Controversies and Accusationsĭespite the sexual revolution Kinsey was able to initiate through opening people’s minds and confronting them with topics they may have found disturbing or firstly repellant, Kinsey caused many controversies concerning his scientific methods and his gathering of data. In the report, he explained his ‘Kinsey Scale’ in detail, he revealed statistics about the marital coitus and discussed the topic of sadomasochism, which caused a great scandal these days. The second work ‘ Sexual Behavior in the human Female‘ followed five years later. It was the first part of the so called Kinsey Report and caused him to instantly become famous. His first revolutionary work was was published in 1948 and was called the ‘ Sexual Behavior in the human Male‘. Together with his colleagues, he interviewed over 20,000 Americans about their sexual behavior, for which he developed a 500-question questionnaire himself. They were outraged and put pressure on Kinsey. So he began organizing public discussion groups at Indiana University and openly promoted early sexual experiences in order to psychologically be a healthy person. Completely independently and alone he laid the foundation for academic sexual research by first asking his female students about their sexual behaviour they told their parents, who in turn informed church circles about it.
Kinsey did not hesitate to shout out what he had to say, even though he began his research in times when the topics of sexuality and sexual identity were not as open as they (at least seem to be) today. Nevertheless, the scale was widely used and regarded by many sexologists for several years. Today, the scale is seen as outdated, because of it not representing all sexual identities. The first project he made public was the ‘ Kinsey Scale’, a scale to measure sexual orientation ranking from 0 as exclusively heterosexual and 6 as exclusively homosexual. It turned out that there was virtually no data on the sexual behaviour of the mammal human being and that many writings drew some very obscure conclusions on the basis of purely philosophical considerations. In 1936, Kinsey was asked to hold marriage counseling courses for the students, arousing his interest in human sexual behavior. In order to be able to make reliable statements, he collected and determined hundreds of thousands of animals. There he dealt with the cataloguing of gall wasps and wrote a two-volume standard work on this insect family. During the research for his doctoral thesis on gall wasps, Kinsey more and more tried to relate the wasps reproduction practices to human sexual practices, which opened up a whole new scientific field to him. He received his doctorate in zoology from Harvard in 1920. Kinsey began his scientific career as an entomologist at Indiana University in Bloomington. Finally, in 1914, the talented student began studying in his original fields of interest, biology and psychology. Alfred Kinsey developed a predilection for nature early on, was a boy scout. He even began studying engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology, but regarded these years as a waste of time.
From Engineering to BiologyĪlfred Charles Kinsey grew up in a strictly religious Christian family and even though he did not share his parent’s enthusiasm, Kinsey followed their wishes and demands. Kinsey’s work has profoundly influenced social and cultural values in the United States and many other countries.
Alfred Charles Kinsey published the second of his controversially discussed and provoking reports entitled ‘ Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female‘. Alfred Kinsey at an interview photo: Bill Dellenbeck, ©Kinsey Institute
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