The Kinsey Reports are two controversial books on human sexual behaviour, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey and others. Kinsey was a zoologist at the Indiana University at Bloomington and the founder of the Institute for Sex Research.

Kinsey's research astounded the general public and was immediately controversial and sensational. He concluded among other things:

  • Something between 90% and 95% of people were somewhat bisexual (see Kinsey scale).
  • Masturbation was almost universal in human males.
  • Women who reported masturbation before marriage had no less sexual satisfaction in their marriages, there was even a slight correlation of greater satisfaction.

These findings caused shock and outrage, both because they challenged conventional beliefs about sexuality and because they discussed subjects that had previously been taboo. The belief that heterosexuality and abstinence were both ethical and statistical norms had never before been seriously challenged.

Table of contents
1 Kinsey's methodology
2 Organised opposition
3 The reports in context
4 References

Kinsey's methodology

Kinsey and his associates gathered their data primarily by means of interviews, which they encoded using a code to maintain confidentiality. They also gathered materials such as the diaries of convicted pedophiles, all under guarantees of confidentiality. Later the data was computerised 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 submit SPSS programs to be run on the data, which remains a unique resource in both the size of the survey and the care with which it was documented.

Kinsey's conclusions based on his data were if anything modest. His statistics were more carefully compiled and interpreted than was common at the time, and his subject confidentiality more carefully protected. But his subject led itself to sensationalism. Based on his data and findings, others claimed that all but 10% of the population are homosexual, and that women enhance their prospects of satisfaction in marriage by masturbating previously. Neither claim was made by Kinsey, but both were (and continue to be) attributed to him.

Kinsey's methodology was criticised by some of the leading psychologists of the day, notably by Abraham Maslow. Fully 25% of Kinsey's survey group were, or had been, prison inmates, 5% were male prostitutes, and the majority were volunteers. It was claimed that he refused to consider volunteer bias as a confounding factor even when he was warned by prominent research psychologists, that he provided incomplete demographic data, and that his statistical methods of analysis were inappropriate. It should be noted that Kinsey's critics did not suggest that his research should be improved, rather they wanted it rejected and abandoned.

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 its 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.

Professor Martin Duberman writes:

Instead of Kinsey's 37 percent, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4 percent; the 10 percent figure (with prison inmates excluded) came to 9.9 percent for white, college-educated males and 12.7 percent for those with less education. And as for the call for a "random sample," a team of independent statisticians studying Kinsey's procedures had concluded as far back as 1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey's interviewing technique had been "extraordinarily skillful." They characterized Kinsey's work overall as "a monumental endeavor."

Organised opposition

Some conservative groups including RSVPAmerica (headed by Dr Judith A. Reisman) and the Family Research Council have stated that one of their goals is to discredit the Kinsey Reports.

RSPVAmerica advertises publications such as "Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences" and "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People" (both by Reisman) and the video "The Children of Table 34", funded by the Family Research Council. The video, according to the campaign website, "presents the story of Dr. Reisman's discovery of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's systematic sexual abuse of 317 male children". The Kinsey Institute denies this claim, citing the diaries of convicted pedophiles as the source of this information.

In its 1998 response [1] to the core allegations made by Reisman, Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft stated:

  • The data on children in tables 31-34 of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male came largely from the journal of one adult "omniphile", who had illegal sexual interaction with these children. The man's journal started in 1917, long before the Kinsey Reports.
  • Kinsey explicitly pointed out that the data came from the journals of adults who had such illegal sexual contacts, but he granted his source anonymity.
  • Kinsey did never have any sexual interaction with children, nor did he employ others to do so. He interviewed children in the presence of their parents.

See also Judith A. Reisman, Family Research Council, RSVPAmerica.

Other attacks by these and other organisations and people have centred on the sex life and motives of Kinsey himself, see Alfred C. Kinsey, or have claimed that the Kinsey Reports are themselves responsible for decay in society.

The reports in context

The Kinsey reports are associated with a change in public perception of sexuality. In the 1960s following the introduction of the 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 similar taboos and misapprehensions as Kinsey had 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.

Many of Kinsey's conclusions while radical for the time are now generally accepted. The reports continue to be widely cited, and regarded as a significant piece of original research.

References