Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
A new biography of Alfred C. Kinsey shows he not only studied many forms of sexual behavior but experimented with them as well.
Apr 15, 2000 | Long before Dr. Ruth began televangelizing about the wholesomeness of doing it in the shower, playing doctor and "being sensitive to our partners' needs," Alfred Kinsey was observing, recording and, last but not least, having sex -- a lot of sex. In 1948 he shocked the world with his international bestseller "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," the so-called Kinsey Report, in which he questioned the basic distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality, proposing instead his "scale," a continuum of erotic responses that defied easy categorization.
Five years later, he published the companion volume "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," an equally outrageous exposi of American Womanhood in which he moved the typical happy homemaker of the 1950s out of her kitchen and into the barn and the monkey house, side by side with her counterparts in the wild kingdom. His pioneering work on the nature of female orgasm, the masturbatory habits of adolescents and the prevalence of extramarital intercourse is so basic to the modern understanding of sex that at times it is difficult to appreciate his originality, so thoroughly have his trailblazing observations become the stock and trade of well-meaning sex columnists the world over.
The dance card of the greatest American sexologist of all time was empty for his high school prom, even though he was devilishly handsome, smart as a whip and, as Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's excellent new biography, "Sex the Measure of All Things," so shamelessly discloses, hung like a horse. The son of a religious fanatic, he wore his Boy Scout uniform at all times well into college and even prayed to God with the younger cubs he counseled to help them avoid the errors of "self-pollution" -- an unanswered prayer, it would seem, given that he continued to masturbate all his life and even engaged in more esoteric perversions, including "tea-room trade" in public johns, genital mutilation, self-circumcision and his favorite sexual pastime, urethral insertion, a practice that involved sticking into his penis pens, pencils and even, as he honed his craft, toothbrushes -- bristles first.
As a budding herpetologist, he housed dozens of snakes in his dorm room and, after he graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, quickly became one of the greatest collectors of all time. He began first as an entomologist, gathering millions of specimens of wasps (many species still bear his name), and then as a sexologist, amassing thousands of sexual histories of pedophiles, prostitutes, businessmen and housewives. He also collected the measurements of more than 5,200 penises and 400 African-American clitorises, to say nothing of 2,000 films of male orgasms and hundreds of documentaries recording the mating habits of rats, pigeons, horses and even porcupines.
He was a born scientist and a compulsive statistician, as monomaniacal about bugs in killing jars as he was about dicks in vaginas. He stunned America by stripping sex of the trappings of romantic love, liberating it from the moral judgments of Judeo-Christian prudery and reducing it to a pure biological act in which men and women behaved like any other rutting animals. (An unflattering vision is still enshrined on the bathroom doors of the Kinsey Institute, which bear not the dainty expressions Ladies and Gentlemen but the starkly taxonomical terms Male and Female.)
He also practiced what he preached and hence, in the eyes of his ostensibly more detached colleagues, unscrupulously violated the high standards of objectivity that are the prerequisite of effective science. He encouraged wife-swapping among the staff of his institute, pimped off his own beloved spouse, a comely den mother, to other horny men and insisted that acquaintances keep detailed sex calendars describing the origin and intensity of their orgasms. He even, in the case of a mildly homophobic interviewer he employed, summoned the man to his hotel room in order to provide him with a firsthand demonstration of gay sex with another colleague.
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