What we do in private

"Peek," a collection of erotic photos from the Kinsey collection, is a strangely clinical yet revealing look at American sexuality.

By Michael Alvear

Oct 19, 2000 | You really can tell a book by its cover. One look at "Peek," a fascinating glimpse of the Kinsey Institute's photography collection, and you know it's true. What you see on the cover is what you get in the book.

And what you get is tits and ass, Kinsey style.

Alfred C. Kinsey, the man who jump-started sex research with a good pinch in the ass, stunned the country in 1948 with his pioneering study, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," and in 1953 with "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female." No one, least of all Kinsey himself, expected the scholarly work to become what it did: a bestselling mirror of America's sexuality.

Kinsey's work forced people to see the dichotomy between their beliefs and their actions. Everybody assumed, for example, that most women were virgins when they married, yet Kinsey's surveys revealed that 50 percent of women were doing the hoochie-koochie before they got hitched.

Kinsey scandalized the country, and the only reason he wasn't dismissed as a crank is that he walked and talked like he had a cork up his ass. This was a buttoned-down professor of biology at a Midwestern university, after all; a scientist who brought rigorous discipline to the 18,000 interviews his team conducted for the studies.

True to form, puritanical America treated Kinsey's work with the same kind of hypocrisy it reserved for sex: It denied his findings in public and practiced them in private.

It's this schism in the American sexual psyche that "Peek" captures so brilliantly, especially in the women it portrays.

If you used a sheet of paper to cover the photographed women from the neck down, in most cases you couldn't possibly guess their bodies were naked, or that the women wanted to be or were about to be shtupped. Page after page after page, the facial expressions of these women do not come close to matching the sexual posture of their bodies. You'd expect to see some expression of lust, ecstasy, desire -- anything to show us a spark of libido.

But you don't. And the fact that you don't perfectly captures the Madonna (face)/whore (body) dichotomy and the "nice girls don't, at least not in public" mentality of the age -- most of the photographs in the book were taken between the 1880s and the 1960s.

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