Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Inside America's Famous Sex Study About this episode How could recording people having sex be 'for science'? Same question for sleeping with your colleagues? Well, these were just two of the practices embraced by the subject of today's conversation.
Donna Drucker is returning to the podcast to discuss pioneering sexologist, Alfred Kinsey. Donna, from Columbia University, is author of The Classification of Sex.
This episode was edited by Nick Thomson. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK.
All music from Epidemic Sounds.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Cade Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. Have you got that right? Is that the podcast that you actually want to be listening to? You haven't mistaken us for something else? Okay, then, let's crack a wait before we crack on. I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Oh, God, I feel safer after that. Do you feel safer? Right, on with the show.
1:07 Kate Lister? It's 1948, mid-afternoon, and we are in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. Women in mid-length dresses with neatly set hair are pushing strollers down the sidewalk in groups of two and three. There's babies and toddlers everywhere, probably that baby boom everyone's talking about. Shiny Fords are being driven down the street by men in sharp, structured suits, and store windows are crammed full of tinned goods, packaged coffee, and Spam. That's my understanding of the time period. They ate a lot of Spam. In this picket fence paradise with the sun shining through the dappled trees and the birds singing, it'd be quite easy to believe that babies are delivered by the stork, were it not for a book on everybody's lips.
1:50 Kate Lister? The book that broadcasts the bedroom behaviours of men and women in America to the world. The bestselling Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, and then later the Female, by Bloomington's own Alfred Kinsey. And today, we're going to find out just what he did.
2:16 Speaker 01 What do you call a man?
2:18 Speaker 02 Oh, money, of course.
2:19 Speaker 03 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
2:22 Speaker 02 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.
2:34 Speaker 03 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
2:37 Speaker 04 Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.
2:45 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. How many people are really totally 100% straight, or 100% gay for that matter? How often do married people actually have sex? And how many of said married people have done the dirty with somebody other than their spouse? Hmm, all quite reasonable questions, I think, and ones brought to the interview table in the mid 1900s by scientist Alfred Kinsey. Well, today I am joined once again by historian Donna Drucker, who, as well as her work on contraceptives, has delved quite intimately into Mr. Kinsey, if you'll forgive the expression. Donna and I are going to discuss just how human sexual behaviour became a research topic,
3:30 Kate Lister? what results Kinsey actually came up with, and just how ethical was his research? Got your lab coats and your goggles on? All right then, let's do it.
3:45 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Donna Drucker. How are you doing?
3:51 Speaker 05 Oh, I'm doing very well. How are you?
3:53 Kate Lister? Fabulous. It's so lovely to have you back. I really enjoyed our chat about the pill.
3:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, same here. Same here. Thank you for having me back.
4:01 Kate Lister? And one of the things we did touch on in that conversation is the topic of conversation today, the one and the only Alfred Kinsey, which to people outside of sex studies and sex history, I don't know how well-known that name actually is, but he's a big deal, isn't he?
4:20 Speaker 05 Very much. So he's very much one of the biggest figures in the founding of sexology as an academic discipline in the 20th century.
4:29 Kate Lister? So that's what he did. He is, he's not, he's not the original. Like, there were people that came before him, but he probab- oh, did he do the biggest study? I mean, we're going to get into all of this, but is it, or is it that his results were the most significant?
4:46 Speaker 05 A little bit of both. So, over his career as a sex researcher, he and his team interviewed about 18,000 people individually, which to the date of the 1950s, that was by far the largest and most in-depth set of sex interviews, surveys, data analysis that had, that had happened. And he also established the zero to six scale and the 10% figure for homosexuality.
5:14 Kate Lister? Oh, is that that everyone's a little bit gay theory that he had?
5:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, in, in short, yeah.
5:20 Kate Lister? He did call it that. We should probably take it back a notch because I've gotten, I've already gotten carried away myself. For people who are listening, and there will be quite a lot out there who've never heard this name before and who are taking a punt on this podcast going, all right, I don't know who this is, but I'll trust you. Who was he? Let's give a bit of an origin story, where he came from, before he even gets to the sex stuff.
5:43 Speaker 05 Sure. Alfred Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is where he grew up. And his father was an instructor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. And Kinsey went there for his first two years of college, which he absolutely hated. And so he wanted to be out in nature. He really loved being outdoors. And so he finished his bachelor's degree at Bowdoin College in Maine, very remote area of country.
