Age First Premarital Petting

Kinsey Reports

Table

By: Alfred C. Kinsey

Date: 1979

Source: Paul H. Gebhard and Alan B. Johnson. The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938–1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1979.

About the Author: Alfred C. Kinsey graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin University with bachelor's degrees in biology and psychology in 1916, and earned a doctorate in biology from Harvard University in 1919. After teaching zoology and botany at Harvard for a short while, he began his professional career as an assistant zoology professor at Indiana University in 1920. In 1938 he was asked to develop a course on marriage, and during his research for this course he discovered the relative paucity of published information about human sexuality. Soon his research overtook his interest in teaching the class, an undertaking that occupied the remainder of his professional career. He began by gathering the sexual behavior histories of his students, eventually expanding his database to include a large-scale nationwide study that eventually encompassed more than 18,000 interviews. Kinsey and his colleagues published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.

INTRODUCTION

In 1938, Indiana University zoology professor Dr. Alfred Kinsey was asked to develop a course about sex and marriage for female students and their spouses or fiancés. Kinsey did extensive research in preparation, and quickly discovered the dearth of published material on human sexual behavior in the medical, biological, and psychological literature.

Kinsey was keenly interested in the continuum of human sexual behavior. This was in stark opposition to the political climate in which he was operating—extremely repressive and conservative, with a pervasive taboo against the open discussion of sexuality. Given the tenor of the times, his work was highly controversial from the outset.

Deciding that the most efficient and effective means of data gathering was by interview and case history, he began to collect the sexual histories of students in his marriage classes. This formed the foundation of his master database. Seeking to broaden the scope of his data, he designed a series of 350 questions around which to frame his interviews; this gave him extremely detailed, accurate, and comprehensive data.

As the scope and intensity of his project grew, along with no small degree of controversy, Kinsey was asked to choose between continuing to work as a university professor and devoting himself to his research full time. He chose the latter, and began to seek grants and outside support to increase the scope of his research while still maintaining an affiliation with Indiana University.

By 1940 his work was funded by the National Research Council (NRC), which was in turn funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. This enabled Kinsey to hire a team of research scientists and clinical interviewers, who spread out across the country to acquire even more diverse data. Less than a decade after he had begun interviewing students, Alfred Kinsey and his staff had collected more than 10,000 sexual histories spanning the demographic continuum. These formed the basis of the extensive collection of books, articles, and other media now known as Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. The institute is also a nationwide center for research programs and a repository for the (now electronic) sex research database.

The first data compilation was published in 1948 as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. It contained much that was considered startling and enormously controversial: According to the book, more than 90 percent of the 9,000 males interviewed admitted that they had masturbated; and more than a third said they had experienced some form of homosexual encounter. The book was filled with data tables and statistical analyses—a bestseller that was extremely technical and difficult to read.

The second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was similarly received. Of the 6,000 women interviewed in the book, half had not been virgins when they married, one-quarter had engaged in extramarital affairs, and 9 percent reported never having experienced an orgasm. The second book's notoriety eclipsed even that of the first. The figures on pre- and extramarital behavior were scandalous, and conflicted directly with conventional views of women at the time.

PRIMARY SOURCE

TABLE 199. AGE FIRST PREMARITAL PETTING

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

By publishing these two books, Kinsey effectively ended the secrecy and misinformation surrounding human sexual behavior, created a venue for ongoing research, and opened a forum for public discussion. According to his data, not only had 37 percent of American male and 13 percent of American female interviewees had homosexual experiences, 62 percent of female and 92 percent of male respondents acknowledged that they masturbated. Premarital sex was reported to be a fairly common occurrence, and many married couples (50 percent of the responding males and 25 percent of the responding females) had engaged in extramarital relationships. It is important to recognize not only the social and cultural climate in which these studies were published, but the political and legal one as well: Nonmarital sex was illegal nationwide, and even within the confines of marriage many states had outlawed oral and anal sex.

From the start, there were those who felt that the sample was biased, and that people might exaggerate their sexual histories; those issues continue to be debated. Some clergy and political conservatives believed that Kinsey's openness about his own bisexuality encouraged overreporting of homosexual behavior. One of the most inflammatory and enduring criticisms of the data concerned the discussion of sexual behavior in children. Critics alleged that this research

paved the way for a dramatic increase in child sexual abuse; his defender, however, believed that his work actually encouraged, for the first time in history, the reporting of adult-child sexual activity. Kinsey publicly and repeatedly stated that no children were directly involved in the research project, and that much of the data came from a sample of nine men, primarily located in one prison facility, who were admitted pedophiles.

