Dr. Sex

Dr. Sex. That was what they called Alfred C. Kinsey, professor of zoology, around the Indiana University campus in the 1940s and 1950s. As in, "There goes Dr. Sex in his secondhand Buick, with his wife beside him and his kids in the back," or "Look, there's Dr. Sex in his barely visible skin-colored shorts (and nothing else), roasting wienies over a fire in the park."

Kinsey was an entomologist, and he'd made his reputation—and acquired his tenure—as the world's foremost expert on the gall wasp, those tiny cynipids that produce galls or blisters on oaks and rosebushes, but in the late 1930s he discovered his true life's calling: sex. His career as a sexologist began in 1938, when he was in his 40s and had accomplished about all he could with his gall wasps and was looking for some other outlet for his uncontainable energy. In those days, sex was little discussed or studied in the university, aside from the bland, euphemistic "Marriage and Family" courses that did more to obfuscate the subject than cast light on it. College students around the country, alarmed by the VD epidemic of the 1930s, had been clamoring for courses that were frank and informative, courses that illuminated the mechanics of sex, disease and contraception, and at IU Kinsey took up the challenge.

Kinsey's marriage course was open only to seniors, faculty and students who were married or engaged, and it comprised 11 lectures in all—five on the social, legal, psychological and religious facets of marriage, the remaining six on the physiology of sexual behavior in the "human animal," as Kinsey liked to refer to us Homo sapiens. Kinsey electrified the assembled students by announcing at the outset that there were only three types of sexual abnormality—abstinence, celibacy and delayed marriage—and he absolutely stunned them by showing slides of sexual intercourse, the erect phallus and the moist and glistening vagina awaiting it, all while lecturing on about vasoconstriction and clitoral stimulation in the driest, unmodulated scientist's voice. The course was a sensation. Hundreds of students, eager to hear about the sexual outlets available to them (such as petting to orgasm, which the good doctor described at length in his neutral tones), signed up, any number of them claiming to be engaged so as to pass muster.

And here's where it got interesting. Inevitably, students from the course began to come to Kinsey for advice on sexual matters, and he became privy not only to their fears and concerns but to their sexual histories as well, and those histories, as might be expected, ran the gamut from militant virginity to the widest range of behavior possible. What amazed Kinsey the taxonomist was not only the variation in experience and behavior but the fact that we knew more about the sex lives of farm animals and the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) than that of humans. As a result, he hit on the idea of doing a far-reaching survey of human sexuality in order to correct for this deficiency. The rest is history.

Before his death in 1956, Kinsey and his senior staff—Clyde Martin, Wardell Pomeroy and Paul Gebhard—conducted some 18,000 face-to-face interviews with people from all walks of life, accumulating data about their sexual behavior. The typical interview, during which Kinsey and his staff tried to put the subject at ease by providing cigarettes, soft drinks and, in the appropriate venues, liquor, consisted of 350 questions and took approximately two hours to complete. Kinsey was a master at drawing people out so that they revealed their deepest secrets, and he could invariably tell if someone was lying or holding something back. (On one occasion he easily exposed a fraud who'd been sent to undermine the credibility of the survey by reporting a false history.) Most subjects, however, were glad for the chance both to unburden themselves and to contribute to science, and Kinsey duly recorded their responses. The result of all this was two groundbreaking volumes, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which appeared in 1948 and was the biggest best-seller since Gone With the Wind, and its companion volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published five years later and equally popular.

Certainly the books were controversial. Kinsey's critics attacked him on both moral and technical grounds—he was undermining the institution of marriage, advocating free love, normalizing homosexuality; his statistical analyses were flawed and his samples skewed—but the books had an enormous impact nonetheless. By demonstrating the variety of human sexual activity, Kinsey was able to assert that there is no "normal" behavior, and this did open society up to a less prejudicial view of certain sexual practices. To Kinsey, all sex acts between consenting parties were equal and equally valid, and though he presented himself as a disinterested scientist, he was in fact a reformer out of the Progressive Era and an advocate for sex. His studies helped give rise to the sexual freedom of the 1960s, to the live observation of sexual activity by Masters and Johnson and others, to the rescinding of various laws restricting sexual behavior (witness the recent Supreme Court decision regarding sodomy laws) and to a freedom and frankness in the press hither to unknown. Indeed, Hugh Hefner has cited Kinsey as one of his chief inspirations in launching Playboy.

Kinsey's name and the shorthand title the press gave his two volumes, "The Kinsey Report," loom large in our recent history. According to his most recent biographers, James H. Jones and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Kinsey was the single most recognizable figure in America in 1953 but for the president himself. Popular songs were written about him—"The Kinsey Boogie" and "Ooh, Dr. Kinsey," to name two—and he was the subject of endless editorials and cartoons. The institute he founded—originally the Institute for Sex Research and now simply the Kinsey Institute—is still going strong. Still, most Americans know little about him or his research. All of this happened a long time ago, and we've all moved on.

In fact, Kinsey was to me no more than a name floating in the ether until I came across David Halberstam's concise account of Kinsey's career in The Fifties, his 1993 social history of the period. My interest was piqued—here was a man who took a purely mechanistic and biological view of human sexuality, absent the emotional factors or any such notional baggage as love and romance, once famously averring that the poets had 2,000 years to talk of love and that now it was the biologists' turn to examine its psychological basis—and I sought out the four extant biographies, after which I made a pilgrimage to Bloomington, Indiana to visit the institute and learn as much as I could. The result is my 10th novel, The Inner Circle, which makes use of Kinsey's studies—and the details of Kinsey's life—to create a fictional scenario exploring the sociology of love, marriage and sex.

