Kinsey Ramblings
Mwahahaa, someone asked!
Hokay. So, dude Was Born.
Was Born a while ago. His father was a preacher/religious type, very strict. And Alfie was sick a lot as a kid, until he discovered the Great Outdoors. This is when he got interested in biology. He did the school thing, then went to uni - and his dad was v.v. disappointed that he didn't become an engineer. Cue sadfaces. *sadfaces*
Kinsey's life's work was pretty much set to be collecting samples of this one kind of wasp. And I mean, hundreds of thousands of samples. Dude was a little obsessed, I think. But it showed that even insects are genetically unique to others of the same species. The differences, no matter how tiny, were still different and still noticeable. One of his students at IUB was a girl named Clara McMillen, whom he called Mac. She later became his assistant, and then his wife.
But! They had problems with The Sex. They were both virgins because, well, that was what people Did in Those Days. And sex was painful for Mac. (not just the first time, either!) Finally, they went to a doctor and found out that she had a birth defect, easily fixed with surgery but it could otherwise have made their sex life miserable.
Instead, it was Very, Very Good For Them. They were scientists, so they liked experimenting. But something about the whole thing bothered Kinsey. He knew other couples must sometimes run into the same sort of sexual problems. Before they'd gone to the doctor, he and Mac had tried to find books that could help - most of them were a bunch of bunk. And not "I'll be in my bunk" bunk, more like, "steaming pile of horse-shite meant to scare people into heteronormativity" bunk.
Little by little, people started coming to Kinsey for advice, or with questions. Boys who got into college still thinking they'd go blind if they masturbated, young couples who didn't have a clue what the mechanics of sex were...dumb, obvious questions that a lot of books still wouldn't answer because people were so damn Victorian about sex. So Kinsey needed to do something - he started a class, only open to upperclassmen/women and married students. And it was, essentially, sex ed. Mostly clinical descriptions: this is a penis, this is a vagina, a woman has a hymen, her first time is uncomfortable and there is some blood. This is normal. X much blood is not normal. This is how babies are made. Penis goes in vagina, man orgasms in vagina, wheeeee...
And Kinsey got Interested in Ways People Have Sex. So he started doing surveys, first of the kids in his "Marriage Class," then of some faculty members, and then pretty much whoever would talk to him. But the bigwigs were getting a bit antsy. Surely this wasn't appropriate?
Eventually, the young president of the school, Herman B. Wells (and I could go on for at least another 500 words about how much I love that man) was forced to say "both of these things are valuable, Kinsey, but you need to pick one or there's going to be trouble for both of us." Wells would go to bat for teachers and students alike, but he knew when he was beat and when to make compromises.
Kinsey picked the sex research, because I think he'd already laid the groundwork for a more educated IU population and he wanted to pretty much educate the world. He got a team of researchers and taught them all a specific shorthand for the notes, because you don't ask people questions like this and then ask them to repeat it. He taught them interviewing techniques and how to make people comfortable without taking all day. And then he unleashed them on the unsuspecting world - or, at least, the totally unprepared Midwest.
(The reason his data is flawed is because his first test groups were educated, relatively wealthy, and white. This was a pattern that persisted in much of the subjects of the survey. He thought with enough thousands of people, even if they were all one demographic, it would control for variation. But statistics have since proven this a fallacious premise, though I doubt he would have been able to adequately survey enough other demographics considering the makeup of his team and the fact that most people just genuinely didn't want to "talk about sex." He also interviewed numerous prison inmates and prostitutes, which inflated statistics. And there were accusations of consorting with child molestors (some "pedophiles" as the Kinsey Institute called them were interviewed, but it has been denied that any child molestation was observed by the researchers). Kinsey was also biased; he was frustrated with conventional sexual morality and experimented frequently with unconventional sex, and encouraged his team and his wife to do the same, via group sex and other unconventional sexual acts.)
While he was conducting surveys in some of the larger cities, Kinsey stumbled upon the gay population. This is where the data gets really badly mucked up; he surveyed a promiscuous gay male underground meant for anonymous hookups rather than lasting relationships. Men in lasting relationships wouldn't go near Kinsey, probably. Also, Kinsey sampled the nightlife. By which I mean, he done cheated on his wife.
He did manage to explain himself to Mac, and they even had something of an open marriage, after a fashion. I dunno how much she wandered, but he did several times, usually with men. It's probable that Kinsey himself was a 3 or higher on the Kinsey scale, another part of his research that many people are disputing now (personally, I think of it as something of a guideline. Very few people would exactly hit on number or another; I generally classify myself as somewhere between a 4 and a 5, depending on how I feel that day). Another reason Kinsey is considered biased is because he encouraged his researchers to experiment with their sexuality - by which I mean he pretty much insisted that the men doing the interviews have sex with other men. Including himself. It was probably meant to discourage them from judgmental behavior, but it comes off as an abuse of power.
His studies were published in two separate reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He died in 1956, of heart disease (probably caused by his boyhood heart problems) and pneumonia.
Hokay. So, dude Was Born.
Was Born a while ago. His father was a preacher/religious type, very strict. And Alfie was sick a lot as a kid, until he discovered the Great Outdoors. This is when he got interested in biology. He did the school thing, then went to uni - and his dad was v.v. disappointed that he didn't become an engineer. Cue sadfaces. *sadfaces*
Kinsey's life's work was pretty much set to be collecting samples of this one kind of wasp. And I mean, hundreds of thousands of samples. Dude was a little obsessed, I think. But it showed that even insects are genetically unique to others of the same species. The differences, no matter how tiny, were still different and still noticeable. One of his students at IUB was a girl named Clara McMillen, whom he called Mac. She later became his assistant, and then his wife.
But! They had problems with The Sex. They were both virgins because, well, that was what people Did in Those Days. And sex was painful for Mac. (not just the first time, either!) Finally, they went to a doctor and found out that she had a birth defect, easily fixed with surgery but it could otherwise have made their sex life miserable.
Instead, it was Very, Very Good For Them. They were scientists, so they liked experimenting. But something about the whole thing bothered Kinsey. He knew other couples must sometimes run into the same sort of sexual problems. Before they'd gone to the doctor, he and Mac had tried to find books that could help - most of them were a bunch of bunk. And not "I'll be in my bunk" bunk, more like, "steaming pile of horse-shite meant to scare people into heteronormativity" bunk.
Little by little, people started coming to Kinsey for advice, or with questions. Boys who got into college still thinking they'd go blind if they masturbated, young couples who didn't have a clue what the mechanics of sex were...dumb, obvious questions that a lot of books still wouldn't answer because people were so damn Victorian about sex. So Kinsey needed to do something - he started a class, only open to upperclassmen/women and married students. And it was, essentially, sex ed. Mostly clinical descriptions: this is a penis, this is a vagina, a woman has a hymen, her first time is uncomfortable and there is some blood. This is normal. X much blood is not normal. This is how babies are made. Penis goes in vagina, man orgasms in vagina, wheeeee...
And Kinsey got Interested in Ways People Have Sex. So he started doing surveys, first of the kids in his "Marriage Class," then of some faculty members, and then pretty much whoever would talk to him. But the bigwigs were getting a bit antsy. Surely this wasn't appropriate?
Eventually, the young president of the school, Herman B. Wells (and I could go on for at least another 500 words about how much I love that man) was forced to say "both of these things are valuable, Kinsey, but you need to pick one or there's going to be trouble for both of us." Wells would go to bat for teachers and students alike, but he knew when he was beat and when to make compromises.
Kinsey picked the sex research, because I think he'd already laid the groundwork for a more educated IU population and he wanted to pretty much educate the world. He got a team of researchers and taught them all a specific shorthand for the notes, because you don't ask people questions like this and then ask them to repeat it. He taught them interviewing techniques and how to make people comfortable without taking all day. And then he unleashed them on the unsuspecting world - or, at least, the totally unprepared Midwest.
(The reason his data is flawed is because his first test groups were educated, relatively wealthy, and white. This was a pattern that persisted in much of the subjects of the survey. He thought with enough thousands of people, even if they were all one demographic, it would control for variation. But statistics have since proven this a fallacious premise, though I doubt he would have been able to adequately survey enough other demographics considering the makeup of his team and the fact that most people just genuinely didn't want to "talk about sex." He also interviewed numerous prison inmates and prostitutes, which inflated statistics. And there were accusations of consorting with child molestors (some "pedophiles" as the Kinsey Institute called them were interviewed, but it has been denied that any child molestation was observed by the researchers). Kinsey was also biased; he was frustrated with conventional sexual morality and experimented frequently with unconventional sex, and encouraged his team and his wife to do the same, via group sex and other unconventional sexual acts.)
While he was conducting surveys in some of the larger cities, Kinsey stumbled upon the gay population. This is where the data gets really badly mucked up; he surveyed a promiscuous gay male underground meant for anonymous hookups rather than lasting relationships. Men in lasting relationships wouldn't go near Kinsey, probably. Also, Kinsey sampled the nightlife. By which I mean, he done cheated on his wife.
He did manage to explain himself to Mac, and they even had something of an open marriage, after a fashion. I dunno how much she wandered, but he did several times, usually with men. It's probable that Kinsey himself was a 3 or higher on the Kinsey scale, another part of his research that many people are disputing now (personally, I think of it as something of a guideline. Very few people would exactly hit on number or another; I generally classify myself as somewhere between a 4 and a 5, depending on how I feel that day). Another reason Kinsey is considered biased is because he encouraged his researchers to experiment with their sexuality - by which I mean he pretty much insisted that the men doing the interviews have sex with other men. Including himself. It was probably meant to discourage them from judgmental behavior, but it comes off as an abuse of power.
His studies were published in two separate reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He died in 1956, of heart disease (probably caused by his boyhood heart problems) and pneumonia.