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. Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University and the founder of the Institute for Sex Research, more widely known as the Kinsey Institute.
The research astounded the general public and was 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 stated that some of the data in the reports could not have been obtained without observation or participation in child sexual abuse, or through collaborations with child molesters. The Kinsey Institute denies this charge, though it acknowledges that Kinsey interviewed men who had sexual experiences with children, and some former and current directors of the Institute described those men as "pedophiles".
Findings
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 system was used. The Kinsey scale ranked sexual behavior from 0 to 6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 completely homosexual. A 0 was considered to be strictly heterosexual, a 1 mostly heterosexual, a 2 more than incidentally homosexual, a 3 equally homosexual and heterosexual, a 4 homosexual but more than incidentally heterosexual, and so on. An additional category 7 was created by his colleagues for asexuals, those who experienced no sexual desire.
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 the 7-point 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. It uses a scale from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual, to 6, meaning exclusively homosexual. In the Kinsey Reports , an additional grade was used for asexuality. 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:
The scale is as follows:
- 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 late teens; 2.2 times a week, by age 30; and 1.0 times a week, by age 50.
Extra-marital sex
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.
Sadomasochism
12% of females and 22% of males reported having an erotic response to a sadomasochistic story.
Methodology
Data was gathered primarily by means of interviews, which were encoded to maintain confidentiality. Other data sources included the diaries of convicted child molesters. 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.
Subject matter of the report led itself to sensationalism. Based on his data and findings, others claimed that 10% of the population is homosexual, and that women enhance their prospects of satisfaction in marriage by masturbating previously. Neither claim was made by Kinsey.
Criticism
Objections on moral grounds
The books have been widely criticized by conservatives as promoting degeneracy. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male has been on two lists of the worst books of modern times. It was #3 on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century and #4 on a conservative website with modest web-traffic Human Events' Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Objections to Methodology
In addition to moral objections, academic criticisms pertain to sample selection and sample bias. Two main problems identified were that (1) significant portions of the samples come from prison populations and male prostitutes, and that (2) people who volunteer to be interviewed about taboo subject are likely to suffer from the problem of self-selection, both of which undermine the usefulness of the sample in terms of determining the tendencies of the overall population.
In 1948, the same year as the original publication, a committee of the American Statistical Association, including notable statisticians such as John Tukey, condemned the sampling procedure. Tukey was perhaps the most vocal critic, saying, "A random selection of three people would have been better than a group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey." Criticism principally revolved around the over-representation of some groups in the sample: 25% were, or had been, prison inmates, and 5% were male prostitutes.
A related criticism, by some of the leading psychologists of the day, notably Abraham Maslow, was 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 or close friends. Before the publication of Kinsey's reports, Dr. Maslow tested Kinsey's volunteers for bias. He concluded that Kinsey's sample was unrepresentative of the general population.
In a response to these criticisms, Paul Gebhard, Kinsey's successor as director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, spent years "cleaning" 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. The results were summarized by historian, playwright, and gay-rights activist Martin Duberman:
One can object to "cleansing" of clearly non-representative data, and hence there were calls for studies by more independent researchers. The results of a survey of 3,321 American males in their 20's and 30's by Billy, et al was published in the March/April 1993 issue of the Alan Guttmacher Institute publication Family Planning Perspective found that only 2.3% reported any homosexual contacts in the previous 10 years, and only 1.1% exclusively engaged in homosexual sex during the same time period.
Other attacks have centered on the sex life and motives of Alfred Kinsey himself
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