Kinsey Reports

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, Wardell Pomeroy 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. His 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.

Kinsey's methodology

Kinsey and his associates gathered their data primarily by means of interviews, which they encoded to maintain confidentiality. They also gathered materials such as the diaries of convicted pedophiles, all under guarantees of confidentiality. Later the data were 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 statistics were more carefully compiled and interpreted than was common at the time, and his subjects' confidentiality more carefully protected. However, his subject lent 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.

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."

Accusations of child abuse

In the Kinsey reports are data concerning pre-adolescent orgasms. Kinsey's critics allege that to obtain this data, Kinsey either sexually abused children or condoned the sexual abuse of children. Particularly controversial are tables 30 through 34 of the male volume. For example, table 34 is, "Examples of multiple orgasm in pre-adolescent males. Some instances of higher frequencies." A typical entry indicates that a certain 7 year-old had seven orgasms in a three hour time period. Kinsey's critics state that data such as these could have only been obtained by direct observation of or participation in child abuse. In particular they point to the information given in table 32, "Speed of pre-adolescent orgasm; Duration of stimulation before climax; Observations timed with second hand or stop watch," and say that the only way such precise data could have been collected was through cooperation with pedophiles.

The Kinsey institute states unequivocally on its website, "[Kinsey] did not carry out experiments on children; he did not hire, collaborate, or persuade people to carry out experiments on children." It goes on to say,

Kinsey clearly stated in his male volume the sources of information about children's sexual responses. The bulk of this information was obtained from adults recalling their own childhoods. Some was from parents who had observed their children, some from teachers who had observed children interacting or behaving sexually, and Kinsey stated that there were nine men who he had interviewed who had sexual experiences with children who had told him about how the children had responded and reacted. We believe that one of those men was the source of the data listed in the book.

Organized opposition

Some conservative groups including RSVPAmerica, headed by Dr Judith A. Reisman, and the Family Research Council have stated that they aim to discredit the Kinsey Reports. These groups often accuse Kinsey's work of promoting unhealthy sexual practices or mores.

RSVPAmerica 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 campaign website states that the video "presents the story of Dr. Reisman's discovery of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's systematic sexual abuse of 317 male children".

In its 1998 response [1] to the core allegations made by Reisman, Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft stated that 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. Bancroft further stated that Kinsey explicitly pointed out the illegality of the man's actions, but that he granted his source anonymity. In addition, Bancroft reiterated the Kinsey Institute's claim that Kinsey never had any sexual interaction with children, nor did he employ others to do so, and that he interviewed children in the presence of their parents.

Other attacks have centered 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 taboos and misapprehensions similar to those Kinsey had broken 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.

External Links

• The Kinsey Institute Website

References

• A.C. Kinsey, W.B. Pomeroy, C.E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, (Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders, 1948). ISBN 0253334128.
• A.C. Kinsey, W.B. Pomeroy, C.E. Martin, P.H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, (Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders, 1953). ISBN 025333411X.
• Dr. Judith A. Reisman, Edward W. Eichel, Dr. John H. Court & Dr. J. Gordon Muir, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, (Lafayette, LA: Lochinvar-Huntington House Publishers, 1990).
• Katz, Jonathan Ned (1995) The Invention of Heterosexuality. NY, NY: Dutton (Penguin Books). ISBN 0525938451