6:14 Kate Lister? I've never heard of it. Yeah, okay, fair enough.
6:16 Speaker 05 There is a smaller arts college. And he decides to obtain a doctoral degree at Harvard. He studies under a man named William Morton Wheeler, who is a specialist in ants.
6:31 Kate Lister? See, this is one of the best things about Kinsey is you think that he would have just been studying sex his entire life. But he really isn't. He's just this mad 180 tangent, doesn't he? He starts, did he do his PhD on ants?
6:44 Speaker 05 On an insect called the gall wasp, which is very, compared to humans, they're probably some of the least interesting creatures.
6:56 Kate Lister? They're not even interesting compared. There'll be gall wasping these asps out there. We're very sorry that I'm sure that they're fascinated. But he loved them, didn't he? That was his thing.
7:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, he really wanted to make a mark on taxonomy and science. And the way he thought to do that was, here's this area of entomology that no one is really working on. I'm going to make my mark on entomology. And so he goes out, he goes all around the US, he goes to Mexico, down to Guatemala, collects all these gall wasps and devises these taxonomies of gall wasp species.
7:32 Kate Lister? You do you, I guess. I mean, one, I do like this is one of my favorite examples of someone getting a PhD in something, but then becoming famous for studying something completely different. Because that does actually happen quite a lot.
7:45 Speaker 05 Yes, definitely.
7:47 Kate Lister? This is one of the most extreme ones, though.
7:49 Speaker 05 Yes, and that was kind of the question I had when I began to study him is how do you get from these little insects that die two days after they're born, you know?
7:59 Kate Lister? Do they? Well, that's quite interesting.
8:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, but there's odds and ends about them that are interesting. But he had kind of come to the end of what he could accomplish with taxonomy.
8:10 Kate Lister? Okay.
8:11 Speaker 05 By the mid 1930s. By then, he had accepted a job at Indiana University, which is a small, uh, public university in rural southern Indiana in the Midwest. And he's also not making a lot of money. And so he decides to start writing junior high, high school textbooks.
8:31 Kate Lister? On wasps or no?
8:33 Speaker 05 No, um, on, uh, general science education. So it's a way, even now, that professors who are looking to make a mark on the field in a different way can make some money as they write a general textbook about, about their field.
8:48 Kate Lister? Nothing about sex yet, though.
8:49 Speaker 05 It's just about it's getting there because what he finding is that there's lots about reproduction of newts, frogs, but students are not getting very much instruction about their own anatomy and about sex education.
9:06 Kate Lister? Okay.
9:06 Speaker 05 And students are starting to come to him as a science educator to say, you know, we need this knowledge, we need to know this information. And he thinks, okay, well, why don't I teach a marriage course?
9:20 Kate Lister? Is that code for just sex? Is that like nineteen thirty's code?
9:24 Speaker 05 Actually, it's not. Starting in the in the depression era, there was a lot of concern that the decadence of the nineteen twenties had left young people without the skills to have successful marriages. And so this marriage instruction movement starts where instructors at universities who don't necessarily have any.
9:47 Kate Lister? Oh, it's so weird. It's weird already. I almost don't want you to continue. But what what is it that they're doing?
9:53 Speaker 05 It's not too, it's it's well meaning. It's maybe a little naive, but it's, you know, how to run a household, you know, how to parent children, you know, how to find a good partner. But most of them kind of dance around the sexual element of a marriage. And so he decides, okay, I'd like to do this marriage course, but I want to have a more honest element of sex education in it. And for the archivists out there, for the lovers of historical documents, all these lectures still exist at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington. So you can actually go back and read them.
10:35 Kate Lister? How straightforward are they? Is it all very like opaque and sort of hinting? Or is it is it much more factual?
10:43 Speaker 05 Kinsey's lectures are very straightforward. He does not want to sugarcoat any element of having sex. The courses were restricted to students who were engaged or in the early years of marriage. They include things like a diagram of the clitoris compared to a diagram of the penis in terms of how long the kind of nerves are in each of those appendages.
11:10 Kate Lister? Interesting. Okay.
11:12 Speaker 05 This is mixed in with courses on like how to have a household budget or, you know, things like that. And so obviously this is a sensation, these courses.
11:24 Kate Lister? Were they very popular, Donna? Did a lot of people want to know about maintaining households?
11:30 Speaker 05 And budgeting, yes. Very exciting. Yeah, they were right away. They were covered in the student newspaper and students started to try to fake engagements to get in them.
11:42 Kate Lister? Oh. But that, that, that kind of tells you, Donna, like how desperate this information must be. So I'm always fascinated about where did people learn about sex, about the birds and the bees? Because this is, it's to, to, not to use too obvious a pun, but this is a very oral history. This is something that is passed from a parent to child, from friend to friend, from sibling to sibling. And often we just don't have the records of it, but information is patchy at best.
12:14 Speaker 05 Right. And, you know, Kinsey, whatever his flaws are, he is an educator at heart. Like he wants people to learn. And so the offshoot of this is that students start coming to him individually, one-on-one with questions they don't feel comfortable asking.
12:32 Kate Lister? Oh, no. I suppose that's a good thing. I'm, I'm just having flashbacks to my own university days when students would come in for a chat. It's like, I'm not, I'm not trained for this. Help me.
12:42 Speaker 05 Yeah. People feel like they can, they can trust you.
12:46 Kate Lister? But this is like, what, this is the 40s and the 30s? Completely different environment back then?
12:52 Speaker 05 This is 1938. This is when the marriage was.
12:54 Kate Lister? Right. Okay. Yeah.
12:56 Speaker 05 And so the students are coming to him and as a taxonomist, as a scientist, coming more broadly, he starts thinking, this data is amazing and people are just coming to me and bringing me this data about.
13:12 Kate Lister? Oh, so they're telling him, they're going to him with like, like personal problems?
13:16 Speaker 05 Oh, yes, very much so, because the.
13:20 Kate Lister? I mean, you can see why they would, I guess.
13:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, because the course is like a lecture format. They're delivering the lecture, then they leave. There's not really a discussion format. So
13:30 Kate Lister? Okay.
13:30 Speaker 05 That's where he gets the idea, maybe I should actually just interview these folks and start keeping records. And eventually, the medical director of the university starts getting wind of this course and how popular it is. It's a small town, small school, information travels.
13:51 Kate Lister? But did the director of the university not know?
13:54 Speaker 05 He did this aside from the medical staff.
13:58 Kate Lister? Never get away with that now. Could you even imagine if I decided I'd just do an extra class where students can come and tell me about their sex lives? Oh, my God. I, I don't think that you would last two minutes at your university if you came up with that particular idea. I think you would be out on your ear pretty quick smart.
14:15 Speaker 05 And it wasn't that even that he was wrong, it's that he was on now on the turf of the school physicians. And the school physicians were very territorial and said, you know, were the ones who guide students in their physical health. Not, who are you? And you're an entomologist? Like, what are you doing?
14:38 Kate Lister? Guy?
14:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly.
14:39 Kate Lister? Why are you telling them? Actually, when you say like that, they did kind of have a point.
14:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, interestingly, he, you know, kind of like an ecologist, I'm like, who's starting a new topic? You know, his whole library, again, is still at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana. And, you know, he is reading all the sexology that he can find. He doesn't read German, but a lot of sexology is in German, so he hires a translator to help him read.
15:07 Kate Lister? It's methodical, isn't it?
15:08 Speaker 05 He starts talking to a statistician because he's realizing, okay, I'm going to need more statistical knowledge to be able to process this data.
15:20 Speaker 05 And the university president has to intervene and basically says, okay, this is about two years down the road. You can either teach the marriage course, or you can start, keep doing these interviews.
15:34 Kate Lister? But he doesn't fire him?
15:35 Speaker 05 No, actually, this president is, in the world of American university history, fairly well known for his support of intellectual freedom. And he says, you know, go for it.
15:46 Kate Lister? I'm impressed. I thought, I thought he would have been out on his air with his, with his book collection, standing in the middle of the road.
15:53 Speaker 05 Which still exists, but no, the man's name is Herman Wells, and Wells says, do it.
15:59 Kate Lister? Thank you, Herman Wells.
16:00 Speaker 05 Do it. And Kinsey, by then, by, this is 1940, he had already started traveling to Indianapolis and to Chicago. And he's talking to anybody who will listen to him. He's going into poor neighborhoods, he's going into African American neighborhoods. Of course, America is still very segregated. And so here's this like, kind of nerdy, buttoned up university professor wandering around the prostitutes and, you know, pimps of Indianapolis, going, hey, would you talk to me about your sex lives? And they do.
16:35 Kate Lister? And that's something else that as a modern academic, I don't know if, well, I mean, you might, you probably could get ethical clearance for that, but we are a long way away from going, yeah, I'll go and talk to random people in, in the street. You'd never ever be allowed to do that now. You have very, very rigorous ethic committees that you have to go through, don't you?
16:58 Speaker 05 Absolutely. You have to get human subjects permission and have consent forms signed and things, things like that. So he's realizing, okay, I have, there's all this data and people are willing to talk to me. How am I going to gather this? And so he, what he does is create a form. It's a one page form that holds information for up to 300 questions. Some people with very extensive experience can be asked up to about 520 questions, but most people's sex histories get covered in about.
17:27 Kate Lister? What, what, what, what kind of set, what kind of questions? I've got, I've got to know, I've got to know.
17:32 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, it's, it's actually, yeah, I'll publish. It's, it kind of starts your childhood and kind of moves, moves forward. So, you know, did you see your parents undressed? When did you see other boys and girls without clothes on, you know? When do you start, you know, you know, touching your genitals? They're very straightforward questions. They're not, he's not using very euphemisms, but he is using language that people of different social classes would understand. So he kind of is code switching in a way that makes people feel comfortable. And so to keep the privacy of the interview subjects, the interview sheet is in code. And so you can look at it, these sheets, and it's just like X's and O's and little dots and
18:17 Speaker 05 stars and things. And so the outside reader or viewer could never perceive what was on the sheet. And he memorized the questions and then his team memorized the questions. So your privacy was guaranteed because no one could interpret the code. No one could have their private, you know, behavior discovered.
18:38 Kate Lister? Now, one of the things that, and there's been a number of stuff that over the years, people have gone back to Kinsey's work and gone, hang on a minute there, mate. The ethical part of it is definitely one issue. But another thing that you'd have to consider today is your sample. Who is it that you are talking to? Does your data set skew some of the responses? Who was he and his team talking to? How did they make sure that they had like an equitable and a balanced sample set?
19:10 Speaker 05 This was a big concern and he starts, starts small and with people who he already knows. And what he does is go for, start talking to like the heads of different organizations. So it would be like, you talk to the president of the fraternity or you talk to president of the Lions Club or the Rotary Club or whoever and say, okay, get their sex history. And then the president or leader will say, okay, now everybody.
19:41 Kate Lister? I wonder how he talked them into it. I wonder how he did that because that, like to go up to somebody in the thirties, like I have a really private quiz about when you started masturbating and who you've seen naked and what your sexual fantasies are. Would you mind giving it the once over? That would be a difficult sell today. That would be tricky. Do we have any idea of how he recruited people? What he explained he was doing? They must have thought he was a lunatic.
20:10 Speaker 05 It's hard to see. There's only a few video clips of him that survive. They're a very formal setting, so it's hard to get a sense of like how how he was. But he really framed it as a contribution to scientific knowledge to say, you know, you are going to be part of a big project that will really shed a lot of light on how how people behave. And it doesn't cost anything. This is how you can contribute. And I think kind of from a psychological perspective, a lot of people who had kind of guilt about what they had done, or they were ashamed about, you know, maybe having an affair or something like that.
20:52 Speaker 05 It was completely nonjudgmental. He operated from the premise, not that people hadn't done anything, that you had already done everything and you were kind of taking away from like a person who had done everything. So it wasn't like, have you ever had extramarital sex? It would be, when was the last time you had extramarital sex? And then it was on you to deny it if you if you hadn't. But the question being framed that way, you could see, well, you know, if it's framed that way, then probably lots of people have. And I don't have to feel as much shame about kind of being truthful about that part of my life.
21:32 Kate Lister? Who was on his team? Who did he recruit? Because that must have been another safety concern. Because I'm sure somebody that researches and talks about sex as I do, you will have encountered that 99% of people are lovely and are interested, but there is that 1% who have a funny reaction to it. Um, that might be that they don't like it, or it might be that they think that that's an opportunity to tell you quite intimate things about themselves. Who was on his team and how did he make sure that they were okay?
22:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, he ends up having a team of four, including himself. They're all men. They're all married. And there's the whole story about how he tried to recruit a female interviewer, but it just, for various reasons, it just never, never worked out. The three men, one of them is a recent Harvard PhD in anthropology. And the other two, one has a master's degree, the one has a bachelor's degree. The youngest one is a student at the time, and he kind of gets grandfathered into, into the project after it's, it's started. But these men, their names are Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gebhardt, and Clyde
22:47 Speaker 05 Martin. And they also have to memorize the interview code. They have to memorize the sheet. And they are also responsible for managing the data, which means they enter it all in punch card machines. So of course, there's no computers in the 1940s. So you have to, if you want to do any big calculations, you put them through a punch card machine. And so it's hot, loud, it's tedious, because you're punching every time someone had an orgasm from, you know, masturbation or premarital sex or whatever, you're punching that into a card. And so he had to trust them implicitly. They were all married, but they all had all kinds of sex with all kinds of people.
23:29 Kate Lister? Well, that's interesting. So were they, were they polyamorous people? Were they, what was going on there?
23:36 Speaker 05 I don't know if I'd say that exactly, but they'd say they have, Clyde Martin's a little less on board with this, but Kinsey and Pomeroy and Gebhardt, they all have open marriages, but they all stay, as far as I can tell, happily married. Kinsey's married to one woman his whole life. And later on in the, in the story, they gather data by, by filming, filming sex in Kinsey's attic.
24:05 Kate Lister? Oh, we might have just gone to a strange place.
24:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:07 Kate Lister? Then with that one.
24:08 Speaker 05 We can come back to that.
24:10 Kate Lister? Yeah, okay, okay. But so far, we haven't got to.
24:13 Speaker 05 Attic filming. No, we're not there yet.
24:15 Kate Lister? That, that might be the point where you go, do you know what? I found a boundary. I found a dada chafa.
24:26 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Donna and Kinsey after this short break.
24:44 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
25:27 Kate Lister? He's got all of this data. They're punching stuff into cards. It's thousands and thousands. And if it's like up to 500 questions per person, the amount of data that they must have was to be phenomenal. So they get it all and then what?
25:42 Speaker 05 As they gather, they're starting to analyse it. And I won't go into the statistical techniques because it's, I figured them out mostly, but it's quite dry. But basically Kinsey thinks, I have this enormous amount of data. I want to publish it, but I want it to be not salacious. I want it to be published by a respectable.
26:01 Kate Lister? Tricky.
26:02 Speaker 05 Publisher. And so he chooses a medical publisher in Philadelphia to publish a volume just on the American men who are white in, as his first volume. He plans a series of six. That was his original plan.
26:20 Kate Lister? What do you get with all that data? And they go, this is brilliant, but we only want the white men. It's not very scientific, is it?
26:26 Speaker 05 Well, his rationale for this was that.
26:30 Speaker 05 There was men who had, some men who had thousands of partners who had done everything under the sun with all kinds of folks and all kinds of non-folks, meaning animals.
26:44 Kate Lister? Oh, hello. Okay.
26:46 Speaker 05 And his view was that if we had African Americans in there, any readers of this book would think, oh, building on stereotypes, the kind of extreme data could be attributed to African Americans in the sample. And he wanted to say, basically, white men do everything that, you know, you could possibly do.
27:12 Kate Lister? But you know what? I think he's probably right, isn't he? Oh.
27:17 Speaker 05 It's not a kind of a rationale you would kind of use today, but he was kind of, he was fighting a particular stereotype.
27:25 Kate Lister? Yeah.
27:25 Speaker 05 In a way by excluding African Americans from the first book.
27:30 Kate Lister? All right. So the first book, it comes out, what, a small, little publication, specialist, limited run?
27:36 Speaker 05 Uh, I think about five thousand copies, something, something like that.
27:40 Kate Lister? Okay.
27:41 Speaker 05 January of nineteen forty-eight, so it's only two and a half years after the war. And you wouldn't expect it, but it lands like a thunderbolt. It's just astonishing.
27:52 Kate Lister? Huge, right?
27:53 Speaker 05 Yes. And Kinsey becomes very famous right away. People buy it, even though there's absolutely no pictures in there. If you're like, looking for kind of a fun, sexy read. This is the least, one of the least sexy books about sex you could, you could find.
28:10 Kate Lister? It's like where sex meets maths is what it is.
28:13 Speaker 05 Basically.
28:14 Kate Lister? So why were they buying it then? What information was contained within that made it so popular?
28:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's eight hundred pages, um, just basically text and some, lots of graphs and tables. And what he has basically done and his team, he and his team have done is taken all this data up to five hundred points from over five thousand people. And I've organized it to show, what is the earliest date, you know, people have started to have orgasms? How many men have had extramarital affairs? How common is masturbation?
