Alfred C. Kinsey

Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 23, 1956) was one of the pioneers of human sexual research in the United States. Although he studied entomology at university, his most important publication - due to the great impact it generated - was his study of the sexual behavior of men and women.

Biography

Kinsey renounced his parents' Methodist religion and became a very convinced atheist. He studied at Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Maine) between 1914 and 1916 and graduated magna cum laude. i> with a B.S. in biology.He received his Sc.D. in such science from Harvard University (September 1919) and served as assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University (August 1920). Additionally, he established an academic reputation for his biological testing and his research in taxonomy and evolution.

In 1937, the American Men of Science named him as one of its precursors. A year later, he took over coordinating the new marriage course at Indiana University, and then began collecting stories for the sexual behavior archive.

In 1938 the Kinsey Institute began its journey, when the Women's Student Association asked Indiana University for a degree program for students who were married or intended to marry. Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey was in charge of coordinating this race, in which he discovered that there was little scientific data on human sexual behavior, so he began his own data collection. Over time, he and his research partners obtained more than 18,000 sexual stories based on face-to-face interviews.

By 1941, Kinsey's pioneering work had earned financial backing from the National Research Council, funded at the time by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1947, in order to ensure the absolute confidentiality of those interviewed and to provide a secure location for the growing collection of data and other materials that Kinsey had collected on human sexuality, the institute was established as a non-profit organization. affiliated with Indiana University.

He died in 1956 at the age of 62 due to pneumonia.

Work

Kinsey compiled in his work Sexual Behavior in Man, published in 1948, thousands of personal interviews that suffer from some important legal, methodological and technical problems.

In 1948, the same year as Kinsey's publication, a committee of the American Statistical Association, including notable statisticians such as John Tukey, condemned the sampling procedure. Tukey was perhaps the biggest critic, saying that "a random selection of three people would have been better than a group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey."

Based on more than 5,300 personal interviews with Caucasian men, Kinsey reached a series of conclusions about homosexuality:

1. 37% of the men interviewed experienced a homosexual orgasm from adolescence.
2. 13 per cent of men felt homosexual desires, without any physical contact.
3. Twenty-five per cent of them had non-catch homosexual experiences between the ages of 16 and 55 years.
4. 18 per cent maintained the same number of heterosexual and homosexual relationships for a minimum period of 3 years, between the ages of 16 and 55 years.
5. 10% had a strictly homosexual conduct for at least 3 years and between the ages already described.
6. Only 4% manifested a strictly homosexual conduct throughout their lives and already manifested during adolescence.
7. Homosexuality existed at all social and occupational levels.

In his 1953 work on Sexual Behavior in Women, Kinsey conducted 5,490 interviews with white women and deduced that:

1. 13% of women had experienced some homosexual orgasm from adolescence.
2. Only 3 per cent of women had been predominantly homosexual for at least 3 years.
3. Women, in contrast to men, did not usually be promiscuous and had their homosexual relationships only with 1 or 2 companions in 71 % of cases.

These results were later denounced as fraud by Reisman, who went so far as to declare that Kinsey was hiding facts of child sexual abuse and, therefore, fraud was the basis of the supposed "scientific data" about human sexuality.

These results led Kinsey to create the Kinsey Scale on heterosexuality-homosexuality, where grade 0 manifested complete heterosexuality without any ambiguity and grade 6 showed exclusive and dominant homosexuality. Kinsey claims that most people fell within the number 1 or 2 on his scale.

The conclusions that Kinsey drew differed radically from the appreciation of homosexuality as a minority phenomenon: half of the men in the sample studied had had, according to the author, at least one homosexual experience (on a physical or fantasy level), although it was very common for them to have had more than one, or even an exclusive homosexual life (4%). Therefore, this type of sexuality was not exceptional, which indicated that homosexuality in itself was not an index of mental pathology, as Churchill in 1967, Silverstein in 1972 or Martin and Lyon also in the same year would later maintain, who argued in their studies that the majority of male and female homosexuals identify with their own sex, contrary to what is often considered regarding the effeminacy of men or the masculinization of women.

Some publications

• «New Species and Synonymy of American Cynipidae». Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 42: 293-317. 1920. Consultation on 22 October 2010.

• «Life Histories of American Cynipidae». Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 42: 319-357. 1920. Consultation on 22 October 2010.

• «Phylogeny of Cynipid Genera and Biological Characteristics». Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 42: 357a-c, 358-402. 1920. Consultation on 22 October 2010.

• An Introduction to Biology. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company. 1926 Essay on Kinsey's textbook

• «The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of Species». Indiana University Studies. 84-86: 1-517. 1929 Source cited

• New Introduction to Biology. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co. 1933, revised 1938.

• The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips. Indiana University Publications. Science Series 4. Entomological Series 10. 1936. pp. 1-334 (source quoted by Kinsey 1929)

• Merritt Lyndon Fernald; Alfred Charles Kinsey (1996 reprint. First published 1943). Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications (reprint of Harper 1958 edition. ISBN 0-486-29104-9. Consultation on 22 October 2010First published 1943 b7 Idlewild Press, Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.

• The Kinsey report:
  • Sexual behavior in Man. 1948, reprinted 1998
  • Sexual behaviour in women. 1953, reprinted 1998

Kinsey in fiction

• There's a musical about his life called Dr. Sexxxpremiered in Chicago in 2003 (Jeff Awards winner).

• In 2004 a film was made about his life and work, entitled Kinsey. The main role was played by actor Liam Neeson; Laura Linney (computer of an Oscar Prize nomination for this performance) played Clara Bracken McMillen, his wife.

• The Inner Circle (The inner circle), novel written by T. C. Boyle in 2004, is based on the first years of Dr. Kinsey in Indiana.

• In 2005, PBS produced the documentary Kinsey in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute, which authorized access to many of its files.

• The Colombian author, R. H. Moreno Durán, in the story entitled "Last report Kinsey", has the doctor as the main character. You can read in: Giraldo. Light Mary. Stories and stories of Colombian literature. Economic Culture Fund, 2005.

• It's mentioned by Jack Kerouac in his work On the road Realizing that the narrator, Sal, found himself at the same bar where Kinsey used to perform interviews.