Who is Alfred Kinsey?

By Kylie Wallace

Alfred Kinsey was an educated man who had a long history of changing colleges and majors. This blog however, will only be focused on one career change. In 1938 Alfred and a group of other scholars led a course on marriage. Some of Kinsey’s lectures included biology of sexual stimulation, the mechanics of intercourse, and the techniques of contraception.[1] In this course he was basically using science to tell students being sexually deviant isn’t as deviant as it seemed and there was always some biological normality. In 1940 his class size grew to 400 due to his course content.[1] As a part of his course he would meet with students and take down their sexual histories. With the help of the National Research Council and other organizations Kinsey was able to interview outside people as well as hire research assistants.[1]  This was controversial when he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male because within this book held over 5,000 sexual histories of men including pedophiles, and adulterous sexual activity.[1] I don’t think he could have really done what he was trying to do without the methods he used considering that unless the person is protected under some sort of confidentiality, most people wouldn’t be willing to participate in such a study. Kinsey is protecting people that aren’t necessarily the best, but psychologists are also protecting people who may do controversial things or think about it. Consider the time period as well, I think that today this study would have never been funded to begin with, however in the 1940’s and 50’s when confidentiality wasn’t as big I don’t really think anyone cared about who he was protecting they just cared that he published something so crude and straightforward about sexual histories and deviance. I don’t however believe that interviewing his students was in any way ok at all. 

It wasn’t until 1953 when he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female that anyone really made any sort of reciprocation. He was put under congressional investigation which resulted in his loss of funding.[1] Kinsey wanted to change the way people viewed human sexuality and turn it into something normal. Some suggest that he used this study for his own morals to make things he thought about and did seem a little bit more ok.[1] I think the last part is up to opinion, and I haven’t done nearly enough research on this man to comment, but I do think that he uprooted the views of human sexuality and started a revolution. 

[1]. Theodore M. Brown, and Elizabeth Fee, "Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer Of Sex Research," June , 2003, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447862/.