Kinsey's book on female sexuality was published during the McCarthy era, a period in the 1950s of intense suspicion in the United States, further heightening the controversy surrounding its release. Kinsey's grant funding and public support dwindled, and the institute was forced to seek new funding. Kinsey's health deteriorated, and he died in August 1956. Paul Gebhard, an anthropologist who had played a central role in the project, assumed leadership, intending to maintain a lower public profile for the institute while aggressively seeking funding to continue the research. By the 1960s, the political, cultural, and social climate in the United States had become less restrictive, and funding from NIMH was secured. The institute undertook a series of projects on homosexuality, which had been planned by Kinsey before his death and were encouraged by the NIMH. In the 1970s a much more inter-disciplinary approach to sexual behavior research was adopted, and the Institute's library and archival collections were opened to qualified scholars.

At a conference commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kinsey's death and in deference to his considerable scientific contributions, the institute was renamed the Alfred C. Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. When June Machover Reinisch became director in 1982, its name changed again to the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Dr. Reinisch broadened the institute's mission to include biomedical and psychobiological methods, and extended its scope to incorporate multidisciplinary approaches. She initiated a large-scale public-awareness campaign, as well as an internationally syndicated newspaper column entitled "The Kinsey Report," that answered readers' questions on sexuality and sexual behavior.

When Reinisch retired in 1983; Stephanie Sanders served as interim director until John Bancroft assumed leadership in 1995. Bancroft sought to further Reinisch's research agenda, but worked to educate the scientific community and withdraw the institute's name from the public forum. He contended that a prevailing air of fear still surrounds sex research, and that the religious right and conservative politicians fuel the ongoing controversy. Bancroft believed that the Institute should work to inform and educate policy makers, address the reluctance to study sexuality scientifically, and foster a truly interdisciplinary approach to the scholarly study of gender and sexuality. Julia Heiman became director of the Kinsey Institute in June 2004. Her research interests included the study of sexual dysfunction in women and the relationship between early abuse and development of adult sexual behavior.

Gebhard and Johnson reanalyzed all the research data originally collected by Kinsey and his staff using modern statistical methods and found very few significant differences from the original results. They published The Kinsey Data Marginal Tabulations of 1938–1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research in 1979. More than fifty years after the data was collected, it's used by social science and other researchers as a basis for comparison with contemporary studies.

Kinsey's contributions to the study of human sexual behavior were enormous—not only did he disprove the mythology of the day, he created a framework for the scientific study of sex. He developed a heterosexual-homosexual rating scale, showing that sexuality did not have to be exclusively either one or the other—that sexual behavior existed on a continuum. He also broke new ground by proving that American adults engaged in a wide variety of sexual acts and behaviors.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Jones, James H. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Pomeroy, Wardell Baxter. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Periodicals

Bancroft, John. "Kinsey and the Politics of Sex Research." Annual Review of Sex Research 15 (2004): 1-39.

Bancroft, John, Erik Janssen, Lori Carnes, et al. "Sexual Activity and Risk-Taking in Young Heterosexual Men: The Relevance of Personality Factors." Journal of Sex Research 41, no. 2 (2004): 181-192.

Bancroft, John, and Z. Vukadinovic. "Sexual Addiction, Sexual Compulsivity, Sexual Impulse Disorder or What? Towards a Theoretical Model." Journal of Sex Research 41, no.3 (2004): 225-304.

Bullough, Vern L. "Sex Will Never Be the Same: The Contributions of Alfred C. Kinsey." Archives of Sexual Behavior 33, no. 3 (2004): 277-286.

――――――. "Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: Historical Overview and Lasting Contributions." Journal of Sex Research 35, no. 2 (1998): 127-131.

Graham, C. A., J. A. Catania, R. Brand, et al. "Recalling Sexual Behavior: A Methodological Analysis of Memory Recall Bias via Interview Using the Diary as the Gold Standard." Journal of Sex Research. 40, no. 4 (2003): 325-332.

Web sites

The Kinsey Institute. "About the Institute." 〈http://www.indiana.edu/∼kinsey/about〉 (accessed November 25, 2005).

National Geographic News. "Could Kinsey's Sex Research Be Done Today? Part 1." 〈http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1116_041116_sex_research.html〉 (accessed November 25, 2005).

National Geographic News. "Could Kinsey's Sex Research Be Done Today? Part 2." 〈http://www.news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1116_041116_sex_research.html〉 (accessed November 25, 2005).