo.

Critics have raised concerns about the methodology used to collect data.

File:Kinsey-Male.jpg

The 1948 first edition of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the first of the two Kinsey reports

Findings

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Sexual orientation

Parts of the Kinsey Reports regarding diversity in sexual orientations are frequently used to support the common estimate of 10% for homosexuality in the general population. However, the findings are not as absolute, and Kinsey himself avoided and disapproved of using terms like homosexual or heterosexual to describe individuals, asserting that sexuality is prone to change over time, and that sexual behavior can be understood both as physical contact as well as purely psychological phenomena (desire, sexual attraction, fantasy). Instead of three categories (heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual), a seven-category Kinsey Scale system was used (an 8th category for asexuals was added by Kinsey's associates).

The reports also state that nearly 46% of the male subjects had "reacted" sexually to persons of both sexes in the course of their adult lives, and 37% had at least one homosexual experience. 11.6% of white males (ages 20–35) were given a rating of 3 (about equal heterosexual and homosexual experience/response) throughout their adult lives. The study also reported that 10% of American males surveyed were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55" (in the 5 to 6 range).

7% of single females (ages 20–35) and 4% of previously married females (ages 20–35) were given a rating of 3 (about equal heterosexual and homosexual experience/response) on Kinsey Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale for this period of their lives. 2 to 6% of females, aged 20–35, were more or less exclusively homosexual in experience/response, and 1 to 3% of unmarried females aged 20–35 were exclusively homosexual in experience/response.

Kinsey scale

The Kinsey scale attempts to describe a person's sexual history or episodes of their sexual activity at a given time. The scale ranked sexual behavior from 0 to 6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 completely homosexual. An additional category, X, was mentioned to describe asexuals, those who experienced no sexual desire. It was first published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and others, and was also prominent in the complementary work Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Introducing the scale, Kinsey wrote:

"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories [...] The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. While emphasising the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history... An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life. [...] A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist."

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The scale is as follows:

Rating	Description
0	Exclusively heterosexual
1	Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2	Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3	Equally heterosexual and homosexual (bisexual)
4	Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5	Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6	Exclusively homosexual
X	Asexual

• Men: 11.6% of white males aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.
• Women: 7% of single females aged 20–35 and 4% of previously married females aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives. 2 to 6% of females, aged 20–35, were given a rating of 5 and 1 to 3% of unmarried females aged 20–35 were rated as 6.

Marital coitus

The average frequency of marital sex reported by women was 2.8 times a week in the late teens, 2.2 times a week by age 30, and 1.0 times a week by age 50. Kinsey estimated that approximately 50% of all married males had some extramarital experience at some time during their married lives. Among the sample, 26% of females had extramarital sex by their forties. Between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10 females from age 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex. However, Kinsey classified couples who have lived together for at least a year as "married", inflating the statistics for extra-marital sex. James H. Jones wrote that Kinsey's appetite for unconventional sex and his disdain for conventional sexual morality, drove Kinsey's agenda to strip sexuality of guilt and to undermine traditional sexual morality. He pointed to Kinsey's classification of couples who have lived together for at least a year as "married".

Sadomasochism

12% of females and 22% of males reported having an erotic response to a sadomasochistic story. Jones's biography, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, describes Kinsey as bisexual and experimenting in masochism. He encouraged group sex involving his graduate students, wife and staff. Kinsey filmed sexual acts in the attic of his home as part of his research. Biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy explained that using Kinsey's home for the filming of sexual acts was done to ensure the films' secrecy, which would certainly have caused a scandal had the public become aware of them.　

Methodology

Data was gathered primarily by means of subjective report interviews, conducted according to a structured questionnaire memorised by the experimenters (but not marked on the response sheet in any way). The response sheets were encoded in this way to maintain the confidentiality of the respondents, being entered on a blank grid using response symbols defined in advance. The data were later computerized for processing. All of this material, including the original researchers' notes, remains available from the Kinsey Institute to qualified researchers who demonstrate a need to view such materials. The institute also allows researchers to use statistical software (such as PSPP or SPSS) in order to analyze the data.

The subject matter of the report lent itself to sensationalism. Based on his data and findings, others claimed that 10% of the population is gay, and that women enhance their prospects of satisfaction in marriage by masturbating previously. Neither claim was made by Kinsey.