28:53 Kate Lister? That was a big reveal in that book, though, wasn't it?
28:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I think probably any man who read it was like, oh, okay. Definitely not alone here.
29:03 Kate Lister? What was the general concern? I mean, it's difficult because there's never one opinion on sex that history, but the kind of the public forward facing consensus on masturbation at the time was what?
29:16 Speaker 05 Likely that most people had engaged in it, but it wasn't widely discussed.
29:21 Kate Lister? And it was, it was linked with health problems, right? I mean, it's coming out the 19th century. We're kind of into the 30s and 40s by now. So I hope that's starting to fall away, but it's still there.
29:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, that comes out like the 1910s is really, 20s is really when that hits the US. I think it's a little earlier in the UK is when that kind of moral panic about masturbation really occurs. But people start reading it, they think they find out about masturbation, that there's a lot of material about teenage sexuality, about same sex sexuality. And really, that's the extramarital element. Oh, I think it's about a third of men interviewed had had an affair. Kinsey wouldn't have used that word, extramarital sex to orgasm. And then the most bombshell material was in that chapter on homosexuality.
30:14 Kate Lister? And what was that?
30:15 Speaker 05 The figure that is most well known is this idea of 10% of men being homosexual. The actual phrasing is 10% of the males are more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. This is one male in 10 in the white male population. So he's not saying 10% of men are homosexual for life, but 10% are exclusively homosexual for about three years.
30:45 Kate Lister? How does that stand up with, with modern research? Is that right? Doesn't sound right that you could be gay for a bit and then go, oh, I'm finished now.
30:54 Speaker 05 I don't know the up to date statistics. It still depends like who you ask and how you ask and things like that. Because he was really measuring behavior more than identity. So.
31:08 Kate Lister? Oh, I see. So he's more like, when did you have a homosexual encounter as opposed to, do you identify?
31:15 Speaker 05 Yes.
31:15 Kate Lister? Ha, ha, ha. Okay, that's right. Okay, I'm with you.
31:17 Speaker 05 So I should back up and say like, all the data about extramarital affairs, premarital affairs, anything like that. It's all measured in orgasm in the time. How many times have you had an orgasm doing this particular behavior?
31:34 Kate Lister? See, that kind, that's, that wouldn't get through an ethical committee today. You could, an orgasm is not a unit of measurement, as much as I wish it was. That's, that's not a marker. There'd be a whole load of people, especially women, if like, if the only way you've cheated is because if you actually have an orgasm. I mean, our figures are going to be way off, quite frankly.
31:53 Speaker 05 That's what happened when the male, the female volume came out.
31:58 Kate Lister? No women have ever cheated, ever, according to Kenzie.
32:01 Speaker 05 All angels, every single one.
32:05 Kate Lister? Okay, so everybody's shocked by his book, but then can't stop reading it. It must have been a proper earthquake moment of like, because homosexuality is illegal. At this point punishable by jail and awful things. I think in the UK that it was chemical castration of people. Like Alan Turing. And then so the long comes this book and says, it's completely normal. 10% of white men that we know have, have engaged in this, in this activity to orgasm at some point.
32:31 Speaker 05 Oh yeah, that's for the three years. And then he says 37% of the total male population has had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age. And then 50% of the males who remain single until age 35 have had overt homosexual experience to orgasm. So it's all the time, everywhere.
32:56 Kate Lister? How was this book received? I'm choosing my words carefully. Was there outrage about it? Was it celebrated? What was the reaction to it?
33:05 Speaker 05 There's a wide range of responses to it. Someone like Billy Graham, the American evangelist, you know, thought it was like the worst thing that could have, you know, happened to American democracy. But a lot of people think this is a wonderful example of American democracy because you can do science like this.
33:29 Speaker 05 Is that only in America, not in Russia, only in America, could you do science that would reveal this kind of data? Other religious leaders have a minimal mixed view because it actually shows that the more religious you are, the less, you know, sexual experience you have. So if you're very dogmatic about your, you know, religious beliefs, you know, keeps people from.
33:54 Kate Lister? Oh, they must have been quite happy with that then. They must have been quite pleased. That's a little bit in there for them. They must have been quite chuffed with that.
34:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, but they just didn't want, I can't see asking the questions at all, I guess.
34:07 Kate Lister? So his name is now, he's world famous, the head of the university must have been well chuffed. What's the next thing for him? So he's published his book on men, the obvious thing to do next.
