The Sex Institute

A Journalist who writes on a subject that in any way involves sex--as I have often had occasion to do in the past decade on teenage marriages, campus marriages, marriage problems in general and subsidiary issues such as homosexuality--would be a fool not to consult with the Institute for Sex Research, that famed institution founded in 1938 and incorporated in 1947 at Indiana University by the late great Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey. Being no fool (I hope), I have consulted regularly with the Institute. I often call my friends on the staff long distance, and many a time I have flown to Indianapolis and rented a car at the airport to pay a personal call at the Institute, which is on the university campus at Bloomington, an hout's drive to the south.

The inevitable always happens. The long-distance operator, when I ask for the Institute for Sex Research, titters. The girl at the car-rental desk in Indianapolis, when I tell her that my address will be the Institute for Sex Research, raises her eyebrows. Sometimes I go along with the gag; I say that I plan to offer my body to the Institute. But usually I am just depressed. Why should the Institute for Sex Resarch, 17 year after its first monumental study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male first appeared, still be the subject of so much self-conscious merriment?

Above all, why should its work still be so suspect? I frequently mention the Institute's findings in my articles and lectures, for nobody can pretend to write or talk authoritatively about sex without mentioning them. But almost every time, some editor takes me to task or somebody in the audience rises to challenge me. Don't I know--so go the question--that the Institute's work has been criticized by some of the most prominent psychonanalysts and social scientis in the world? Am I really so naïve as to believe that all those people interviewed by the Institute staff told the truth about their sex lives?

Well, all right. I can see considerable merit in the psychoanalysts' criticism. And I don't necessarily believe that the people interviewed by the Institute were either totally honest or gifted with total recall. But I do believe that the reports put out by the Institute are, in general, accurate--and that, furthermore, they are the most important books that have been published in my lifetime. I believe that the Institute has done more to change the pattern of modern life--and for the better--than any other institution that ever flourished on American soil, with the one possible exception of the Constitutional Convention

The Institute, in recent years, has been much less of a storm center than it used to be. The headline-making days of the giant reports on men and women are over; the more recent books, less sweeping in scope, have attracted far less attention. It operates nowadays almost in obscurity: If you ask the desk clerk at a Bloomington hotel to direct you to the Institu, you are likely to get a puzzled look; and even your taxi driver will probably not know the way unless he happens to be an Indiana University student who has seen it on his way to classes. Certainly the Institute does not advertise its presence. Its outer door, hidden in an out-of-the-way corner of the third floor of one of the university buildings, looks like the entrance to any routine classroom; the words Institute For Sex Research are (continued on page 152)Sex Institute(continued from page 139) casually printed on piece of cardboard pasted to the ground-glass panel. Inside is a small, bare reception room with two wooden chairs and a desk presided over by a thoroughly businesslike middle-aged woman who is usually hard at work typing letters or keeping books. Very few of Bloomington's residents, or even the students and faculty of the university, have ever had occasion to walk into the reception room; and fewer still have passed through the locked door that leads back to the working quarters. This is mysterious and seldom explored territorry--and the source of most of the more enlightened sexual attitudes of the America of the 1960s. Criticism of the Institute sometimes seem to get more publicity than the Institute itself, but this is only a continuing echo of the old controversies, and hollow. Quietly, slowly, but surely, the Institute's findings have gained the ultimate kind of acceptance. Scarcely a serious book is published to day--on any kind of human behavior ranging from anthropology through psyshology to sociology--that does not liberally quote the work of the Institute for Sex Research.

• • •

To fully appreciate what the Institute has done to our modern world, a person must be old enough to have arrived at adolescence, as I did, before 1948, when the Institute fired its first great bombshell in the form of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. I grew up, in those pre-1948 dark ages, in the little town of Chester, Illinois. It was an earthy town, surrounded by farmlands in which the horses, cattle and pigs were busy breeding. We young people knew "the facts of life" from personal observation. Some of us practiced them: In my tiny senior class at the high school there were at least three girls whose graduation gowns covered pregnant abdomens. Yet we were incredibly ignorant--and so, indeed, were the adults around us.

One day when I was in the eighth grade, a friend of mine suddenly jumped up from his seat and asked the teacher for permission to go outside and throw stones at the Devil. Startled, she told him to go ahead, and he did. Standing at the windows, we watched him pick up all the stones he could find in the schoolyard and hurl them as hard as he could at something that we were unable to see but that he apparently saw clearly. Poor fellow, he was the victim of one of those myths that used to torture so many people a mere few decades ago. He had been told that masturbation drives boys crazy--and because he believed the myth, he had gone temporarily out of his head.

I had another friend whose high school years were turned into a nightmare because somebody saw him and another boy engaged in some sort of nemeless shenanigans one night. I never did find out exactly what they were up to--or supposed to be up to. Things like that were never spelled out in the polite language of pre-1948 America. But the word got around that this fellow was "queer," and mothers refused to let their daughters have anything to do with him. I think he took to believing in his own mind that he was "queer"; he tried to talk to me about it several times, but never could get around to frank details. He was one of the unhappiest fellows I ever knew, until at last he moved away to another town, got blissfully married and sired six healthy children.