But this all sounds a bit too abstract. Let me give you an idea of how rich the material is. Before getting us into the truly significant accomplishment of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the sections on anatomy and physiology of sexual response and orgasm, Kinsey provides a 224-item alphabetized list of the various professions of his female subjects. A selection: acrobat, actress, art critic, cigarette girl, circus rider, claims adjuster, dice girl, Girl Scout executive, glass-blower, inventor, laundress, osteopath, packer, prostitute, taxi dancer, tutor, typist, Wave, weaver, welder and window decorator. The man was thorough, no doubt about it, and he was obsessive about his work. He drove himself continually, dashing all over the country to lecture and record interviews, haunting bathhouses and patrolling the streets into the wee hours, working 16- and 18-hour days to the point of exhaustion (which contributed to the heart failure that killed him at the age of 62). As his wife, Clara, said: "Since he took up sex, I hardly see him at night anymore."

What is even more fascinating to a novelist—to this novelist—was Kinsey's secret life. Everything he accomplished was dependent upon his image as an unbiased scientist and happily married family man (and he insisted that his senior staff be happily married family men as well), and yet behind closed doors he was a sexual enthusiast of the first order. Inevitably, for a scientist, the mere recording of people's sexual histories would prove limiting—as opposed to direct observation, that is. And so, unbeknownst to the stirring and hypercritical world that would have brought him down in a heartbeat, he began to engage in the staging and filming of live sex, both heterosexual and homosexual. With the royalties from the male volume pouring into the institute's coffers, he was able not only to expand his erotica collection but to purchase the finest moviemaking equipment and take on a full-time photographer as well.

Secretly, in the attic of his house, he convened the members of his inner circle and their wives and encouraged them to perform in various combinations, as he and his wife performed themselves, even as he sought out male homosexuals, sadomasochists and a select group of highly sexed females to participate as "friends of the research." (He used the phrase high raters to describe such females, once dryly informing a scandalized woman who had used the term nymphomaniac that a nymphomaniac is simply someone who has more sex than you do.) Memorably, too, he filmed some 1,000 men in the act of masturbation in order to settle the debate over whether the majority spurted or dribbled, as the medical literature of the time insisted that men must spurt in order for reproduction to occur. His conclusion? Seventy-three percent were dribblers.

Kinsey is not without his critics today. Some claim that his enthusiasm for sexual activity of all kinds and with all partners blinded him to some of the potential abuses, specifically with regard to children. One of the most arresting—and highest-rating—contributors to Kinsey's survey was a man known only as Mr. X, whose detailed diaries record his sexual relations with 600 preadolescent males and 200 preadolescent females, including infants, as well as sex with hundreds of adults, various species of animals and 17 of his own family members, including his father and grandmother. Kinsey's response? He claimed repeatedly that his function was not to make moral judgments but to record behavior. And that was what he did, obsessively, always hot on the trail of one more history, one more sheet of data to add to his ever-accumulating files.

Certainly love and sex are more closely linked than Kinsey cared to admit, but is sex better if love is involved? Or is the notion of love purely hormonal, as is the urge to procreate and so engage in sex in the first place? Kinsey was a biologist, an empiricist, a Darwinian. For him, notions of love were extraneous to the physiology of arousal and the stimulation of the penis and clitoris and the various transformations that occur in our bodies as we engage in sexual activity (the swelling of our lips and nipples, for instance, the contraction of the levator ani muscles in the female and our indifference to environmental stimuli in the heat of the moment). As we map the human genome, it has become increasingly apparent that our behaviors—social as well as biological—are perhaps more predetermined than we may want to admit. Love? I don't know. But if it feels good, do it. That's what Dr. Sex would say.

The Kinsey Files

Ever Wondered what Percentage of American men have, Say, Masturbated a coat? So did Alfred Kinsey. Some of the Less-Quoted Statistics from the Preeminent Researcher of his time:

22.4

Percentage of men who admitted to having had "sexual contact with an animal" or to having "masturbated an animal."

Of those, percentage who had Coitus with cattle: 60.9

who had coitus with swine: 80.4

Who had "anal contact" with a horse or a mule:4.5

Who had masturbated a sheep or a goat:10.5

Who had masturbated a chicken or other fowl:5.0

48.5

Percentage of men who answered yes to the question "Does motion—such as being in a car or riding horseback—arouse you sexually?"

Percentage of women who answered yes to this question:9.8

Percentage of women who answered "61 to 90 seconds":

21.9

Percentage of men who answered "one to 30 seconds":

5.2

67.1

Percentage of men who said their left testicle hung lower than their right.

Who said the right hung lower:21.2

Both Equal:11.6

2.7

Percentage of men who claimed they were able to fellate themselves.

Percentage of men who said they had tried and failed to fellate themselves:25.8

Percentage of men who said they either had tried or frequentley got off by "inserting something into the penis":9.4

Results from 9,052 college-Educated white adults in the U.S Surveyed Anonoymously between 1938 and 1963.