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Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey

Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist. In 1947, he founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, which is now known as the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.

Education and Early Career

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, June 23, 1894. He attended Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine (1914-1916), graduating magna cum laude with a B.S. in biology and psychology. He received his Sc.D. in biology from Harvard University in September 1919.

Dr. Kinsey arrived at Indiana University in 1920 as an assistant professor of zoology. For the next 20 years, Kinsey studied gall wasps, and  established a solid academic reputation for his biology tests and his research in taxonomy and evolution. By 1937,  American Men of Science  listed him as one of their "starred" scientists. 

During his work on gall wasps, Dr. Kinsey developed many of the techniques around recording and organizing data that would come into play in his later research into human sexuality. He took dozens of minute measurements on each tiny wasp, and recorded the data in sheafs of notes, later developing his own coding system for the information - precursors to the detailed sex history questionnaires and recording codes he developed for use by his sex research team.

Transition to Sex Research

In 1938, the Association of Women students petitioned Indiana University to offer a course on marriage for students who were married or contemplating marriage, part of a nationwide demand for similar courses. Dr. Kinsey, popular with students, was invited to coordinate the new course, "Marriage and Family," restricted to senior and married IU students.

Faced with questions from students about sexuality, Kinsey could find little scientific information on human sexual behavior that was not value-laden or based on small samples from clinical trials. His interest in the topic was piqued by this "gap in our knowledge," and he began collecting sex histories, first from his students, and then from groups and individuals in Bloomington and throughout Indiana.  

In 1940, President Wells gave Kinsey a choice: to continue either with the marriage course or with his sexuality research project. Kinsey chose to concentrate on his sex research, again crisscrossing the United States, this time to conduct sexual behavior interviews.  Over the next few years, Dr. Kinsey sought out funding for his research expenses and began gathering a research team.

In 1947, Dr. Kinsey became the founding director of the new Institute for Sex Reseach (ISR) , which published  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and the complementary work,  Sexual Behavior in the Human Female  ,in 1953. The two books were wildly popular, and Dr. Kinsey became an American celebrity mentioned in cartoons, novels, and popular music.

"We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe." - Alfred Kinsey

The Great Collector

During his early career as an entomologist and zoologist, Kinsey travelled across North America collecting specimen wasps and the galls from 36 states and parts of Mexico. Altogether he amassed a collection of more than 7.5 million gall wasps that is still available to researchers through the Division of Invertebrate Zoology of the American Museum of Natural History .

In his personal life, he was known for his collections of both irisis and 78 rpm records.  His expansive gardens included over 250 different varieties of irises, some of which he sold to local gardeners and other collectors. A music lover, when the 78 rpm record was introduced, Kinsey began avidly collecting again, building one of the largest private record collections in the Midwest at the time.

When he turned his attention to sexology, Dr. Kinsey was no less ambitious, outlining a goal to collect comprehensive sex histories from 100,000 interviewees. The interview questionnaire he designed for his research team included hundreds of questions on every aspect of human sexual behavior. While the average interview lasted a couple of hours, some could run as long as six hours or more. The resulting collection of over 18,000 detailed sex histories has never been matched.

In Introduction to Biology, Kinsey said about the passion for collecting:

"If your collection is larger, even a shade larger, than any other like it in the world, that greatly increases your happiness. It shows how complete a work you can accomplish, in what good order you can arrange the specimens, with what surpassing wisdom you can exhibit them, and with what authority you can speak on your subject."

Dr. Kinsey passed away unexpectedly at age 62 on August 25, 1956 of a heart ailment and pneumonia. Earlier that year, he gave an interview to NBC News (see rehearsal tape below) and interviewed his last two subjects. All told, Dr. Kinsey personally took 7,985 of the approximately 18,000 sex histories gathered by the Institute for Sex Research team.

Alfred Kinsey's Legacy

• the accumulation of a wide variety of materials relevant to the history and sociology of human sexuality that has grown to become among the largest and most comprehensive in the world
• a database of a size, richness and scope still of continuing interest to contemporary researchers
• a major impact on public attitudes to sexuality, gender and reproduction, particularly on the laws governing sexuality, that has helped legitimize related scholarly research
• a compassionate spirit that compelled him to try to help individuals struggling with their sexual lives, efforts captured in his extensive correspondence.

More Resources

• Alfred Kinsey Collection in the Kinsey Institute Special Collections
• Shelf Life : Episode 9 - Kinsey's Wasps (video)
• History of the Kinsey Institute
• 75th Anniversary Historical Review (pdf)
• Kinsey Institute Directors

Kinsey-era publications

Consult this page for a list of publications of the sex research team prior to the establishment of the institute (1941-1946) and during Dr. Kinsey's time as Director (1947–1956).

• Support Kinsey

Sexuality and intimate relationships are essential to our individual and collective well-being. Your support will help the Kinsey Institute advance research and education in the science of love, sexuality, gender, and sexual health, and give our diverse field of researchers the resources they need to make new discoveries.

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Alfred Kinsey

Biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was based on research he and his colleagues conducted at the Institute for Sex Research.

(1894-1956)

Alfred Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1938, he launched a sex studies program. In 1947, he incorporated under the name, the Institute for Sex Research, Inc. In 1948, Kinsey published his first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , followed by a sequel in 1953. On August 25, 1956, Kinsey died in Bloomington, Indiana, from complications caused by congestive heart failure.

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, to engineering professor Alfred Seguine Kinsey and his wife, Sarah (Charles) Kinsey, in the tenement town of Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the oldest of three children in a devout Methodist family. Alfred Kinsey's mother described her firstborn son as, "shy and soft spoken."

In 1912, Kinsey graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. He worked to fund his undergraduate education while attending Bowdoin College, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in biology and psychology in 1916. In 1920, Kinsey received a doctorate degree in biology from Harvard University. He met his future wife, Clara McMillan, at a zoology department picnic that same year.

Shortly after earning his doctorate at Harvard, Kinsey accepted a job as a professor in the zoology department at Indiana University in Bloomington. A specialist in botany and insects, through his research, Kinsey established himself as the No. 1 authority on the gall wasp. From 1926 to 1929, he took field trips all over the country with his students, collecting tens of thousands of gall wasp specimens along the way. He focused intently on categorizing and numbering his specimens, but longed to take his scientific investigation a step further. Turning his focus to questions of evolution and natural selection, in 1930—a year after he was promoted to full professor—Kinsey published his findings in a paper called The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of the Species.

Sexual Behavior Studies

In the 1930s, Kinsey agreed to teach a marriage course. When his students starting asking him questions about sex, Kinsey realized there was very little scientific data on the matter. He decided to apply the principles of scientific research toward the topic of sexual behavior. In 1938, he launched a sex studies program. In the early 1940s, he procured funding from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation's Medical Division. In 1947, Kinsey and his research assistants became incorporated under the name the Institute for Sex Research, Inc.

In 1948, Kinsey published his first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male . He based the book on more than 10,000 interviews—during which men and women of all ages provided candid answers to personal questions about their sexual feelings and behaviors. The book quickly sold close to 500,000 copies. Kinsey used the royalties from the sales of his book to do more research. He came out with a sequel called Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953, but it didn't sell as well as his first book.

Because Kinsey's research dealt openly with human sexuality during a time when the topic was taboo, his work was the subject of much controversy. During the course of his study, Kinsey was subjected to anti-Communist investigations, loss of funding and a lawsuit by U.S. Customs over a collection of erotic photos. Nevertheless, Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research still survives today, under the new title the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.

During the last six months of Kinsey's life, his health steadily declined as he gradually developed congestive heart failure. On August 25, 1956, Kinsey died at Bloomington Hospital in Bloomington, Indiana. A few days earlier, he had bruised his leg after tripping in his garden, and the bruise had developed into a deadly embolism. Kinsey was 62 years old at the time of his passing. He was survived by his wife, Clara, and their three children.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Alfred Kinsey
• Birth Year: 1894
• Birth date: June 23, 1894
• Birth State: New Jersey
• Birth City: Hoboken
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was based on research he and his colleagues conducted at the Institute for Sex Research.
• Science and Medicine
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• Bowdoin College
• Harvard University
• Occupations
• Anthropologist
• Death Year: 1956
• Death date: August 25, 1956
• Death State: Indiana
• Death City: Bloomington
• Death Country: United States
• We are recorders and reporters of the facts—not judges of the behavior we describe.
• The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.

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Kinsey, Alfred

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Introduction

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Sarah Ann Charles and Alfred Seguine Kinsey. The oldest of three children in a devout Methodist home, he loved hiking, scouting, and playing the piano, but also suffered from a number of illnesses including rickets and typhoid fever. Socially avoidant but respected by classmates for his academic abilities, he was referred to as a future “second Darwin” in his high school yearbook (Jones, 2004, p. 32). Indeed, Kinsey would be posthumously regarded as “one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century” (Bullough, 2004, p. 277) due to his pioneering sex research at Indiana University.

Kinsey began his college education studying engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, where his father was a faculty member. After 2 years of mediocrity in both effort and grades – likely due to lack of interest in engineering and pressure from his authoritarian father – Kinsey transferred to...

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Bullough, V. L. (2004). Sex will never be the same: The contributions of Alfred C. Kinsey. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 33 , 277–286. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:ASEB.0000026627.24993.03 .

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Jones, J. H. (2004). Alfred C. Kinsey: A life . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., & Martin, C. B. (1948). Sexual behavior in the human male . Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders Company.

Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., Martin, C. B., & Gebhard, P. H. (1953). Sexual behavior in the human female . Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders Company.

Pastoetter, J. (2006). Alfred C. Kinsey: A much discussed scientist of our time. Sexuality & Culture, 10(1) , https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-006-1001-9 .

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Fisher, A.R., Fisher, M.A. (2019). Kinsey, Alfred. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_672

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Dr. Kinsey's Revolution

Articles from the 1920s through the 1990s comment on sex in America and the influence of Dr. Alfred Kinsey

This month, the film Kinsey starring Liam Neeson opens nationwide. Neeson plays Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the Indiana University zoology professor who until his mid-forties was best known as an expert on an insect called the gall wasp. By the time Kinsey began to teach an experimental marriage course to coeds in 1938, he had gathered more than four million of the stinging bugs. It's not surprising, then, that when students started coming to him for sex advice, the quasi-therapy sessions soon evolved into what Kinsey knew best: data collection. Over the next decade, and with support from the National Research Council (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), Kinsey and his assistants gathered 18,000 sexual histories. The job was all-consuming. He left teaching and in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research.

Kinsey's team asked volunteers hundreds of questions on such subjects as masturbation, fantasy, sexual positions, affairs, homosexuality, premarital sex, foreplay, and sex with prostitutes. Among his findings: 11 percent of married males had anal sex at a frequency ranging from once to often; 36 percent of men experienced a same-sex orgasm; 13 percent of females did the same; about 50 percent of married men had an extramarital affair; and 26 percent of women did the same. His two landmark studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) were published to instant success and controversy. The reason for both was simple: the Kinsey Reports, as they became known, suggested that the sex being talked about in public was rather different from the sex going on behind closed doors.

Kinsey claimed that his goal in conducting his research was simply to fill a gap in the knowledge about sexual practices—to take a purely scientific approach and remove morals from the sex equation, leaving only numbers. "We are the recorders and reporters of facts," he said, "not the judges of the behaviors we describe." But even scientists editorialize. In a review of two biographies of Kinsey that appeared in the May 1972 Atlantic , Paul A. Robinson suggested that Kinsey's apparent impartiality in itself served as an endorsement of certain behaviors:

Whatever their motivation, the Reports were all the more effective polemically for their seeming disinterestedness. Instead, for example, of stating outright that premarital sex was desirable, Kinsey simply documented a high correlation between premarital sexual experience and sexual "adjustment" in marriage, leaving the reader free to opt against adjustment if his moral code demanded.

Many Americans were shocked and offended by Kinsey's data. "The controversy that greeted the publication of Kinsey's two Reports," Robinson wrote, "was perhaps the most heated since that unleashed by Darwin's Origin of Species ." Even certain intellectuals, Robinson noted, disapproved of an examination of sexual experience that removed sex from its emotional context. Robinson pointed to a critique by Lionel Trilling in Partisan Review :

Trilling charged that the Male volume was not the neutral scientific document it pretended to be but a highly tendentious work with a permissivist bias. He granted that the Report's intentions were generous, but he regretted its naïveté and its fundamentally materialist notion of human sexuality.

In "Are Americans Well Adjusted?" (January 1961), a critique of a 1957 national survey on mental health, Charles J. Rolo went further. "The claim made by Dr. Kinsey and others," he wrote, "that their findings are 'an accumulation of scientific fact' is at best an exaggeration; the data collectors themselves concede that imponderables—the way a question is worded, the skill of an interviewer—influence their results." In Rolo's view, the Kinsey Report had a clear bias: "[It] breathes the spirit of American liberalism. It was obvious that Dr. Kinsey, despite his pose of scientific detachment, dearly wanted us all to have a good sex life."

Of course, whether or not one had a good sex life was hardly a matter of public discussion in the era before the Reports were published. Two decades before Kinsey appeared on the scene, in "Courtship After Marriage" (November 1921), "Another Bachelor" (as the anonymous author referred to himself) called such squeamishness into question. He began his piece by lamenting the great number of unmarried members of society, writing of the "over-strained, atrophied women doomed to live out their lives unmated and deprived of their rightful inheritance [to give birth]."

"Something must be decidedly wrong with our civilization," he suggested in his introduction, "to permit such a state of affairs." One of the culprits, he believed, was Puritanism:

Many a boy and a girl brought up in a Puritan environment have come to regard the first attractions of sex as something utterly unholy... They have turned to ascetic discipline and severe torments of the soul, until their outlook has become badly distorted, even at times to the extreme of insanity. These unhappy victims of Puritanism have been prevented from realizing that Nature is only asking her own: that she rejoices in the instinctive revelations of sex; that adolescence is as natural as breathing, and must not be too long absorbed... Puritanism, in its peculiar definition of moral purity and its gloomy approach to marriage, has created a stuffy atmosphere in which it is excessively difficult for men and women to meet naturally.

Even marriage, he suggested, does little to improve couples' attitudes about sex. "Many a young mother finds herself condemned to a painful reticence and evasion," he wrote, "at a time when she should be boldly exultant in her supreme realization of Nature's greatest miracle." A chaste discussion of sex, perhaps, but an endorsement of it nonetheless.

Groundbreaking and influential as Kinsey's work was, it did not succeed in breaking down every last inhibition. As years passed, other researchers picked up where Kinsey left off. In "Sex and the Married Couple" (December 1970), Paul Wilkes profiled two sex researchers, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who in the late 1950s had begun measuring human sexual response in a laboratory setting: they observed hundreds of men and women having sex or masturbating. Masters and Johnson later counseled couples on solving such sexual problems as premature ejaculation or the inability to have an orgasm. Even during the 1960s, in the midst of America's sexual revolution, they found that Puritanism was still an influence. Their highest failure rate—40 percent, they pointed out in one of their books—was with impotent men, "many of whom could not overcome religious strictures that have effectively castrated them." Wilkes pointed out that Masters and Johnson did their work in St. Louis, Missouri—a state where in the 1970s it was against the law for unmarried men and women to have sex.

In the face of such persistent prudishness, Masters described his and Johnson's role as "to put sex back in its natural context; [as] a perfectly normal function—as normal as breathing. " In Wilkes' view, Masters and Johnson had largely succeeded in this goal of shattering taboos and promoting sex as a normal part of everyday life for everyone:

Masters and Johnson have consistently kicked over barriers, pushed their way through myth, mores, and misconception, to come up with undisputedly sound medical and therapeutic information. When a Roman Catholic nun comes to them with complaints of pelvic pain, a bloated feeling at other than 'that time of the month,' and they find massive congestion that can be relieved in only one way, they tell the nun to masturbate to orgasm.

Masters looked to Kinsey as a role model of sorts, and informed himself about the man and his research so that he might be inspired in his own work. As he learned more about him he increasingly came to recognize that Kinsey had been in many ways flawed:

Masters found that Kinsey developed an overpowering ego, would not train a qualified successor, and thus guaranteed that his work would end with his death. He never collaborated with a female researcher although he was studying both sexes. And in his last years, Kinsey was obsessed with the thought that everyone was trying to steal his data.