34:19 Speaker 05 Let's publish the book on women.
34:21 Kate Lister? Okay.
34:22 Speaker 05 And again, it's about the same number of women, about 5,000. It's again, does not include anyone who's not white. I should say as a side note, this data all still exists in its original forms. So you can access it if you have permission at the Kinsey Institute, you can like look at this, the original interview sheets, they all still exist. So the women's book comes out in a quite different atmosphere politically and with a lot more expectations placed on it because no one would have guessed that this entomologist at an obscure state university was going to publish this landmark study. Now, everybody
35:04 Speaker 05 knows him and we're further into the Cold War and we don't want the Russians knowing all our sexual secrets. We don't want American white womanhood to be mirrored in any particular way. And so the female volume comes out after a lot of revision, including by some female academics. He sends it out to lots of different reviewers and the female volume comes out in August of 1953. The medical publisher called it K-Day and there's funny little cartoons of like, you know, like a bomb, bomb thread hooked to the book and then a little, little, a little Kinsey running away and holding his ears as if it was going to be a nuclear
35:49 Speaker 05 attack on women's sexuality. And it was.
35:52 Kate Lister? Was it? Oh, it was?
35:53 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, I think, but not the kind of he expected because the male volume was received much more positively. Of course, the men, everyone's gonna, all men are gonna like do terrible things.
36:06 Kate Lister? They were all expecting to just open up the women's one and just go, oh, no, we're not really interested. Once a week with the lights off with my husband. Thank you very much. That'll do me. What's an orgasm?
36:15 Speaker 05 Right. A couple, couple pumps and turn over and that's that.
36:19 Kate Lister? And then we're done. I don't even know when it's happening. Honestly, lie back and think of, think of America.
36:24 Speaker 05 Waiting for it to be over. But of course.
36:27 Kate Lister? That wasn't what you found?
36:28 Speaker 05 No. So of course, you know, women are doing lots of the same things.
36:33 Kate Lister? Shock. Ha.
36:34 Speaker 05 Yeah. Premarital, extramarital, masturbation.
36:37 Kate Lister? What was the thing that, that was the most shocking? Well, I'm interested in is that was the lesbian revelation the most shocking like it was for the, for the men? Or were they shocked at different things this time?
36:49 Speaker 05 I think it was more of the extramarital data that was alarming. And I guess because there wasn't quite as much stigma, at least publicly attached to lesbian sex or sex between women. There wasn't seen as like against the moral fabric of the society to quite the same degree as male homosexuality.
37:15 Kate Lister? Still isn't. In the public perception of gay men and lesbian women. I mean, everyone has their struggles, but it's never been quite. I think, I think, this is my theory. I don't know if Kenzie's interested. I think it's all about penetration. I think that patriarchy gets so upset about men having sex with men because there's an act of penetration and somebody has to quote unquote, be the girl. I think it's all about being terrified of femininity and lesbians don't have a penis and they can't threaten the heterosexual bottom. They can't make him submissive. That's my theory.
37:47 Speaker 05 I mean, Kenzie was very much not interested in identity because he saw how identity had been used by police because to prosecute men. Because he would, he would find when he was interviewing like soldiers and sailors, that if like a police officer came across a man engaging in oral sex, the man who was like giving the blowjob would be prosecuted, but the man who was receiving it wasn't because that's what men do is get blowjobs and they don't, they don't give them, they receive them. So.
38:26 Kate Lister? Who's being the girl?
38:27 Speaker 05 Basically.
38:28 Kate Lister? In very crude terms, I'm being very reductive with this, but it's just.
38:33 Speaker 05 So if you're in like a submissive position, that was associate homosexuality was associated with this kind of submissiveness and it got you in a lot of legal trouble. But if you were receiving the blowjob, you wouldn't have been in legal trouble necessarily.
38:51 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Donna and Kenzie after this short break.
39:13 Speaker 06 Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.
40:08 Kate Lister? So he's published his book on women have sex. Everybody's shocked. Was this a success as well? Did his reputation suffer after this one?
40:16 Speaker 05 It did, but not in the way he would have anticipated. I think he anticipated sort of a very similar reception. Oh, this is great. This is knowledge about, you know, American women that people can, you know, learn, learn about their neighbors, learn about society, so on. As one other note, key finding from the female volume is that he stated directly that vaginal orgasm did not exist. This was not a thing.