There was a girl in the high school who was known as a "nymphomaniac." This was a mystertious word that none of us understood exactly, but it conjured up all sorts of wild vistions of insatiable and debilitating abandon. Some of the boys, of course, managed to meet up with her in private, but nobody would have any part of her in public. She never found a steady fellow, all the while I lived in Chester, and as far as I know she is still unmarried. Poor girl, she was not a nymphomaniac at all--just a skinny, homely and neurotic kid trying her best to be popular.

All these things were a commonplace in pre-1948 America, and nobody can even guess how much unhappiness they caused and how many lives they ruined.

Now, of course, almost everybody knows better--and the one big reason we know better is that the Institute for Sex Research has laid the facts on the line once and for all.

Up until 1948. nobody really had the faintest idea whether masturbation was common or uncommon, "normal" or "perverted." Now we know, from Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, that more than 90 percent of all men have committed this act which my boyhood friend in Chester had been led to consider a sin.If it drove people crazy, almost everybody would be crazy. (Sigmund Freud made an interesting error along this line. At one point in his career, because so many of his patients told him they had masturbated, he decided that masturbation was indeed a cause of emotional disturbances. What he didn't know was that all the undisturbed people who never visited his office would have told him the same thing.)

Up until 1948, nobody knew how many men in America shared my other friend's experience of having had some kind of homosexual experience, from the vague to the specific. Now we know, again from Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, that one man in three has at one time or another had a homosexual experience reaching the point of orgasm--and that the experience does not necessarily make a man"queer" at all.

Up until 1948, the "nymphomaniac" was a popular character in folklore and literature. But Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and later Sexual Behavior in the Human Female have proved that sexual appetites and capacities, like everything else in nature, range along a continuous scale from the very weak to the very strong. Nowhere in the reports of the Institute for Sex Research does the word nymphomaniac even appear.

The sexual misconceptions of the pre-1948 world were by no means confined to small towns like Chester. I went from there to Washington University, a so-phisticated school in the sophisticated city of St. Louis, and was surrounded by just as much abysmal ignorance.

For one semester I went to the university's law school in a vain effort to get interested in the safe and sure profession of the lawyer instead of the insecure life of the journalist. One member of the law class was a married man, a rarity among students in those days. He assured us solemnly that his wife practiced the most effective possible form of birth control by using a douche composed of one tablespoonful of vinegar in a quar of warm water, and we believed him. At the end of the semester his wife was pregnant--and so, I suppose, were the girlfriends of some of the fellows who had followed his advice.

It could hardly happen today. Anybody can go to a good physician--even in states where it is still theoretically against the law to disseminate information about birth control--and get the facts. And the facts are available in well-documented detail. Ever since Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made sex research respectable, other explorers have been at work in this onceshunned field. I don't mean to belittle Margaret Sanger and her followers, who won the first battles for family Planning; but it was the pioneer work of Dr. Kinsey that paved the way for Dr. William Masters and other medical research workers who have made scientific studies, replete with statistics, of how effective are such birthcontrol methods as the pill, the vaginal diaphragm, the various contraceptive jellies and the condom. Their final word on this subject is available to every physician--and, indeed, to anybody else who cares to look it up.

Going back again to my university days, I remember that one of the first things all of us beginning law students learned from the upperclassmen was that if we went to a certain volume of the state supreme court reports and turned to a certain page, we could read a titillating account of a subject almost too racy to mention. I got out the volume and found that I did not even have to turn to the proper page; the book opened automatically, at a point where it had been opened countless times (continued on page 164)Sex Institute(continued from page 152) before, and the subsequent pages were grimy from the touch of innumerable hands. It was a sodomy case involving a husband and wife. None of us who read the case knew exctly what sodomy meant, and the Supreme Court wasn't about to tell us. All we knew was that the dictionary said that it was something "unnatural." It must have been drastically "unnatural," we felt, because the fellow in the court case went to prison.

I know now, of course, and I'm sure that every freshman law student in every university also knows, that this wellthumbed case in the law reports referred to the act of fellatio. I doubt very much that we would know unless the Institute for Sex Research had brought this onceforbidden subject into the open, and made the very word fellatio a part of our acceptable language.

I shudder to think of how many people, in those dark days before 1948, must have suffered the tortures of the damned because they enjoyed oral sex play of one kind or another and thought they therefore belonged to some strange, "unnatural" and perverted minority, so despised by the vast majority of "normal" Americans that any discovery of their disgraceful habit would doom them to everlasting ostracism, if not indeed to jail. It took those tactful and persuasive interviewers from the Institute for Sex Research, adept at putting people at their ease and getting them to admit secrets they would not have admitted to their closest friends, to establish that more than 60 percent of American men and a substantial number of American women have engaged in fellatio, and almost equal numbers in the kindred practice called cunnilingus. (Among the "best people," the proportion is even higher. The more education one has, the more common is this type of sex play.)

The law has not caught up with the Institute findings: You can still go to prison in Missouri for doing what theat man in the lawbook did, and in all but one other state as well. (Illionls is the exception; in 1961 it adopted the most enlightened code of sexual laws in out national history.) But the laws of the 50 states are applied infrequently and quixotically; few people go to prison these days for engaging in heterosexual oral sex play, although the legal threats are still there on the books. Indeed, a marriage manual sponsored by the Catholic Church now officially recognizes that there is nothing wrong with this kind of sexual conduct, provided it is followed by intercourse. Would this have happened without the Institute for Sex Research? Hardly.