Data concerning pre-adolescent orgasms including tables 30 through 34 of the male volume, which report observations of orgasms in over three-hundred children between the ages of five months and fourteen years, led to further scrutiny. The Kinsey Institute states on its website, "[Kinsey] did not carry out experiments on children; he did not hire, collaborate, or persuade people to carry out experiments on children." and that

"The bulk of this information was obtained from adults recalling their own childhoods. Some was from parents who had observed their children, some from teachers who had observed children interacting or behaving sexually, and Kinsey stated that there were nine men who he had interviewed who had sexual experiences with children who had told him about how the children had responded and reacted."
He balanced what he saw as the need for their anonymity to solicit "honest answers on such taboo subjects" against the likelihood that their crimes would continue. Bancroft later revealed that the data on children in tables 31–34 came from one man's journal that was started in 1917, long before the Kinsey Reports. Kinsey explicitly pointed out the illegality of the man's actions, but granted him anonymity.

In response to criticisms of sample selection, Paul Gebhard, Kinsey's successor as director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, cleaned the Kinsey data of purported contaminants, removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard (with Alan B. Johnson) published The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938–1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research. Their conclusion, to Gebhard's surprise he claimed, was that none of Kinsey's original estimates were significantly affected by this bias: that is, prison population, male prostitutes, and those who willingly participated in discussion of previously taboo sexual topics had the same statistical tendency as the general population. The results were summarized by historian, playwright, and gay-rights activist Martin Duberman, "Instead of Kinsey's 37% (men who had at least one homosexual experience), Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4%; the 10% figure (men who were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55"), with prison inmates excluded, came to 9.9% for white, college-educated males and 12.7% for those with less education.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow asserted that Kinsey did not consider "volunteer bias". The data represented only those volunteering to participate in discussion of taboo topics. Most Americans were reluctant to discuss the intimate details of their sex lives even with their spouses and close friends. While this is a valid possibility, finding data from those reluctant to give data is impossible. Nonetheless, Maslow concluded that Kinsey's sample was unrepresentative of the general population. A 1994 study found that less than 5 percent of men said that they had had a same-sex sexual experience since the age of 18. Laumann's findings for rates of adultery were also around half those of Kinsey's.

Criticism on 'moral' grounds was put, alleging that data in the reports could not have been obtained without 'collaboration' with child molesters. The Kinsey Institute denies this charge, though it acknowledges that men who have had sexual experiences with children were interviewed, with Kinsey balancing what he saw as the need for their anonymity to solicit "honest answers on such taboo subjects" against the likelihood that their crimes would continue. Additionally, concerns over the sample populations used were later addressed by the Kinsey Institute, and the conclusion was that none of Kinsey's original estimates were significantly affected by these data sources.

Context and significance

The Kinsey Reports, which together sold three-quarters of a million copies and were translated in thirteen languages, may be considered as part of the most successful and influential scientific books of the 20th century. The Kinsey Reports are associated with a change in public perception of sexuality. In the 1960s, following the introduction of the first oral contraceptive, this change was to be expressed in the sexual revolution. Also in the 1960s, Masters and Johnson published their investigations into the physiology of sex, breaking taboos and misapprehensions similar to those Kinsey had broken more than a decade earlier in a closely related field.

To what extent the Reports produced or promoted this change and to what extent they merely expressed it and reflected the conditions that were producing it is a matter of much debate and speculation.

Alfred Kinsey and Kenneth Anger at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in the mid 1950s, with a photo of Crowley on the wall. From Nevill Drury's Magic and Witchcraft

Popular culture

The Kinsey report was mentioned in Cole Porter's contemporaneous song, "Too Darn Hot", for his musical Kiss Me Kate (1948) - "According to the Kinsey report/Every average man I know ..." (though this was altered to "the latest report" in the 1953 film).

Kinsey, a biographical film based on the life of Alfred Kinsey was written and directed by Bill Condon, and released in 2004. It starred Liam Neeson as Kinsey, and Laura Linney (in a performance nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress), Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker and William Sadler. Kinsey was nominated for a number of awards, winning 10 of them.

See also

• Kinsey, the movie based on the life of Alfred Kinsey
• Klein Sexual Orientation Grid

External links

• Kinsey Institute home page
• Kinsey's Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale