By
Kelsey Wilkins
Alfred
Kinsey was a professor of sexology and the founder of the Sex Research
Institute at Indiana University. He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 23rd,
1894. Kinsey wrote a few books in his lifetime, these books included the Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Gentlemen’s Disagreement [1]. Kinsey believed that there was a
spectrum of sexuality, which said people would fit under his scale, the Kinsey
Scale of Sexuality. The Kinsey Scale said that there wasn’t such thing as a
Gender Binary, you were either homosexual or heterosexual, there was no in
between. Instead, a spectrum of sexuality meant that you fit into 1 of 7
different descriptions of sexuality. A 0 meant that you expressed Exclusively
heterosexual behavior; a 3 meant that you expressed and equal amount of
heterosexual and homosexual behavior and a 6 meant that you expressed
exclusively homosexual behavior [2].
Throughout
his years of research, Kinsey was the main subject in controversy because he
was the first researcher that said sex was common, even before marriage and
also masturbation and homosexuality were common things [3]. In this day an age,
all of those things seem pretty normal and it sound crazy that people were
upset that Kinsey was saying these things, but I think I can also understand
where these people were coming from. If you grew up in a conservative household
that said you needed to wait for marriage to have sex or that you were always
taught that God hated homosexuals, these things Kinsey said would sound crazy
to you and your family and they would go against what you were taught since you
were a young kid and it’s the only thing you know. 
I think going through this class
and learning what we have this past semester has really opened my eyes to a
bunch of different things and I have realized that a lot of things are more
“normal” than I though they were. I have also learned a lot about the history
of America, Kinsey has been, other than Christopher Columbus, my favorite topic
that we have talked about because of his controversy. What surprised me the
most about Kinsey is that he interviewed pedophiles and convicted sexual
criminals and didn’t turn them in. I’m not really sure how I feel about what he
did. I can understand why people didn’t like it, but I also think that if he
told them that whatever they say can’t be used against them in court then it
makes his research more authentic because the people actually told the truth
and that really helped with the research. I feel bad saying that what Kinsey
did was right, by not turning these people in, but if he promised that he
wouldn’t, so these people would tell him the whole truth, then I agree with
what Kinsey did.
Citations
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