Speaking of the law, there is one case cited in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female which I consider to be the final word on how the Institute for Sex Research has changed our modern world. In the year 1943, less than a quarter century ago, the supreme court of one of our states ruled that a lower court was absolutely right in committing a man to an insane asylu. The proof that the man was insane--get this!--was that he insisted on having sexual relations with his wife as often as three or even four times a week. There was nothing else in the world wrong with him; he was admittedly "bright," "competent" and "a good worker." But the court ruled that any man with a sexual appetite of such magnitude had to be considered a psychopath and put out of harm's way.

We know now, from the figures in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, that there are young men who enjoy coitus as often as 25 times a week, and that indeed, some men are still capable of 7 times a week even after they have reached the age of 70. Unless some anachronistic reform wave suppresses the findings of the Institute for Sex Research and thrusts us into another dark age, surely no man will ever again be committed to an insane asylum for the routine sin of trying to make love to his wife three or four times a week.

To anyone who grew up after 1948, the reasoning of the courts in this case doubtless seems almost unbelievable. To those of us who grew up earlier, it is all too easy to understand. As the Institute has shown, sexual appetites come in all shapes and sizes. Take a pre-1948 man of somewhat more than average appetite married to a woman of far less than average. Particularly a woman taught from childhood, as women used to be taught, that men are beasts. Let her then take her complaint to a lawyer of less than average appetite, to whom the thought of coitus as often as three times a week is personally inconceivable. Let her case against her husband come up before a judge of similar temperament. And let all this take place at a time when there are no sound statistics anywhere in the world to show who and what is average, and what the individual differences are. The poor husband was just a natural human sacrifice--in the dark days of sexual superstition that lasted until 1948.

• • •

The man who started aiming the searchlight of fact into all the shadowy corners of ignorance and fear was what a pioneer has to be: a fanatically dedicated man, a rugged individualist, an indefatigable work horse. He was also an insufferable egotist, as stubborn as a mule and as touchy as a prima donna. Above all, he was, in my opinion--thought I did not like him and he did. not like me--one of the bravest men who ever lived.

I first met Dr. Kinsey in 1953, at an event which neither I nor any of the other journalists who took part in it will forget as long as we live. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was about to be published, and every magazine in America, as well as every newspaper and newspaper syndicate, was clamoring for a look at it. Dr. Kinsey could easily have made a quarter of a million dollars or more for his Institute by selling exclusive rights to one magazine and one syndicate, but to his way of thinking such a notion was unscientific, commercial, dishonest and indeed immoral. He secided instead to let the representatives of any and all publications look at galley sheets, provided that they would hold up their stories until the day the book was unveiled in the boookstores. So many magazines and newspapers took up the ofer that he had to arrange for three separate shifts of visiting journalists; each group visited Bloomington for a week, studied the galley sheets and then went home, to be replaced the following Monday by another group.

As it happened, Life magazine decided to send me, and the luck of the draw made me a member of the first shift, in company with writers from McCall's, Harper's, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest and a number of others which I have long since forgotten. We all gathered in Bloomington one Sunday afternoon, eying one another rather warily because out stories were bound to appear in open and naked competition, and bright and early the next morning--at an hour to which Dr. Kinsey was accustomed even if we vistiors were1 not--we got to work on one of the strangest assignments in journalistic history.

The report on women, which runs 843 pages and contains 334 tables and graphs, is a difficult book to read under any circumstances. In galleys it read like Sanskrit--especially since there were not even enough of the galleys to go around. The Institute staff divided the copies into sections; each of us got a hunk of chapters from somewhere at random in the volume; and after studying what we had for a few hours we had to pass it along, in turn receiving another section from somebody else. As I remember it, I started reading something from the middle of the book, then jumped to the end and back to the middle; I never had the benefit of the introductory explanations at the beginning of the book until the very last day. Fortunately, I had taken along a dictating machine; I gave up any attept to understand the book and simply dictated a condensation of whatever seemed important into my microphone, hoping to pick up the pieces later, after I had returned home and had my dictation transcribed. Bill Davidson, then of Collier's did the same thing. Some of the other writers who had not come prepared had a terrible time, and (continued on page 194)Sex Institute(continued from page164) the stories they wrote reflected not so much their mature judgment of what was important in the book as what little they had been able to take sensible notes on as the pages were more or less whisked in front of their eyes, in haphazard and woefully illogical order. One of the women writers gave up completely, ignoored the report and wrote a story about what a strange experience it was.

The most important part of the week, as far as my relations with Dr. Kinsey were concerned, took place the very first morning. We had an introductory meeting with members of the Institute staff, which Dr. Kinsey opened by passing out copies of contracts for us to sign. Among other things, we had to agree to observe his release date--no jumping of the gun before the book was out. We also had to agree to submit our manuscripts to the Institute and correct any factual errors that the staff detected in our copy. That is, the contract was supposed to bind us to accepting the Institute's corrections; actually, owing to some kind of mix-up in composition or typing, it read that we agreed "to accept any errors requested by the Institute" I was the first of the visitors to notice this, and right then and there I made a fatal mistake. The meeting had been uncomfortably tense and formal: I was young and brash anyway at the time, and I thought that a joke might reshen the air. So I spoke up loud and clear: "Dr. Kinsey, don't you think that we journalists can make enough mistakes of our own without accepting any of yours?"

My fellow journalists laughed. Dr. Kinsey did not.

It was the kind of levity that he deplored, and he never forgave me for it. Every time our paths crossed afterward, for the rest of the week and the years to come, he gave me the same cold stare. After the stories about Sexual Behavior in the Human Female had all been published, he begrudgingly conceded to his staff that he thought mine had done as much justice as anyone's to the work of the Institute--but not without adding that it was a shame I was such a "frivolous" fellow.

As I thus learned the hard way, Dr. Kinsey was a stern, grim and totally humorless man. He believed that life was real and life was earnest, and that nobody was put on this earth to waste time kidding around. I had picked one of the surest ways to antagonize him; the surest way of all would have been to tell him a dirty joke, as strangers ofter did to their sorrow. The closest Dr. Kinsey himself ever came to a joke about sex was when he had a group of curious visitors at the Institute, particularly if they were women schoolteachers or civic leaders. If he happened to be feeling especially good on such a day, he would promise to open up the Institute's files of pornography and let his visitors see the most shocking book ever written; the joke consisted in his neglecting to tell them in advance that it was unillustrated and written in Chinese. Even this feeble bit of humor, I am sure, was palatable to the good doctor only because of the needle it contained--it was one way of punishing his visitors for any prurience with which they may have regarded his Institute.

Dr. Kinsey was a puritan by birth and by training. He grew up in a strait-laced New England family where it was considered a sin even to hitch up the horses on Sunday; he became one of the nation's first Eagle Scouts and a sincere and exemplary young man who studied hard, worked hard and never smoked or drank. In later life he tried to take up smoking, in a vain effort to seem like one of the fellows, but he could never learn to enjoy it and eventually abandoned the attempt. He did succeed in learning to force down an occasional drink, partly for reasons of good-fellowship and partly because the doctors said a little alcohol would be good for his ailing heart, but he was naïve about drinking to the end. The trays he passed around at cocktail parties always contained enough glasses of syrupy liqueurs to gag his more sophisticated guests.

What Dr. Kinsey really liked, in the way of social life, was his musicales; he had one of the first hi-fi sets and a large collection of records, and every Sunday evening his invited gugest would gather at his house to sit in stiff-backed chairs and listen to his music, preceded by his own meticulously composed and formally delivered program notes. The musicales, considered a command performance for members of his staff at the Sex Institute, were a cross borne for years by his two highly reluctant chief associates, anthropologist Paul Gebhard and psycho!ogist Wardell Pomeroy. Dr. Pomeroy, who hates classical music, finally got up enough nerve to stay away. Dr. Gebhard, who likes it, finally gave up because the seats were too uncomfortable.

Dr. Kinsey also enjoyed gardening, which he tackled as earnestly and, in a sense, as mathematically as everything else; he took great pride in pointing out that his yard contained over 200 different species of iris. He spent many a late afternoon in summer puttering around the plants, usually barefoot and wearing nothing but an old pair of swimming trunks. After he became famous, people began walking and driving past just to catch a glimpse of the great man, so informally attired, and he had to let the shrubbery around his house grow high enough to thwart them.

Until he was well into his 40s, Dr. Kinsey was an obscure though highly respected zoologist--an expert on the mutations and permutatons of the gall wasp, an insect that lays its eggs inside the leaves of plants or the bark of trees, and thus causes the swellings and tumors that gardeners call galls. Not until some of his students went to him for advice about sex and marriage did he ever contemplate becoming an expert on the mating habits of human beings. But when he began searching through the university library for scientific inormation about sex, he found that there was none--just opinion and guesswork--and his scientific curiosity suddenly took a new tack. He uniersity administration gave him remarkable support, and eventually the Rockefeller Foundation provided the money for a staff. Dr. Kinsey, Dr. Gebhard and Dr. Pomeroy spent the next years traveling wherever people were willing to answer their questions; and the Institute eventually would up with the sexual case histories of10.000 men and 8000 women, a truly monumental statistical sample. (The Nielsen report on the Popularity of television programs, accepted as gospel, is by contrast based on a mere 1100 homes.)

Dr. Kinsey, with his puritanical background and his duty-oriented character, was as moral about sexual matters as a man can possibly be; he undoubtedly entered upon his marriage as a virgin, and never even considered what his reports term "extramarital outlets." His attitude toward sex was, if anything, prudish--a fact which helped him greatly in getting support for the Institute. It took considerable courage in those days for a university to harbor such an institution on its campus or for a foundation to lend it financial support; and the slightest suspicion of any kind of leering interest in sex on Dr. Kinsey's part would have doomed his project from the beginning. On the other hand, his stern and unrelenting moralism might have been a impossible handicap in his atual research, and it is one of the aspects of his genius that this did not turn out to be the case. He managed to listen without batting an eye to the most lurid biographies of pimps and prostitutes, of boys who had sold themselves to homosexuals, of men who were in prison for sadistic rape. And as he began to realize the vast range of human sexual behavior, he achieved what is probably the finest accomplishment of a civilized man--the ability to sympathize with conduct that he himself would personally have found utterly distasteful. Sexual behavior, he decided, is almost completely compulsive; all of us grow up with capacities and tastes and preferences over which we have very little control, and it is not for a Dr. Kinsey, former Eagle Scout and a bit of a square, to say how anybody else should live his life.

On all other matters, Dr. Kinsey remained uncompromising. He deplored the fact that his otherwise impeccable aide Dr. Gebhard liked to lie abed on Sunday mornings after his hard week of reporting to duty at eight A.M. Monday through Saturday. And he once severely castigated Dr. Gebhard for eating too many of the peanuts that they had bought with Institute money for a quick lunch between interviews. "Gebhard," he complained, "you've eaten almost twenty cents' worth!" (In almost the next breath, however, he offered to lend Dr. Gebhard a thousand dollars to tide him over a financial crisit.) His strange combination of tolerance on sex and inflexibility on all other topics was best illustrated by his attitude toward prostitutes: He never condemned them for leading a "life of sin"--but he remained borrified to the end by the late-rising and indolent aspects of their carreer, which he considered utterly demoralizing.

Many of Dr. Kinsey's findings distressed him; hw was almost moved to tears, for example, when he first heard about the husband who was committed to a mental hospital because of his thrice-a-week sexual appetite. He was also shaken badly by many of his interviews with prisoners--especially men convicted of homosexual acts with adult and willing partners. Nowhere so much as in the field of sex, he decided, is man (and woman) so guilty of inhumanity toward man. Like most rusaders, he eventually became too self-righteous for his own good. He could never unerstand why the world did not immediately rewrite its sex laws in the light of his findigns. The criticisms of the psychoanalysts and sociologists struck him as so carping as to constitue a form of personal persecution. His hypersensitivity and his heart trouble made him increasingly cranky; and he died, in 1956, an unhappy and embittered man.

• • •

The work of the Institute goes on.

Recently, for example, a chic, beautifully coiffured wearer of an expensive dress walked into the reception room, gave the name Virginia--and was immediately ushered to the office of Dr. Gebhard, who has been the Institue director since Dr. Kinsey's death. There, for most of that day and part of the next, Virginia talked frankly to Dr. Gebhard and his staff. What made the occasion noteworthy and, indeed, almost unique in the history of scientific investigation, is that Virginia was a man: a transvestite, the editor of one of the esoteric little maazines published in this nation by and for transvestities.

Transvestitism is one of the many topics about which the Institute for Sex Research knows more than anyone else has ever known before in history, or knows even today. Until the Institute began its work, scientific knowledge of this strange phenomenon was limited to a few papers published by psychiatrists who has happened to treat transvestites and who, of course, wrote about them strictly in analytical and therapeutic terms. The Institue staff ran into a number of transvestites in the course of its interviews of the male population; following up these leads, it has since attended and taken moving pictures at transvestitie conventions, and has leaders like Virginia, most of whom have never been near a psychiatrist's offie. Contrary to popular belief--or at least to what I always assumed--it turns out that the true transvestite is not a homosexual; Virginia is happily married, and so are many others. But the Institute has also recorded the case histories of a number of other men who like to dress in women's clothes and who are completely homosexual; many of these men, who are properly termed transsexualists, would go to Denmark if they could and have the Christine Jorgensen type of operation to remove all traces of their masculinity. Included in the Institute's files is the case of one transsexualist who for a time worked happily as a big-city "police-woman," inviting passes from male mashers on the local transit system. The police department never caught on that its good-looking decoy was in reality a man, but the Institue knows the story in full detail.

The Institute gets quite a number of exotic visitors. A folklore expert who has been collecting all the ribald songs of the Ozarks brings in a four-volume typewritten collection, complete with words and music. A noted student of Irish folklore arrives to discuss the difference between the bawdy ballads of Ireland and the United States, and leaves with a promist to send the Institue some information he has in his files about the obscene carvings that irreverent workmen created near the top of medieval churches, far above the vision of their priests. A police official drops in with a huge cartion of stag films and French postcards seized in a raid on a Midwestern wholesaler of pornography--a welcome addition to the Istitute's archives of forbidden erotica, of which more later.

The Institute also gets a steady stream of unusal mail: catalogs of the new high-heel and corset fetish booklets sold openly in some cities and uner the counter in others; catalogs of the stange devices manufactured in the Oriebt for the supposed enhancement of sexual pleasure; a request from a Malaysian manufacturer for information that would help him improve the quality of his condoms; a letter from the Daughters of Bilitis, a West Coast society of Lesbians, informing Dr. Gebhard that because of his interest in the organization he has been named an "Honorary S.O.B."--Son of Bilitis.

Mostlye, however, what has always impressed me about day-to-day life at teh Institue is that it is so surprisingly routine, even downright dull. The staff is small; at the moment, 15 regulars, plus 15 wives of graduate students who are temporarily employed to put summaries of the 18,000 interviews on magnetic tape so that they can be analyzed by the university computers. The quarters are spare and Spartan--a dozen tiny offices, a few workrooms, a photographic darkroom and a library with overcrowded shelves. The erotica is all locked up in rows of grim steel filing cabinets; there is nothing in view to indicate the nature of the Institue's work except a few photographs in one hallyway of some erotic Incan pottery that Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gebhard once collected on a trip to South America, and the portraits of some distinguished scholars such as Julian Huxley and Dr. John Rock, the Catolic physician who helped invest the contraceptive pill, who have visisted the Institue from time to time.

