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.
KINSEY SCALE TEST PAST PRESENT FUTURE MANUAL
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. But for the first time, scientific inquiry had acknowledged that there weren’t just two options.Īnd 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. It’s a captivating legacy for a man who spent the first half of his career studying the gall wasp.ĭepending whom you ask, Kinsey - the creator of the Kinsey Scale of sexual behavior along a continuum - either ignited a radically progressive understanding of human sexuality created a scale that doesn’t come close to encapsulating the range of human sexuality or even, according to one critic, “spent his lifetime ripping down the institution of the family.”įirst published in 1948, Kinsey’s eponymous scale classified people according to their degree of attraction or sexual behavior toward the same or other sex: 0 being “exclusively heterosexual” and 6 being “exclusively homosexual” - with a big swath of gray in between. Alfred Kinsey’s imprint on the world of sexuality has - and continues to - inspire criticism, fascination, even outrage.
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