Alfred Kinsey

From Philosopedia

Kinsey, Alfred (23 June 1894 - 25 August 1956)

An American biologist and noted sexologist, Kinsey was associated with the University of Indiana from 1920 until the time of his death. His early work dealt with the gall wasp. After receiving financial support from the university, the National Research Council, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey began a project of interviewing many thousands of individuals in a study which led to his publishing Sexual Behavior of the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953). The research immediately helped free American society of Victorian repression. His crusade to promote more enlightened sexual attitudes, according to James H. Jones’s Albert C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (1997), led to the following:

• [I]n 1957, a year after his death, the Supreme Court’s Roth decision narrowed the legal definition of obscenity, expanding the umbrella of constitutional protection to cover a broader range of works portraying sex in art, literature, and film. In 1960, the birth-control pill was introduced, offering a highly effective method of contraception. In 1961, Illinois became the first state to repeal its sodomy statutes. The next year, the Supreme Court ruled that a magazine featuring photographs of male nudes was not obscene and was therefore not subject to censorship. And in 1973, in a dramatic reversal, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychopathologies.

Ernest Jones described Kinsey’s finesse is developing and interviewing individuals, told of his interest in homosexuality (in fact, calls Kinsey—the father of four—a homosexual rather than a bisexual) and sado-masochism (who struggled as a youth with homoerotic feelings and punished himself by inserting a toothbrush up his urethra during masturbation); photographed his wife Clara masturbating; filmed writer Glenway Wescott and his companion Monroe Wheeler in order to document the former’s “jackknifing” at the time of his orgasm; decreed that men could have sex with each other and that the wives, too, could be free to embrace whatever sexual partners they liked; even had himself photographed while engaged in masochistic masturbation. One of Kinsey’s most provocative discoveries was that males of different social backgrounds and educational levels presented strongly dissimilar sexual histories. Many of his statistics were challenged, and he received considerable criticism from academic as well as religious sources for the scope of his research.

Martin Duberman, critiquing the Jones work, pointed out that he had ignored Kinsey’s famous 0 to 6 scale (0 = exclusive heterosexuality; 6 = exclusive homosexuality). Insiders, he claimed, placed Kinsey at between a “1” and a “2”—more “straight” than “gay”—when younger, then shifting increasingly to the “homosexual” side of the scale as he aged, but never becoming an exclusive “6.” In the final analysis, Duberman found the Jones book “never manages a coherent portrait—and personality contradictions can intelligible cohere.”

Kinsey was the son of evangelical Methodists. His father had forbade dancing, tobacco, drink, and popular music in their household. Kinsey in his later years went public, according to Jones, declaring himself an atheist. He did not, however, become a member of any of the freethought associations. (James H. Jones, “Dr. Yes,” The New Yorker, 25 August-1 September 1997)