The staff still works, as it did under Dr. Kinsey, from eight A.M. to five P.M. Mondays through Fridays, and on Saturdays from eight A.M. until noon. Most of the work is similar to what goes on in other research centers of all kinds: the long and laborious rendering of case histories into statistics that can be put on computer tape, the compilation of complicated statistical tables, painstaking study of the tables for significant trends. As everywhere else, the financial records have to be kept and the correspondence answered. In the old days, Dr. Kinsey had his own private method for filing books; now a woman libarian and an assistant, also a woma, are hard at work at the tedious job of recataloging the 20,000 books on the open shelves and the 2200 in the locked files according to the neater logic of the Dewey decimal system.

Dr. Gebhard spends a lot of his time writing; so does John Gagnon, the Institute sociologist. The two are also in constant demand for lectures and consultation. Gagnon serves on an Indiana state committee for the study of parole of sex offenders, and was recently called on to help set up a hospital study of a possible relation between sexual intercourse in early life and cancer of the cervix and prostate. (The medical people knew how to recognize cancer, all right, but not how to obtain accurate histories of sexual activity.) One of Dr. Gebhard's regular chores is addressing each year's new Indiana State Police recruits on the subject of how to deal with people like Peeping Toms and exhibitionisits. (He likes to tell them, among ohter things, that when he himself goes to a movie theater he feels perfectly competent to take care of a possible approach bya a homosexual in the men's room, and hopes that the police will concentrate on making sure his car has not been stolen by the time he leaves the theater. Since most policemen hate the kind of peephole work that is sometimes ordered for the entrapment of homosexuals, he usually gets enthusiastic agreement.)

Legally speaking, the Institute is a totally independent, nonprofit corporation; this is an arrangement which Dr. Kinsey set up years ago to insure that he and his successors would always have full control of its files and could make an unconditional guarantee that all information from the people they interviewed would eternally be held in confidence. In practice, however, the Institute operates almost like a department of Indiana University. Dr. Gebhard, Gagnon and four other top members of the staff have university appointments, and Dr. Gebhard's salary is paid in part by the university. The university also gives the Institute its working quarters, furnishings, supplies and utilities; and the Indiana University Foundation, an alumni group, has given it money for upkeep of the library. In return, Dr. Gebhard and Gagnon teach classes and seminars, and also worl closely with other faculy members, especially in the medical school, who are interested in sexual problems. The Institute and its staff have always looked to me like part of a university; the operation goes along quietly, soberly and unpretentously. There is perhaps a little more levity at the Institute nowadays than under Dr. Kinsey's unsmiling regime; when I was there at the height of the Tom Swifty craze, I found that some of the staff member were amusing themselves by composing ribald ones like "I guess I'm getting old," Tom said limply. But mostly the Institute staff drives up early in the morning in its Volkswagens and its secondhand American cars, exchanges a brief greeting with the woman at the reception desk and gets right down to serious work.

Dr. Gebhard, a mild, soft-spoken, self-effacing man of 48, is sometimes asked by strangers if all that exposure to sexual lore does not have a somewhat aphrodisiac effect upon the staff. He likes to reply, "Are the people who work in distilleries alcoholics?" To all appearances, indeed, working at the Institute seems to have a steadying effect. Dr. Kinsey had been married to the same wife for more than 30 years when he died; and Dr. Gebhard and all the other people who have been listed as authors and co-authors of the Institute's reports have now been married for at least 20 years, with the lone exception of Gagnon, a relative new-comer, who is only 33.

The graduate wives who have worked part time at the Institute in recent years constitute perhaps the best evidence of how contact with the Institute is likely to affect a person's sex life. Dr. Gebhard always warns them that they will be exposed to some facts about strange sexual practices tha most young American women have never heard about, and that they may find the facts startling, shocking and even disgusting. A few young women, after thinking over the warning, have decided not to take the job. Of those who have gone to work, only two have quit; they found that they were indee shocked and disgusted, to the point where the job was getting on their nerves. Many of the others have their nerves. Many of the other have volunteered that the job was the best thing that ever happened to their marriages. Like so many middle-class American girls, they had arrived at adulthood with a good deal of inhibition and squeamishness about sex; they had been shocked and repelled by some of their husbands' sexual passions and perferences; at the Institute they learned, form the statistical tables, that their husbands were behaving just as most men behave. (One girl also confidd to Dr. Gebhard that her conscience troubled her because she kept having daydreams about committing adultery. Dr. Gebhard reassured her with the figures on how many men and women actually commit adultery, and the even higher figures on how many thik of it.) All in all, the Institute staff seems to offer convincing proof that the more one knows about sex, the richer, more satisfying and more stable his--or her--sex life is likely to become.

One might expect tha the Institute wold be constantly deluged by job applicants attracted by what they consider the lurid nature of its work, but this has never been the case; there have been very few volunteers of any kind. Dr. Gebhard had a difficult time finding young women to work on the tapes, for example, until he happened to think of the unviersity employment office, which always has a list of students and student wives seeking part-time jobs. As for the mor eimportant staff positions, Dr. Gebhard has had to go out recruiting like any other department head in this day when Ph.D.s are in such short supply. Unfortunately, his requirements ar somewhat unusual: He has to find scholars who are without any rponounced sexual prejudices and who can talk to people in all walks of life without showing any affectation or snobbery. Moreover, he operates on a tight budget with money that comes to him on a year-to-year basis, as shall be noted later; and he cannot offer big salaries or job security. Far from having a long list of eager applicants, the Institute is almost alwasy short-staffed; at the moment, Dr. Gebhard is still looking for a psychologist to replace Dr. Pomeroy, who left more than a year ago to become a marriage counselor in New York. Only occasionally does the Institute get a letter from some one who is obviously itching to be turned loose in those locked cabinets--or, as it once did, from a woman who claimed she would be an ideal employee because she had no sexual impulses whatever. (Dr. Gebhard, of course, did not agreed.)

