|
|
 |
However, behind the scientific façade — and fueled by Kinsey's growing awareness of his own homosexual leanings — lay a more personal agenda: To dispel the hurtful fog of ignorance by making a definitive, scientific statement on the range and variety of sexual behavior in the human animal, no matter what its race, gender, social class, or sexual orientation. Almost as if to make up for his wasted youth, Kinsey wanted to experience everything he studied — and he thought his research team should sample the full spectrum of human sexual behavior as well. He encouraged his staff at the Institute to keep journals of their masturbatory habits, accompany him to gay bathhouses, swap wives, and have sex with "research subjects" of both genders — all while being photographed and filmed. Gathorne-Hardy relates the trouble he had finding new research staff for the Institute: "New interviewers had to have an M.D. or Ph.D. . . . They all had to give their [sexual] histories and at the merest flicker of moral judgment or area of unease — out. The same was true of their wives. . . No one religious need apply. . . . He would ideally have liked them all to have had previous homosexual experience and . . . they also had to be prepared to have sex outside of marriage." One night in Columbus, Ohio, Kinsey asked a young psychologist named Vincent Nowlis, who had joined the team in 1944, to meet with him and two other staff members, Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin in a hotel room. Kinsey had noticed that Nowlis was distinctly ill at ease with homosexuality — and his solution was for the four men to have sex. Nowlis quickly hopped a train back to Bloomington and his family.
Even if Kinsey's staff could literally complain about getting reamed by the boss at work, his methods kept him in good stead. When Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
The public was shocked and relieved to hear that women also masturbated. |
was published in 1948, its thoroughness caused a sensation. The statistics were shocking: Forty percent of American men had had gay sex to the point of orgasm. Ten percent had had a gay relationship that lasted over three years. Six percent were exclusively gay. (Later studies, such as the 1993 Janus Report and studies by the National Institutes of Health, revised this number to around four percent — though "confinement homosexuality" practiced by GIs during World War II might account for some of Kinsey's numbers.) Half of the "farm boys from certain rural areas of the United States" had had sex with animals to orgasm. (According to the porn-industry gossipmonger Luke Ford, Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, had his first sexual experience with one of his grandmother's chickens.) If it's true that most best-selling books only confirm what people are vaguely aware of anyway, Kinsey's was no exception. The report told American men that it was normal to have sex outside of marriage, to have a small penis, to have a large penis, to masturbate, to want a lot of sex, to want little sex, to have sex with other men, and even to experiment sexually with animals — and that their neighbors might be doing the exact same thing.
Publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953 met with a similar response: The public was shocked and relieved to hear that women masturbated, had sex before marriage, had sex outside marriage, had sex with each other, enjoyed a variety of different sexual positions, and derived orgasmic pleasure from their clitorises (as opposed to the Freudian insistence that the "mature" woman is solely contented by vaginal sex).
Critics claim his statistics were misrepresented to make various "perversions" seem more common. |
By popularizing the idea that sex is a continuum of more-or-less common acts, rather than either "normal" or "pathological" behavior, and by using the authoritative voice of science as a plea for tolerance, Kinsey became an overnight celebrity, and a byword for the ability to discuss sex publicly in a calm, sane, and rational manner.
Kinsey's influence has long outlasted his death in 1956 at the age of sixty-two. However, as details of Kinsey's personal life came to light, many have cast doubt on his methodology. At best, his critics claim he was biased; at worst, they charge that his statistics were misrepresented to make various "perversions" seem more common than they actually are. (For a good early critique of Kinsey's work, see Sexual Behavior in American Society, published by W.W. Norton & Company in 1955.) With the aid of postmodern detachment, we can even regard his establishing a scientific institute to examine the sex lives of strangers as one big kink.
Yet, regardless of whether Kinsey's methodology holds up scientifically, its historical value is undeniable. It is because Kinsey published his work that we can publish material about sex today. Arguably, if he hadn't been so interested in exploring his own sexuality, he wouldn't have begun his sex research. In this sense, it's not so much what Kinsey said as the fact that he said it at all — and that people read it. Even if, for most 1950s Americans, sex meant marriage and a family, people were nonetheless talking publicly about sex. In this, Kinsey was, and remains, one of the fathers of the Sexual Revolution.
n°
©2007 Ken Mondschein and Nerve.com |
|
|
|