In the years since the Reports were published, further problems with Kinsey and his research have come to light. In "The Mystique of Betty Friedan" (September 1999), an article questioning the social-scientific underpinnings of Freidan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique , sociologist Alan Wolfe explains that Kinsey's work "misrespresented the sexual habits and practices of Americans because Kinsey's interviewees were so unrepresentative." Instead of random sampling, Kinsey relied heavily on volunteers who were mostly middle-class, educated, young, and white. He also went searching for gay subjects in places like prisons and bars and included in his data testimonies from convicted pedophiles.

Wolfe even goes so far as to suggest that Kinsey did not pursue sex research as a dispassionate scientist seeking truth but, rather, because he was "stimulated by his voyeurism and sexual adventurousness." Others have speculated that Kinsey harbored homosexual feelings which were what led him into the field of sex research in the first place. Still others—many of them fundamentalist Christians—dismiss his research on moral grounds.

In the end, however, despite his inexact scientific techniques and unclear motives, it is indisputable that the effect Kinsey's research has had on American society over the years has been very real. He was one of the first prominent scientists to take seriously the reality that people were having all kinds of sex, whether society liked it or not. His data proved it and got people talking. The rest is history.

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Short abstract

Directed by Bill Condon. UK release date: 4 March www2.foxsearchlight.com/kinsey/site/

Rating: ★★★★

A lfred Kinsey was a complex man who became one of the most famous—and controversial—sex researchers of recent times. Although people have questioned his ethics, methods, and personal life, he remains an important figure in sexology.

The importance of research underpins the whole of this movie about Kinsey's life and work. Cast members were required to learn about Kinsey, his study team, and his methods for taking sexual histories. Director Bill Condon decided to mirror Kinsey's interviewing technique “as a way into Kinsey's personal biography,” so the film is matter of fact about issues to do with sex, including Kinsey's own relationships and particularly his bisexuality.

Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson) grew up with a religious and domineering father, and as a young child he suffered from a number of serious illnesses, including rickets. As an adult Kinsey made a career as a biologist, specialising in the taxonomy of the gall wasp, but became interested in studying sex systematically after teaching “marriage” classes to his students, in which he found that he was not always able to answer their many questions about sex. He was, and still is, considered radical as a researcher for dismissing the idea of normality and instead describing the “common” or the “rare.” His attempts to welcome sexual diversity, in particular acknowledging homosexuality, simultaneously paved the way for greater freedoms for gays and bisexual men and women but led to hostile criticism of Kinsey.

Those who have done health research, but especially anyone who has studied sex, will enjoy watching interviews being recreated and be happy to see Kinsey actively supporting his research team, taking a leading role in interviewing participants, reviewing how best to take a sexual history, and training colleagues to collect data. ​ data.

Let's talk about sex: Liam Neeson as Kinsey

More surprising is the blurring of boundaries between some of Kinsey's work and his personal life, in particular his sexual relationship with a male research colleague; his unconventional marriage to Clara (played superbly by Laura Linney); and the frank discussions of sex with his family, including taking his father's sexual history.

Those who work in sexual health will find some moments of the film very poignant—particularly researchers who have struggled to get funding because of their research topic, had their work devalued or criticised, or been made to feel they were “unscientific” for studying sex.

The film is also interesting for a general audience, having a strong cast, beautiful cinematography, and a storyline that mixes humour, scientific interest, and humanity. It provides a powerful testament to the need for sex research and a greater acceptance of sexual diversity.

And it's very relevant. In the United States currently the religious right is targeting sex researchers who they feel are studying areas outside those of “traditional family values.” The drug industry is keen to create and measure sexual dysfunctions in order to market products; and in the media, from which many people glean much of their information on sex, the “sex survey” is now a commonplace and much misused and misunderstood means of filling copy.

Actor John Lithgow (who plays Kinsey's father) says of Kinsey that “he got people to say things out loud, real terrifying truths, and find out they weren't so terrifying.” For that he should be remembered, and this film pays a great man a great deal of respect.