“That somebody doesn't have to be only one sexual orientation, that's super basic now, right?” says Queen. The scale’s function, when it first appeared in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was as a way to visualize the information in the text. The Human Female report caused such a backlash that Kinsey’s funding from the Rockefeller Foundation was cut. Women, too, turned out to be sexual beings with same and different-gender attraction and behavior - 13 percent had had a same-sex experience. Kinsey found that 37 percent of men had had a same-sex sexual experience by age 45. With the reports that came from this research - Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953 - Kinsey shattered the idea of sexual behavior as binary, showing that the sexual habits of thousands of Americans were as varied and diverse as a field of wildflowers. Some of his methods have been called into question - such as his omission of sample data from non-white people - and others would have been unheard of today.Įxactly what happened, and whether it should serve to discredit some of his research, is hard to verify today, but accounts include his correspondence with a pedophile to collect descriptions of child sexual behavior, or encouraging and filming sexual relationships between his staff. He ran statistical analyses based on his methodical data collection. Kinsey and his team meticulously collected the accounts of over 11,000 people and their sexual behavior in one-on-one interviews. “It's been just enough decades now that it's hard for people who were born since 1980 to understand the world in which the Kinsey Reports dropped kind of a bomb,” says Carol Queen, a sociologist, educator, co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Sex & Culture and staff sexologist at Good Vibrations. It wasn’t until 1973 that the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), removed “homosexuality” from its list of diagnoses. In the 1940s, homosexuality was considered a felony in every state because of what were called “sodomy laws.” It wouldn’t be until 1962 that the first state changed that. One thing is undisputed: Kinsey’s work was unlike anything his world had ever seen before. Today’s understanding still relies on so much of what Kinsey described, but adds so much more. Professionals and researchers say that sexuality is tied up with many other factors - and isn’t necessarily a point on a straight line. And though it’s unlikely that a visit to a therapist will earn you a number on the Kinsey Scale today, the legacy of Kinsey lives on in new models of sexuality.
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