Kinsey and The Institute For Sex Research
From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality
Most sex researchers, sex therapists, and sex educators trace the beginning of today’s scientific knowledge of human sexual behavior to the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and the organization that he founded: the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, into a devoutly religious, middle-class family. He studied mechanical engineering (1912–1914) and then transferred to Bowdoin College in Maine to study biology. In 1916 he began graduate studies at Harvard University, concentrating on entomology, the study of insects; he received his Ph.D. in 1920.
Kinsey was an unlikely person to become the most renowned sex researcher of his generation. He became an instructor in biology at Indiana University in 1920, and built an illustrious academic career specializing in the classification of wasps and other insects. In particular, he became the world’s foremost authority on gall wasps. His life changed in 1937 when, as a family man with four children and because of his reputation as a biologist and a person of irreproachable conservatism, he was asked to develop and teach a new course at Indiana University on sex and marriage. While preparing for this course, he quickly learned that research in the area of human sexuality was very weak and that much of the accepted knowledge about the subject was based on outmoded beliefs and speculation rather than on scientific studies. He began to collect his own data through surveys of sexual behavior among his students and gradually expanded this to include the general public.
In a short while he attracted a team of unusually talented social scientists to Indiana University; together they began large-scale interviews of more than 11,000 people for their main research projects. By 1947 Kinsey and his colleagues had founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. Financing for the Institute first came from the Rockefeller Foundation, but when publications of the Institute’s studies became very much in demand, royalties from their books financed further research.
In the years that Kinsey headed the Institute, over 17,000 people were interviewed by it. The topics studied included: childhood sexual activity (see children’s sexuality; teenagers and sex); masturbation; petting; the onset of various kinds of sexual activity; frequency of sex before, during, and after marriage; homosexuality (see also gay and lesbian populations); nocturnal emissions; extramarital sex; and sex among the elderly (see aging and sex). The two main works produced at the Institute by Kinsey and his colleagues have provided the base line data on human sexual activity to which all subsequent sexual behavior research has been compared. They were: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, using a sample of 5,300 males, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, using a sample of 5,940 females. When first published, these two 800-page books were considered by the publisher and the Institute to be of interest only to a limited medical and professional market. However, the lack of information about sexual behavior and the public’s hunger for knowledge about this virtually taboo topic led to both books becoming national best sellers and to a host of secondary commentaries on them by other science and medical writers.
The main work of the Institute and its publications occurred at a time when the United States was politically and socially very conservative. Extreme right wing groups led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin believed that a deterioration of sexual morality was exacerbated by communist teachings and that the Kinsey Institute’s work fed, unintentionally, into this plot. Consequently, in a few cities these books were seized and destroyed—justified by federal and state laws, commonly known as the Comstock Laws and dating back to the 1870s, making it a crime to send “erotic material” or sexual matter through the mail. (Almost a century later, in the 1960s, these laws were found to be in violation of the First Amendment.) Pressure on the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw funding from Kinsey and his colleagues proved successful during the McCarthy period, but by 1957, after Senator McCarthy and “McCarthyism” had been discredited, the attacks on the Institute eased considerably and funding began to increase. Since then it has remained an important research center.
Kinsey died in 1956 at the age of sixty-two. Although there has been some scholarly criticism of some of the sampling techniques of the Kinsey studies, there is no question that the meticulous procedures that Kinsey employed were the best in use at the time and the studies still stand as the best social data ever collected on the sexual behavior of the human male and female. Whenever studies of sexual behavior are reported today, they invariably use the Kinsey data to compare changes in sexual behavior over the past fifty years.