• • •

The Institute's locked collection grew up more or less by accident. Dr. Kinsey, who probably never had looked at a pinup magazine, much less a French posticard, did not even consider this aspect of sexual lore at the beginning. And he was contemptuous of most previous scholarly books on sex; he believed that mankind's only really worhtwhile knowledge about sex lay int eh interviews he was gathering; so he did not attempt to start any kind of library at all. Dr. Gebhard recalls that when he joined the Kinsey staff in 1946, just two years before publication of the report on men, the Institute owned fewer than a hundred books.

When the Institute became famous, however, scientists from all over the world began sending it sexual memorabilia--drawings from the walls of the cave dwellers, photographs of the art of ancient Pompeii, carvings from the fertility shrines of Japn--and Dr. Kinsey decided that the Institute was duty bound to become a repository for everything that related in any way to sex, from scientific books to hard-core pornography. The Institute has now invested about a quarter of a million dollars in books and miscellaneous erotica, has received numberous gifts and owns what is unquestionably the most complete collection in the world, conservatively worht around a million dollars and indeed priceless in the sense that it could nevr be duplicated.

Many of the gifts of pornographic books and art have come from heirs who discovered, to their surprise and embarrassment, that a wealthy father's library had secret shelves containing a private collection. One of the biggest acquisitions was a 1400-pound shipment from an Euglishman who apparently got frightened by the Profumo scandal. A man in Washington has promised to he queath the Institute a collection supposed to be worth around $100,000; the Institute's photographer has photographed the collection in color, lest it somehow be destroyed in the meanstime.

Mandy of the books in the locked files were formerly printed and circulated surreptitiously but can now be bought at almost any bookstore--like Fany Hill, Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Marquis de Sade's Justine. The Institute's volumes, however, are unique--the original privately printed edition of Lady Chatterley, with color illustrations that even today's more liberal censorship standards would never permit; and no less than 25 different editions of Fanny Hill, including one rewritten and Americanized version (with four-letter words that the original author never used)which was distributed under the title The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin.

Most of the stag films and French postcards have come from cooperative police departments; there are a number of police chiefs around the nation who, as soon as they have raided a dealer and finished using his stock as evidence in court, sent it on to the Institute as a matter of course. This materical is indexed and dated, with the help of a drama professer who is an expert on the history of clothing and hair styles, and constitutes a rich source of information about changing fashions in pornographic tastes, which in turn reflect sexual preferences, compulsions, inhibitions and taboos. The earliest French postcards in the Institute files were made in French brothels in 1855, not many years after indoor photography became possibly. The earliest stag film was made in 1917, only three years after Birth of a Nation. Every means of communication invented by man has almost immediately been put to pornographic uses, and Dr. Gebhard assumes that eventually he will receive the word's first example on video tape.

Nobody, except top members of the Institute staff, has ever had access to the entire collection, and only a very few people have seen any of it. No more than 15 to 20 visitors a year manage to convince the Institute staff that they deserve a look inside the locked cabinets; almost all of them are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, and all of them without exception are working on important research projects. In this respect, Dr. Gebhard is as severe as Dr. Kinsey ever was. "If we suspect that people are trying to get in here for kicks," he says, "we kick them out." But this seldom happens; very few curiosity seekers apply. Only twice over the years have halfhearted attempts been made--unsuccessfully--to break into the Institute at night. A few souvenir hunters among groups taken on tours have made off with books from the open library shelves, but nothing very important or even very interesting. Once book that disappeared was a totally outdated and deadly dull treatise on obstetrics printed in the early 19th Century, and in German at that.

In the 1950s the U.S. Customs Department seized some shipments arriving for the Institute from abroad--carvings from a Shinto fertility shrine, miniature paintings produced in 17th and 18th Century France, a few privately printed books and hard-core pictures. The case went to trial in the Federal District Court in New York in 1957, under the off designation of U.S. us. Thirty-one Photographs, and the Institute won. It thus established its right to import anything and everything, and has had no further trouble except from an occasional new customs inspector who looks into a carton, is startled by what he finds and has to be set straight on the Institute's privileges. In almost evey respect, indeed, the Institute has enjoyed good relations with the law; it has had the cooperation not only of police departmenst, but also of prison officials, who enabled the staff to get the more than 2000 interviews with convicts which form the basis of this year's new Institute report, Sex offenders: An Analysis of Types.

• • •

As I said at the start, I agree with many of the criticisms of the Institute's work--though certainly not with all of them. I do not, for example, put any stock in the complaint I hear most frequently from acquaintances and lecture audiences, namely, that nobody in his right mind would blurt out all his sexual secrets, and that the people interviewed by the Institute must have been guilty of considerable evasion, half-truths, exaggeration and outright lying. This seems like a good common-sense observation, appealing particularly to people whose own inhibitions would make it difficult for them to answer a sexual questionnaire; but to nayone who has seen the Institute staff in operation, it does not stand up. The interviewers have gone about their work in such a relaxed and matter-of-fact manner, and with such a friendly and shockproof air, that nobody in his right mind would feel the necessity or the impulse to deceive them. Moreover, they learned through experience to recognize the occasional person who tried to fool them; and on top of this, they built checks and double checks into their interviews to catch any prevarication their sixth sense might have missed.

The psychoanalysts have stated the same criticism in more sophisticated terms; they have suggested that in everybody's recollections of teh past, especially on so sensitive a topic as sex, the truth is often distorted by unconscious wishes and fears, and people cannot always tell the truth, no matter how hard they try. This may indeed be the case; but, if so, the same criticism would have to be, the same criticism would have to be made against virtually all the surveys of human behavior that have been undertaken by social scientists. If the sociologists and psychologists are to acquire any knowledge about human conduct and motives, they have to assume that peoplea re rational, even if they believe that the analysts are probably proving otherwise.

To me, the most telling criticism of the reports is that Dr. Kinsey was far too mathematical-minded, that he went about the business of tallying human sexual experiences in the same cold and mechanical way he might have counted the number of gall wasps landing on an oak leaf. His interviews were too concerned with how much? and how often?, and did not sufficiently emphasize how? and why? At the same time, he was untutored in the finer points of statistical analysis, and was too proud to hire a qualified statistical expert to make sure that the figures meant what an amateur like him might tke them to mean. But these are defects of omission that do not alter the fact that the Institute has nonetheless learned more about sexual behavior (concluded on page 207)than was ever known before. They can be corrected in the future, and they probably will be if the Institute keeps functioning. Director Gebhard is well aware taht the Institute has made some mistakes: Althought the report on men is now out of print, he has refused to permit any reprints or parperback editions, because he knows that some of the statistics do not stand up. He also plans to revise the standard Institute interview so that in the future it will revel not only how people behave sexually but also how they feel about it.

The Institute already has a good deal more research material in its files than it has had the time to analyze, and there are many more things still to be done. The report on women, for example, showed that about a third of woman are as keenl interested in sex and as readily responsive as most men, but that the other two thirds can taken sex or leave it alone. This difference between the average man and two thirds of all women is the chief cause of sexual malajustments and misunderstandings. The question is, what causes the difference? Is it an inborn trait, or does it result from the different ways that boys and girls are brought up in our society? Nobody knows--and somebody should be trying to find out.

As all the reports of the Institute have shown, the pattern of sexual behavior seems to be set early in life: The boy who matures early and desperately hankers for girls by the time he is 15 is likely to remain eager and sexually active all his life, with only the normal allowances for the effect of aging upon sexual appeatite; and the boy who matures late and has no pressing sexual dirves at 18 is likely to hae a low sexual interest throughtout his adulthood. Yet the Institute has found some exceptions. One man whose normal sexual rhythm seemed to involve coitus with his wife one a week went to France for many months on business, took up with a French girlfriend and had sexual relations every night of the week; then returned home and went back to his once-a-week pattern; then was again sent to France and resumed his once-a-day pattern. Some of the women who gave interviews had an extremely modest sex life in their early adulthoods, never actually desiring sex and responing only occasionally in their relations with their husbands; then suddently, in their 30s or 40s or even 50s, developed intensely strong appetites and responses. If the Institute could discover what caused these changes, it might find some clues to greater sexual happiness for all.

Thus, my own chief complaint against the Institute is that it has not yet explored many of these areas--and also that it has not done enough new interviewing in recent years to establish whether, as many people suspect, sexual conduct has been changing among the youngest generations. But the Institute has the best of all excuses: money. After the 1953 report on women concluded the first big pioneering phase of the research, the Rockefeller Foundation ended its financial support. For the next few yers, the Institute had to pay all its own operating expenses out of its royalties ont he two reports; though these amounted to around $500,000, the sum began to dwindle rapidly. This was one of the things that exasperated Dr. Kinsey in his final years; he felt that the American public, as represented by the Government and philanthropic foundations, had abandoned the Institute just when it had done its spadework, had proved its value and was ready to launch an accelerated seond stage of investigation. At last, in 1957, unfortunately too late for Dr. Kinsey to know, the National Institute for Mental Health began giving the Institute an annual grant which has continued ever since, currently at the rate of $125,000 a year. This has enabled the Institute to continue publishing reports such as the recent one on sex criminals. But none of the Federal money can be used for the library or the locked collection, which would have had to be abandoned years ago had it not been for the amazing financial success fo the first two reports.

All in all, the Institute has nowhere near the wealth and resoureces taht most people assume; for more than a decade now it has been shorthanded and short of money, especially for its library and for new interviews. Perhaps it always will be. Though it deals with a subject that affects all American,s not just those afflicted with a disease, and though contributions to it are tax deductible*--as, indeed, are gifts of erotic collections--it is unlikely that anything with a name like Institute for Sex Research. Dr. Kinsey did a lot to make sex a respectable topic of research and of coversation--but not quite enough, at least thus far, for his Institute's own good.

*Anyone who wants to help support the work can send a check to the Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Or contributions can be made indirectly and without disclosing the ultimate destination by sending a check to the Indiana University Foundation at Indiana University, with a note earmarking the money for the Institute; this form of contribution is also tax deductible.