40:42 Kate Lister? Hoorah! Oh, I thought you were going to say something else then. Hoorah, well done, Kenzie.
40:46 Speaker 05 But that clitoral orgasms, you know, were the way physiologically, the way that orgasms happened. And, but that's all gets buried in this avalanche of bad publicity. So basically, Kenzie is trying to weaken American society because he's kind of revealing all our... Sexual secrets.
41:07 Kate Lister? Wow.
41:08 Speaker 05 And so his funder this whole time, his primary funder has been the Rockefeller Foundation. And they finally decide, okay, this is too hot for us. So we're going to take away your funding. So, once that happens, he is really trying to find other funding. He still has plenty of data for the next books, but basically, the stress of trying to fundraise and fend off these attacks on his methodology and his aims is so great that he ends up dying of a heart attack.
41:43 Kate Lister? I thought you were gonna say he went back to bugs. Oh, wow. Okay, I didn't.
41:47 Speaker 05 No, he dies at sixty-two. So he dies quite young.
41:51 Kate Lister? Even for the fifties and sixties, that's quite young.
41:54 Speaker 05 Yes.
41:56 Kate Lister? So as a final question then, and you know, we wouldn't want Kinsey to listen to this because ultimately what he did is huge and it shook things up and it changed things. But if you want to get nitpicky, just because it's fun, there were a few blind spots in there. If you could go back and work with Kinsey, if you were the woman on his team, what might you guide him towards change? Just so it was, I mean, like the idea, like asking a woman that she only cheats if she's had an orgasm, there's a big one. I would have, I'd have said, no, no, no, no, we need to rephrase that one. What else is in there that you would have just helped him with, just pointed out to him?
42:35 Speaker 05 I think the one thing I would do is encourage him to look more closely at contraception and the role of the possibility of pregnancy in heterosexual encounters and the role of possibility of disease in all encounters. Because the question of pregnancy and disease as potential consequences really kind of goes, fades away into the background. And the reason is, I think, because those were really the only two ways you could get into talking about sex in a polite science society. So he kind of backgrounds those two things.
43:20 Speaker 05 But I think they're so important that they have to be. Integrated into any, any study of sexuality, if you're engaging in sex, that could be, you know, lead to pregnancy or any kind of sex with a new person. You don't know, you're not going to sit down and interrogate their disease history in the forties necessarily. So I would say, pay attention to those.
43:42 Kate Lister? And he should also probably not be filming people having sex, which I said that I was going to ask you about and I forgot about it. Was that useful for him? Who was he filming? Why was he filming that?
43:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, this is like fictionalized, interestingly, in the, there's a movie about Kinsey that came out in two thousand and four. It was really to study physiology, like it provided some of the background for the work on the physiology and anatomy of orgasm, like what actually happened to the body, you know, when you had an orgasm or when you, when you didn't. This is kind of the fun side of Kinsey is that he would basically have these, like for lack of a better word, like sex parties that were filmed by a filmmaker named Bill Dellenback. And
44:28 Kate Lister? Cheers, Bill.
44:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, and they would, I think it was Pomeroy was kind of the main man in, in these. But Kinsey would do them too.
44:38 Kate Lister? Oh, so this was his research team?
44:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:41 Kate Lister? He was getting his research team to have sex parties and filming them? Oh, Alfred, really?
44:46 Speaker 05 And his wife would be making snacks in the kitchen downstairs.
44:50 Kate Lister? No.
44:52 Speaker 05 And she'd bring up, everyone finished, they'd come down and have persimmon pudding.
44:56 Kate Lister? Excellent, excellent. Oh my God. See, the good old days before an ethics board got involved, they'd never let you do that now.
45:03 Speaker 05 Exactly.
45:03 Kate Lister? Donna, you have been fabulous to talk to. Once again, and if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
45:10 Speaker 05 I have a book on Alfred Kinsey and, and some other books on contraception and fertility technology. Those are available at any, any bookstore. I am also on social media on Blue Sky.
45:21 Kate Lister? You've been an absolute treat to talk to. Thank you so much.
45:24 Speaker 05 I hope this is a lot of fun. Thank you for having me again.
45:31 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Donna for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . Don't miss our sex work series coming out all this month. Find it wherever it was that you found us today. This podcast was edited by Nick Thompson and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheet: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
Previous Medieval Sex Work Next Sex Work in the Renaissance Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated