Word: kinsey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...made prophets of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis and that Baedeker of sexual abnormality, Richard von Krafft-Ebing. What remained was for someone to link the age's preoccupation with sex to its passion for statistics. That job was taken on, not surprisingly, by an American-Alfred Charles Kinsey of Bloomington, Ind., zoologist by training, who was determined to observe the sex behavior of the human animal with the scientific methods he had once brought to an earlier specialty, the study of gall wasps...
...Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). published by a medical textbook house, caught on like a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, unexpectedly became a bestseller and made its author's name a national byword. Its successor, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), sold less well. What appealed to the public was precisely what horrified many a scientist: the implication in both books that, despite the small size of the statistical samples (5.300 men and 5,940 women), the studies reflected an accurate cross section of human sexual behavior...
Moral Symptom. Dr. Kinsey insistently declared that he was a dispassionate scientist. A teacher's son, he majored in biology and zoology at Maine's Bowdoin, went on to take an Sc.D. from Harvard and to join the zoology department of the Indiana University. After he founded his Institute for Sex Research in 1947, Kinsey and a specially trained staff of psychologists, sociologists, lawyers and statisticians launched a kind of super Gallup poll of America's sex life. Some of the results sounded sensational. According to Kinsey's figures, nearly half of the American...
Quite apart from whether or not the figures were reliable, the Kinsey studies raised moral questions-because of Kinsey's very insistence that he had nothing to do with moral questions, a concept he refused to acknowledge in any case. To Kinsey anything was "biologically normal" that is done by a sizable number of people-or animals. By that logic almost nothing could be called abnormal. The notion fitted in with other thinkers' concept of quantitative morality, i.e., right and wrong are not fixed values but mere fluctuating curves on a statistical graph. Thus "The Kinsey Report" became...
Another Generation. Alfred Kinsey, who lived in a comfortable house in Bloomington behind thick hedges of shrubbery and books, was a well-known figure in the academic world, equally well known in what he called the underworld of New York's Times Square, where he and his Ph.D. associates had conducted widespread interviews. Apart from a passion for hi-fi music, he was driven by a 16-hour-a-day dedication to his work. Said his wife once in a famous aside: "I hardly ever see him at night any more since he took...