Statistician of Sex

Passionately addicted to self-scrutiny, the 20th century started out talking and worrying about its sex life with a nervous intensity that would have appalled earlier ages; it made prophets of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis and that Baedeker of sexual abnormality, Richard von Krafft-Ebing. What remained was for someone to link the age's preoccupation with sex to its passion for statistics. That job was taken on, not surprisingly, by an American--Alfred Charles Kinsey of Bloomington, Ind., zoologist by training, who was determined to observe the sex behavior of the human animal with the scientific methods he had once brought to an earlier specialty, the study of gall wasps.

Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). published by a medical textbook house, caught on like a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, unexpectedly became a bestseller and made its author's name a national byword. Its successor, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), sold less well. What appealed to the public was precisely what horrified many a scientist: the implication in both books that, despite the small size of the statistical samples (5.300 men and 5,940 women), the studies reflected an accurate cross section of human sexual behavior.

Moral Symptom. Dr. Kinsey insistently declared that he was a dispassionate scientist. A teacher's son, he majored in biology and zoology at Maine's Bowdoin, went on to take an Sc.D. from Harvard and to join the zoology department of the Indiana University. After he founded his Institute for Sex Research in 1947, Kinsey and a specially trained staff of psychologists, sociologists, lawyers and statisticians launched a kind of super Gallup poll of America's sex life. Some of the results sounded sensational. According to Kinsey's figures, nearly half of the American men had homosexual experiences "at one time or another," nearly half of the married men committed adultery, 25% of the married women found their sex life in some way unsatisfactory.

Quite apart from whether or not the figures were reliable, the Kinsey studies raised moral questions--because of Kinsey's very insistence that he had nothing to do with moral questions, a concept he refused to acknowledge in any case. To Kinsey anything was "biologically normal" that is done by a sizable number of people--or animals. By that logic almost nothing could be called abnormal. The notion fitted in with other thinkers' concept of quantitative morality, i.e., right and wrong are not fixed values but mere fluctuating curves on a statistical graph. Thus "The Kinsey Report" became at once a radio comedian's joke and a hard-worked (and in many phases perhaps valuable) scientific contribution. It was also a fascinating moral symptom of its age.

Another Generation. Alfred Kinsey, who lived in a comfortable house in Bloomington behind thick hedges of shrubbery and books, was a well-known figure in the academic world, equally well known in what he called the underworld of New York's Times Square, where he and his Ph.D. associates had conducted widespread interviews. Apart from a passion for hi-fi music, he was driven by a 16-hour-a-day dedication to his work. Said his wife once in a famous aside: "I hardly ever see him at night any more since he took up sex."

With his deep conviction that nothing must remain in the human animal beyond the reach of statistical measurement, he laid out a schedule of future work that would take several lifetimes to complete--seven or eight more volumes, on sexual behavior in the European male and female, homosexual behavior, sex laws, and sexual behavior of prison inmates. Last week, his major work only begun, Dr. Alfred Kinsey died, at 62, of a heart ailment complicated by pneumonia. His staff may or may not complete the projected series that, he had hoped, would free another generation from old misunderstandings and fears about sex--leading them ever onward under the sign of biological normalcy.

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