The Kinsey Report – Part 3
01:35:16 Share

Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Whether you're selling your fans' next favorite shirt or an exclusive piece of podcast merch, Shopify helps you sell everywhere.

Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Plus, Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way.

Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash income, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash income now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.

Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. You are listening to the third and final episode of a series on the life, work, and cultural impact of Dr. Alfred Kinsey. Now that we've reached the final leg of our story, I'd like to take a moment and just say thank you.

I am fully aware that for long-time listeners of the show, this topic is a bit of a departure from our usual bread and butter. Typically, we're talking about military conflicts, political struggles, and social upheavals. So a three-part labor of love on a troubled sexologist from the 1940s is definitely off the beaten path. Or maybe it's the beaten-off path.

Anyway, I know it's unconventional, it's challenging, and it's definitely not for everyone. So if you're here at the finish line, I appreciate you sticking with me. Hopefully, you've been able to find some value and insight in this weird little topic. I certainly have. But all that said, the story is not over yet. Far from it, actually. Believe it or not, things are about to get even crazier in Bloomington, Indiana.

But before we land this bird, let's take a look back at what we covered last time so we can dive back in with a fresh understanding of the story threads we've already established. In the Kinsey Report Part 1, we got to know Alfred Kinsey as a man. In Part 2, we got to know him as a scientist. Last episode, we opened with a discussion of Kinsey's first scientific specialty –

the North American gall wasp. This flightless, terminally boring bug dominated Kinsey's imagination for the first two decades of his academic career. In many ways, it was his claim to fame. At the time, he was the world's foremost, and probably only, expert on the gall wasp. But Kinsey's obsessive approach to collecting, categorizing, and characterizing that humble insect would have a profound influence

on how he studied sexual behavior. By the time Kinsey set his sights on sex, he was determined to amass more data on it than anyone in the history of the world. Well, after a mercifully short discussion of the gall wasp, we zipped forward in time to 1938. By that point, Kinsey was teaching the wildly popular and extremely controversial marriage course at Indiana University. The students loved it, but the faculty were incensed by the graphic content and transgressive nature of the curriculum. They were also very uncomfortable with the fact

that Kinsey was using his students as interview subjects, collecting their sexual histories like so many insects in a display case. Oh, by 1939, the university gave Kinsey an ultimatum: either teach the marriage course or research sex, one or the other. Kinsey, of course, chose the latter, and thus his great project, his great crusade,

began in earnest. From there, we spent some time talking about Kinsey's unique method. His fierce commitment to confidentiality, singular gift for building rapport, and encyclopedic command of over 600 questions allowed him to coax incredibly detailed information from his rapidly growing list of interview subjects. By 1942, Kinsey had refined his process to such an impressive degree that he was able to secure funding from the National Research Council, backed by the philanthropic leviathan, the Rockefeller Foundation.

Unsatisfied with the shallow, one-dimensional demographics in rural Indiana, Kinsey took his show on the road. In the late 1930s, Kinsey started visiting Chicago in search of more interview subjects. And that is when the professor began one of the most important periods of his life.

As he explored the hidden world of gay subculture in the big city, Kinsey experienced a bisexual awakening. He realized, or perhaps finally accepted, that he was sexually attracted to both men and women. And with the chains of inhibition cast aside, Kinsey experimented freely with that exciting new preference in the gay clubs and speakeasies of Chicago. But Kinsey, let's not forget, was married.

Clara Kinsey, who he affectionately called Mac, was back home in Bloomington unaware that her husband was spending his weekends having anonymous gay sex a couple hundred miles to the north. But Kinsey, to his credit, told Mac about what was going on right away. Their marriage was built on honesty, open communication, and a healthy attitude towards sexual desire. And Mac, to her credit, did her best to understand and accept her husband's shifting identity.

Well, Chicago not only satisfied Kinsey's sexual desires, but his craving for more data. After that, the research project began gathering steam very fast, accumulating more funding from the NRC and the Rockefellers with every passing year. By 1947, Kinsey and his benefactors had established an official organization for the project, the Institute of Sex Research, headquartered at Indiana University. The ISR was staffed with many talented researchers, but three in particular were very important to Alfred Kinsey and his project.

And last episode, we took a little time at the very end to introduce these three men. There was Paul Gebhard, an anthropologist who had a mind for data and a distinctive mustache. There was Wardell Pomeroy, a handsome, hypnotic interviewer who could charm people almost as well as Kinsey.

And then, finally, there was Clyde Martin, a data specialist who also happened to be a romantic partner for the Kinseys. And I say Kinseys plural because, as you'll recall, Clyde Martin ended up establishing ongoing sexual relationships with both Clara and Alfred Kinsey. Proc, after all, did not know the meaning of the word jealousy, and he was happy to allow his wife whatever sexual experiences she wanted as long as he was allowed to do the same.

And Clyde, for his part, was just happy to be a part of the project. And if that meant sleeping with his boss's wife from time to time, so be it. And so, it is there, with the ISR established, the team introduced, and the Kinsey marriage careening into polyamory, that we left off. This time, we will finally get to the actual ideas and research that Alfred Kinsey is remembered for. The books, the backlash, and the bitter implosion that followed. So now that we're all refreshed and caught up, we can jump right back into the story.

Welcome to the Kinsey Report, Part 3. It's the fall of 1947. We're in the city of Philadelphia, at the printing press of Saunders Company Publishing. This morning, like every morning, employees file into the cavernous facility. Switches are flipped, levers are pulled, and countless machines roar to life. Today is a big day, because today they are going to be making a book. A brand new book.

Now, making a book in 1947 is a multi-step affair involving dozens of specialists, a room full of noisy machines, and no small amount of OCD. It begins with a manuscript, a typed master copy of the book-to-be provided by the author. And this spotless, virginal document is the single cell that will be duplicated many, many times over before the day is done.

Once received, the delicate manuscript is given to an employee called a typesetter. For the next several hours, if not days, the typesetter perches over a set of more than 100 keys containing every letter, number, and punctuation mark in the English language. For hours on end, he retypes the author's manuscript, word by word, line by line. And as he does this, a special machine bathes letter molds in liquid metal, creating thin rectangular bars, each imprinted with words.

and the typesetter will do this thousands and thousands and thousands of times. But when he is done, every sentence in the entire book will have been rendered into these metal bars. And with blurry eyes and aching fingers, the typesetter hands things off to the next employee in this elaborate industrial chain, the composer. If the typesetter spins the thread, the composer sews it all together. Carefully checking each individual line for continuity, the composer slots and arranges them into nine by six wooden frames.

Each frame represents a single page of the book, and once every line is in the correct order, the composer locks the bars in place with a special turn key, then pounds the surface flat with a hammer to create a uniform level. But these soft metal plates, embossed with the text, are not strong enough to withstand the print order for 100,000 copies that this particular book carries. So, stronger plates must be made.

The frames are sent to a room filled with bubbling vats of molten copper. The frames are carefully dipped into the liquid metal, and once they harden, the resulting copper plates can be used over and over again. And when the dipping is done, the plates go to an employee called a ready man, who places them in a machine called a press bed.

Each press bed contains 64 plates for 64 pages of the book. The plates in the bed will be inked, rolled, and pressed against a massive spinning drum of paper, which will create the physical pages of the book. And the resulting pages are then folded, sliced, glued, and bound.

Throughout this entire process, mistakes can happen very easily. One line out of place, one page in the wrong order, and the entire printing run is ruined. Money is lost, clients are angered, and reputations are mangled. But if everything goes right, if the minds and reflexes of the technicians are sharp, then this long, tedious process will result in a clean, bound, beautifully printed book.

ready for shipping. And today, everything goes right. The publishing house fills with that new book smell as dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of copies roll off the assembly line. The craftsmen at Saunders Company Publishing are very good at what they do, and the proof of their skill can be seen in the finished product.

The finished book has a dark crimson cover. On the spine, etched in gleaming gold letters and printed in all caps, is the title, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. And below the title, also in gold, are the last names of the authors, Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin. After 10 years of research, 12,000 interviews, and countless hours of analysis, Dr. Alfred Kinsey's explosive book is finally ready for public consumption. On

On January 5th, 1948, the volume will hit bookshelves across America, and no one, not even its author, is fully prepared for the tempest it will trigger. The physical book itself may have been born in a Philadelphia publishing house, but the ideas within it had been conceived 700 miles away, in a sleepy college town in Indiana. From his office at the Institute of Sex Research in Bloomington, Alfred Kinsey had painstakingly compiled a mountain of hard data about what people did sexually. As Kinsey wrote, quote,

This is, first of all, a report on what people do, which raises no question of what they should do. His stated goal was to, quote, accumulate an objectively determined body of fact about sex, which strictly avoids social or moral interpretations of the fact. In other words, this book is not a sermon.

It's just a mirror. All I can do is show you the facts as I have found them." And if anyone wanted to avoid gazing into that mirror mirror on the wall, they would have found it almost impossible at the time. The Kinsey Report, as sexual behavior and the human male became known, was prefaced

a whirlwind of media attention and hype. Kinsey was a scientist first, but in another life he was most definitely a publicist. Using the same disarming charisma that had convinced thousands of strangers to reveal their most intimate secrets, Kinsey charmed the pants off the press. In matters of publicity, foreplay is key, and Kinsey skillfully whetted reporters' appetites for his book. "In half a million years of mankind's history," wrote Look Magazine,

It is to be the first adequate, large-scale inquiry into man's sex life. Reader's Scope said the Kinsey Report promised to be, quote, the most complete and objectively scientific report ever assembled on the sex life of American men. Many of our most deep-rooted concepts of sex and marriage are about to be blasted by a soberly documented report by a group of University of Indiana scientists, wrote Harper's Magazine. And one publisher commented about all the hype, quote,

I think it is probably the most widely publicized unpublished book on record. By January 5th, the pump was primed. In preparation for consumer demand, the publishers at Saunders Company printed 100,000 copies of the book. It was, historian James Jones points out, quote, an extraordinary number for a work of fiction, hence an unbelievable figure for a scientific report.

report. Alongside pulp paperbacks, breezy romances, and home cookbooks, the Kinsey report towered like a crimson colossus, gold and thick and intimidating. "It is hard to imagine a book that looked more imposing than the male volume," writes Jones. It had all the trappings of heavy-duty science. Topical headings in bold print announced subjects. 173 graphs and 162 tables laid out the evidence in mind-numbing detail, and an impressive bibliography commanded the literature.

But despite the book's esoteric style, tens of thousands of Americans nervously spread its pages looking for truth, scandal, or vindication. And they got all three in spades. As Kinsey wrote in the opening pages of the book, quote, "...the publicly pretended code of morals, our social organization, our marriage customs, and our educational and religious systems are based upon an assumption..."

that individuals are much alike sexually, and that it is an equally simple matter for all of them to confine their behavior to that single pattern which the Moors dictate. In other words, writes historian John Gawthorne Hardy, quote, most people think that whatever they do sexually is what everyone else does, or should do. But people, Kinsey asserted, were just as varied and unique as the gall wasps he had studied for decades. There is no American pattern of sexual behavior, he wrote,

but scores of patterns. What American men are supposed to do is not what they actually do. As historians John D'Amelio and Estelle Friedman write, quote, "...the study of the male revealed that masturbation and heterosexual petting were nearly universal, that almost 90% had engaged in premarital intercourse and half in extramarital sex, and that over a third of adult males had had homosexual experiences."

Virtually all males had established a regular sexual outlet by the age of 15, and fully 95% had violated the law at least once on the way to orgasm. In one stroke, so to speak, Kinsey exposed a breathtaking hypocrisy at the heart of American culture and law. The overwhelming fact, Harper's Magazine observed,

is that sex acts condemned as immoral and illegal in our law books are so commonly practiced as to make criminals of the vast majority of the American population. And as Americans devoured the book chapter by chapter, the bombshells continued to fall. Unsettling as many of his findings were, write D'Amelio and Friedman, none proved more shocking to conventional values than the incidence figures for homosexual behavior.

Kinsey's estimates dwarfed all previous calculations. Among males, he found that 50% acknowledged erotic responses to their own sex, over one-third had had a past adolescent homosexual experience that resulted in orgasm, 4% were exclusively homosexual as adults, and 1 out of 8 respondents were predominantly homosexual for at least a three-year period. Kinsey claimed that homosexuals were scattered throughout the population. Persons with homosexual histories, he wrote,

are to be found in every age group, in every social level, in every conceivable occupation, in cities and on farms and in the most remote areas of the country. Now, it's important to remember that the sexual politics of the 1940s were very, very different from what they are today.

Especially ideas about sexual orientation, gender, and identity. This is way, way before pride parades and rainbow flags. Before birth control and bikinis. The sexual revolution was still a couple decades away. And as a scientist, Kinsey approached the issue of gay and straight from an incident-based perspective. He saw them as patterns of behavior, not identities.

For Kinsey, writes Jones, labels such as homosexual and heterosexual did not make sense. People engaged in homosexual acts. They were not homosexuals. Therefore, the only proper use for the word homosexual was as an adjective, not as a noun.

Pressing this point vigorously, he declared, "It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience." "Males do not represent two discrete populations, homosexual and heterosexual," Kinsey continued. "The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white."

Only the human mind invents categories to force facts into separate pigeonholes. After all, Alfred Kinsey certainly didn't think of himself as exclusively gay or exclusively straight. For decades he had been married to a woman, who he enjoyed having sex with. And yet, as much as Kinsey valued his relationship with Mac, he also enjoyed having sex with men. He'd even fallen in love with a man, his research assistant Clyde Martin. Had people known the full truth of his private life, the foot soldiers of Christian morality would have labeled Kinsey a freak of nature.

a deviant, an aberration outside God's good and natural order. But he had a hunch that in the real world, beyond the pews and prying eyes, things were not so cut and dry. And all the data that he had found, in 12,000 interviews across dozens of states, reinforced that hunch. Just as no two gall wasps were totally alike physically, no two people were totally alike sexually.

"The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects," Kinsey wrote. "The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex."

And to visualize this continuum, this vast spectrum of sexual behavior, Kinsey created a simple instrument for measuring sexual preference. It is arguably his most famous and widely known contribution to the field of sex research, and there's a pretty good chance you've already heard of it. It's called the Kinsey Scale. On page 638 of the first edition of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, you will find a chart labeled the quote,

Heterosexual/Homosexual Rating Scale. It divides sexuality into numbers ranging from 0 to 6.

If you're a zero on that scale, that means you're exclusively heterosexual. If you're a six, on the opposite end, that means you're exclusively homosexual. But in his research, Kinsey found that zeros and sixes were very, very rare. Most people fell somewhere in between those polar extremes. Numbers one through five represent the gradations and variations in sexuality that occur in the vast majority of the population. A two, for example, represents someone who is "predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual."

A three would be quote "equally heterosexual and homosexual" and so on and so on and so on. Kinsey was quick to note, however, that the scale was only a guide, a way of approximating sexual preference. The numbers were just mile markers. Between each one was an infinite spectrum of behavior. He also stressed that a person's number could change over the course of their life. After all, people change.

and so can their sexual preferences. You might be a four in your twenties and a zero in your thirties. You might start adolescence as a two and then end up as a six. The portrait of human sexuality that emerged from his research, writes James Jones,

was an intricate mosaic, rich and diverse. The Kinsey scale was not a perfect instrument, of course. The whole concept is fraught with difficulties and contradictions, writes Cawthorn Hardy. Nevertheless, the scale did allow Kinsey to get an approximation of what he was finding. As I've said before, it all sounds fairly obvious to modern ears, but at the time, this was revolutionary thinking. The newspapers dubbed Kinsey's book and the scale within a, quote, social atom bomb. The immediate impact of Kinsey's work, writes Jones, was

was to heat up cultural wars of long standing. In the months and years following its release, sexual behavior in the human male precipitated the most intense and high-level dialogue on human sexuality in the nation's history. Prior to Kinsey, Americans had debated a variety of sex-related issues, including prostitution, venereal disease, birth control, sex education, and Sigmund Freud's theories. But the cultural debate that greeted sexual behavior in the human male was far more important.

It swept away the last remnants of the taboos that had inhibited Americans from engaging in public discourse about their erotic lives. In boardrooms, in barbershops, in cafes, in grocery stores, and on street corners, Americans could be heard reciting his findings on the incidents of masturbation, homosexuality, premarital and extramarital intercourse, and the like. And wherever this happened, these and other topics became fair game for polite conversation.

Yes, with this pioneering book, Kinsey had opened up the floodgates. Sexual behavior and the human male had given people an excuse to open up about what was going on inside them, to examine their desires, anxieties, pains, and prejudices like never before. It was the culmination of Kinsey's own long, painful journey towards sexual self-acceptance. From the boy who thought he would literally die if he masturbated, to the young husband who had no idea how to please his wife, to the middle-aged man who discovered his attraction to other men...

This was deeply personal for him, and he hoped that maybe, somewhere out there, someone just like him might take comfort in the facts that he had found. And he had no idea how right he was. As Jones writes, quote,

If he required additional proof that the sexual attitudes that had so filled him with guilt as a boy still stalked Americans, Kinsey only had to read his mail. Thousands of letters arrived from total strangers. Surprisingly few came from people who condemned the research and only a handful could be described as crank letters. Many people wrote to thank, congratulate, praise and bless Kinsey. And despite his busy schedule, Kinsey answered each and every letter. Alongside the praise came questions.

Endless questions. Not only were Americans anxious, guilty, and tormented about sex, many were hopelessly ignorant. As Cawthorn Hardy writes, quote,

We have all had, or have, worries about sex. But we have to multiply and magnify these many times in return to get some feeling of the ignorance, the anxieties, guilts, fears, and frustrations that filled Kinsey's correspondence, which he heard from his histories, and which he knew that he could help. Over and over again, Kinsey heard the same kind of stuff. Am I normal? Is something wrong with me? Am I broken? Please, please help.

As one historian recounts, quote, a young Indiana soldier wrote to Kinsey in great distress. On a date with an older woman, the soldier had attempted oral sex. And this is the soldier talking, quote, indignant, she told me how low, dirty, mean, and contemptible I am. A pervert. Am I a fit specimen of a man after such conduct? I want to be a normal man. A Kinsey reassured him that there was, quote, nothing in your experience which is in any fashion unusual or outspoken.

or abnormal. And more letters like that arrived every day. I am afraid that my organ is too long for intercourse with an average woman, another man wrote to Kinsey. Something that I have always thought would be an advantage, I now wonder whether or not it is a handicap. I am not going to marry if my worries are founded. Will you please help and advise me? Letter after letter, question after question poured into Kinsey's mailbox at Indiana University. Questions like, what does the word fellatio mean?

Can sex while pregnant cause polio? Are tampons sexually stimulating? Does suppressing sex lead to stuttering? Does too much sex cause cancer? Hunched over his desk late into the night, Kinsey did his best to offer advice and comfort to these anxious people. One young man, terrified that masturbation would destroy his health, wrote to Kinsey begging for guidance. As the professor carefully drafted his response, he might as well have been talking to his younger self. Quote,

When another young man reached out to Kinsey with fears that he was a weirdo or a freak, that things that he had done when he was younger would haunt him for the rest of his life, Kinsey responded, In effect, writes Jones, he was saying,

"You're okay," which in turn carried the unspoken corollary,

And so am I. To the press, his colleagues, and his financial backers, Alfred Kinsey liked to present himself as an even-tempered scientist, nothing more than a finder of facts. As he lectured a bit self-righteously, quote, There is no right, no wrong, no beauty, no lack of beauty, nothing but the observed truth. Any scientist who passes opinions on things spiritual or moral speaks as a theologian or as a mere man and not as a scientist. But

But whether he wanted to admit it or not, there was a revolutionary zeal burning beneath that tweed jacket. An activism driven by old wounds and fresh insights. As one close acquaintance observed, quote,

fierily against hypocrisy and repressive law of every sort, censorship, etc., and against Judaism and Catholicism. One of Kinsey's fellow researchers, the mustachioed anthropologist Paul Gebhard, agreed, quote, You had to really twist his arm to get him to admit to this humanitarian impulse, because ordinarily he was the objective scientist without any axe to grind, without any crusade to pursue. But underneath, there was this powerful streak of crusading humanitarianism, which, despite his attempts to cover it,

showed up between the lines in everything he ever wrote. He had led such a wretched, sexually inhibited life himself as a young man that he was determined that he was going to promulgate a more rational approach to sex so that people could be happier.

He felt that knowledge would prevent tragedies, upsets, frictions, guilt, bad things of this sort. It's almost like the biblical saying, the truth will set you free. If he could only get the facts and the truth to people, life would be a lot happier and less guilt-ridden. That was the number one motivation, and he was a great champion for tolerance and liberality. Kinsey believed that it didn't much matter what you did sexually as long as it didn't hurt anyone else, and it made you and your partner happy.

In the words of John Gothorn Hardy, "The most basic force behind Kinsey's sex research was deeply personal and extremely simple, and it lies here: that no one else should have to suffer as he had suffered." And if the sales numbers of sexual behavior in the human male were any indication, Kinsey's crusade was off to a great start. In time, he hoped to write a volume on female sexual behavior, then a book on sex offenders, then a book exclusively about homosexuality.

With each subsequent volume, he would peel apart the old dogma, superstitions, and ignorance. And eventually, maybe, the laws and biases that had hurt so many people might change. Tolerance, writes Jones, was the central message of the male volume. And in 1948, few people were positioned as well as Kinsey to affect that sort of change. In the eyes of the media, he was a clean-cut, respectable scientist from Indiana. A family man in a bow tie.

"Dr. Kinsey has few conventional vices," wrote Time magazine. "The professor does not swear, and he does not smoke." But underneath the flashbulb-friendly image was a man with lots and lots of secrets. Because what was happening behind closed doors in Bloomington was becoming increasingly unconventional. In his quest for more data, more answers, more interviews, more everything, Kinsey was barreling down a dangerous road.

And if anyone found out what was really going on, it would destroy his reputation and end his research. Fame, after all, is a double-edged sword. It brings attention, and not all attention is welcome. Since its publication, critics of Kinsey's book had been taking a fine-tooth comb over some of his more shocking statistics, and they had come back with some very unfavorable and frankly legitimate critiques. Kinsey's crusade was about to endure its first major blow.

Feel your max with Brooks Running and the all-new Ghost Max 2. They're the shoes you deserve, designed to streamline your stride and help protect your body. Treat yourself to feel-good landings on an ultra-high stack of super-comfy nitrogen-infused cushion that takes the edge off every step, every day. The Brooks Ghost Max 2. You know, technically, they're a form of self-care. Brooks, let's run there. Head to brooksrunning.com to learn more.

It's a hot summer night in 1949. We're in Bloomington, Indiana, home of the Institute for Sex Research and its now world-famous director, Dr. Alfred Kinsey. But we're not at the ISR. We're just a few miles away, at a lovely two-story house at 1320 East 1st Street. With its irregular red bricks, charming chimney, and winding stepstones, the home looks a little bit like a gingerbread house. Sweet and wholesome and unassuming.

On the mailbox out front, the name of the resident family is printed in clear black letters.

K-I-N-S-E-Y. Kinsey. This is the home of Dr. Alfred Kinsey himself, the one he and his wife Clara have lived in for almost 20 years now. And if you were to stroll up to the front door and step inside, you would have been greeted by the comforting sound of classical music and the smell of baked goods. In the kitchen, Clara Kinsey is making cookies. For 20 years, Mac has been making cookies in this house. In the early days, when the kids were still young, the house had been a lively place, full of giggles and homework and backyard experiments. But

But now, it's a bit quieter. The kid's been out of the house for years now, and with Alfred or Proc off promoting his new book, the house on First Street has become a lonely place. Later in life, Mac told a reporter that after Proc became a sex researcher, she had to get used to, quote, being alone a lot.

Not that she ever would have pressured him to stay home. This was his calling, his life's work, the thing that mattered to him more than anything or anyone in the world, possibly even her. And the idea of begging him to spend more time with her was beneath her. I felt that it was important work, she said, and I just couldn't do that to him.

For Mac, the key to happiness was to stay busy, to live her own life, and when Proc was around, to help as much as she could, however she could. Like, for example, baking these cookies. Mac follows the recipe she knows by heart. She mixes the dough, cracks the eggs, pours in the sugar and butter and chocolate chips.

She scoops the dough and arranges it on a baking sheet in row after row of neat little dollops. This batch will have to be a big one, because tonight the Kinseys have guests. As she waits for the cookies to finish baking, Mac pours ice-cold milk into five or six glasses, arranging them on a tray. And before you can say good housekeeping, the timer dings and the cookies are ready. She pries them loose from the sheet and arranges them on a plate.

Mac carries the tray of milk and cookies past the kitchen table, through the dining room, and up the stairs to the second floor. This is, after all, no ordinary dinner party. This little treat is going all the way up to the attic. And when she arrives at the door to the attic, she knocks, and a voice tells her to come inside. As Mac enters the room, she is greeted by a different kind of aroma and a different kind of music. The Kinsey attic is full of naked people engaging in live acts of sex.

As Mac places the tray of milk and cookies on a small table, the bed in the center of the room is shaking and rocking. And these are not strangers in her attic having sex. As Mac looks around the well-lit room, she recognizes every single face. In the corner of the room, perched next to a video camera, is her husband, Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Proc barely takes notice of her entrance. His eyes are glued to the action on the bed. And next to Proc, operating the video camera, is a man named William Dellenbach, the ISR's official photographer. And on the bed, bathed in sweat and heaving with exertion, is Wardell Pomeroy, one of Kinsey's handsome research assistants. And beneath him is Agnes Gebhard, the wife of Paul Gebhard, Kinsey's

Kinsey's other assistant. Now any other 1940s housewife would have probably dropped the milk and cookies and run down the stairs screaming. But for Mac, this kind of gathering is not shocking. In fact, it's just another Tuesday. The truth was, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his team at the ISR had been observing live sex acts in the name of science for years, going all the way back to the earliest visits to Chicago in 38 and 39.

The main goal was to study physiological responses in real time, to observe sex as it was happening, in order to gain a better understanding of the processes at work. After all, most people don't take the time during sex to note the width of this, or the diameter of that, or how much of this comes out of that. Nothing could replace Kinsey's interviews, they were the gold standard upon which he had built his research, but they were only as perfect as the memory of the subject. By observing live sex as it happened,

Kinsey hoped to gain new insights into why people did what they did and how they did it.

The problem, Kinsey discovered, was finding people who were willing to get busy while a couple guys in lab coats scribbled notes in the corner. For that reason, Kinsey's first volunteers for live demonstrations were sex workers. Prostitutes who accepted a few extra bucks to let Kinsey essentially hide in the closet and observe what he could through the slits. But that presented problems too. Not just issues of privacy – the Johns didn't know that there was a professor lurking in the room – but also issues of authenticity.

Prostitutes, Kinsey noted ruefully, almost always faked their orgasms. No, Kinsey needed volunteers willing to have authentic sex in a controlled, safe environment. And for that, he turned to the only people that he believed he could fully trust, who actually understood what he was trying to do. His staff.

As it turns out, there is no I in team, but there is one, and I would like all of you to have sex with each other in the name of science. Clyde Martin, Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gebhardt, and all their wives were recruited into these live demonstrations, which took place in the privacy of Kinsey's attic. Kinsey was certainly not the first boss to sleep with his employees, and he definitely wouldn't be the last, but he was probably the first to commit it to film in the name of science.

By 1949, a video camera had been introduced into the equation. As Gothorn Hardy writes, quote, Science meant observation, and observation required film. But it quickly became clear that this wasn't just about science. For Kinsey, this was also about pushing himself and his staff far beyond the limits of conventional sexual morality, out into a new and sometimes frightening frontier. Most bosses just throw a pizza party, but to encourage team bonding, Kinsey went a step further.

As Jones writes, "...within the inner circle of his senior staff members and their spouses, he endeavored to create his own sexual utopia, a scientific subculture whose members would not be bound by arbitrary, inantiquated sexual taboos." Kinsey decreed that within the inner circle, men could have sex with each other, wives could be swapped freely, and wives, too, would be free to embrace whichever sexual partners they liked.

In essence, wrote one historian, Kinsey's team became, quote, a group of interacting open marriages. And this went about as well as you'd imagine. Almost immediately, jealousies began to emerge, egos were bruised, and marriages were strained to their limit. The sexual politics of the Kinsey research team were as labyrinthine as an Ottoman harem.

At one point, Clyde Martin's wife fell in love with Paul Gebhard and his mustache. And it caused such friction within the team that Kinsey had to step in and forbid them from seeing each other. And the chaos only intensified from there. Pomeroy had sex with Clyde's wife, Gebhard had sex with Clara, Clyde had sex with Gebhard's wife, and Kinsey, well, Kinsey had sex with everyone.

He argued, according to James Jones, that, "...because the Institute was investigating sex, there should be no shame or guilt or repugnance attached to any sexual activity among senior staff members."

Well, the attitudes of the staff ranged from grudging compliance to outright delight. Paul Gebhard, for his part, enjoyed it all very much. He wasn't willing to shave his mustache for the Institute, but he'd happily sample his co-workers' wives. As he remembered, quote, I said to myself, I'm an anthropologist. I must participate in the local customs.

But not everybody on the research team was so happy with the rampant polyamory, especially when it involved being filmed up in Kinsey's attic. Clyde Martin was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with it all, as he remembered, quote,

Agnes Gebhard, Paul's wife, also disliked participating in those attic video shoots. She felt, quote, saying, quote,

"'I didn't enjoy it,' admitted William Dellenbach, the Institute's photographer. "'It was against my sense of propriety, I think.'" And if Clara Kinsey, Mack, had any reservations about it, she kept them to herself. As Gebhard remembered, quote, "'Mack so deeply believed in the research that Kinsey was doing, "'I swear if he'd asked her to cut her wrists, she probably would have.'" She idolized the man, even though she was quite free in saying he irritated her occasionally.

Whatever the staff's feelings about the filming sessions, Kinsey was very clear on one thing. As Paul Gebhard remembered, "...the filming was a deep, dark secret. Only the staff members and their spouses, and of course the other participants in the film, knew this. The Institute's secretaries and clerical staff had no idea what was going on."

According to one historian, they filmed, quote, As a scientist, writes Jones, Politically, however, the risks were enormous.

public opinion would have never tolerated sexual filming, particularly of the kinds of behavior he preferred. However much he shouted science, the public would have answered pornography. Decades later, of course, research scientists and clinicians were able to observe and photograph human sexual behavior openly, with little opposition from the public. Researchers such as William Masters and Virginia Johnson of Washington University in St. Louis would become famous for their groundbreaking work in this area. But the real pioneer...

was Kinsey. Over time, he developed a remarkable network of individuals who were willing to perform while others watched.

in any of half a dozen cities. He could pick up the telephone, contact trusted confidants, and stage sex that evening. But as 1949 came to a close, Kinsey had bigger concerns than top-secret filming sessions and the Byzantine sexual dynamics that accompanied them. His book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was being slammed by critics in the scientific community. After a brief honeymoon period of rosy reviews and softball coverage,

the sentinels of academia, had taken the time to actually dig into his statistics. And they found some troubling flaws in Kinsey's methodology. Kinsey, of course, knew that his book would court controversy. The religious leaders in the country would never tolerate a book that put forth such a brazen challenge to the traditional stance on sex. A religious publication called The Catholic Mind bombarded the Kinsey Report with fire and brimstone, saying that its author was, quote, "...at war against purity, against morality, against the family."

Maurice Sheehy of Washington's Catholic University of America writes Jones,

denounced sexual behavior in the human male as quote, the most anti-religious book of our times, charging that it quote, has made the most devastating inroads on Christian morality in this century. We all know that there is too much sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, and homosexuality in our country, another writer said through Clutched Pearls. What does it add to our knowledge to know the exact percentage in each of these three areas? One scandalized writer even compared Kinsey to Jack the Ripper. These kinds of attacks Kinsey had expected.

After all, he had never been shy about attacking the religious institutions that had caused him and others so much pain. There was abundant reason, he said,

for placing the breakdown of our modern home at the door of the Christian church. Their rhetoric, he said, had engendered, quote, ignorance of sexual structure and physiology, of the technique fundamental in the normal course of sexual activities, and the prudish aversion to adequate participation in the one physiologic activity on which society is most dependent. But what Kinsey had not expected were the attacks that came from within academia itself. These

These critiques primarily focused on the methods and data that formed the foundation of his entire book. So in essence, they were an attack on his reputation as a scientist. The science of people's junk, they said, was junk science. The first salvo of criticism took aim at the book's misleading title, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The phrasing of the title seemed to imply a certain universality, that the conclusions within apply to all human males everywhere. But that just wasn't the case. As historian Gary Brett writes, quote,

Kinsey's sample was virtually confined to white U.S. males. And even within that population, those surveyed were far from representative of the U.S. male population. Only 15% of the general population had college educations, but 56% of Kinsey's sample were men in college.

The sample not only skewed young and white, but also did not adequately represent Catholics or farmers. Kinsey's answer to this charge was a grammatical loophole. In the human male meant within the human male, writes Gothorn Hardy. If he'd meant the whole male population, he would have said...

of, but the precision of his prepositions was lost on the majority of Kinsey's readers. They saw that title and assumed the book's conclusions could be applied to every male in the country. The truth was, the Kinsey Report overrepresented some groups and underrepresented others. Furthermore, the critics argued, Kinsey's interview method was fundamentally flawed since it relied exclusively on volunteers. How did he know that they weren't lying or exaggerating or omitting certain things entirely?

One prominent statistician joked that Kinsey, quote, would have been better advised to stick a pin in a telephone book and then interview the people whose names got pierced. Well, Kinsey had an answer for that, too. It wasn't perfect, he admitted, but for this kind of research, volunteers were the only good option.

As Jones writes, quote, Another critique leveled at Kinsey was less about statistics and more about tone.

A prominent cultural anthropologist from New York named Margaret Mead said, quote, Not anywhere in the book. Not a suggestion. Furthermore, the book did not give people any guidance as to what was healthy sexual behavior and what was not. Quote,

The book suggests no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep. Kinsey, they charged, had stripped away all the things that made sex meaningful. The interpersonal connections, the emotional factors. On every page I can find the word penis, wrote a psychiatrist named Lawrence Kuby, but nowhere the word love. This biologist from a third-rate university was out of his depth, out of his field, they said, trespassing an intellectual territory in which he did not belong.

He was, in the words of one critic, quote, trying to make an objective study about something which we cannot be objective. But in a way, that was Kinsey's entire point. As one writer put it, quote, Humans are the only animals in the whole of evolution who like to pretend they are not animals. Sex, Kinsey maintained, was, quote,

entangled in a mass of taboos and repressions. Only by stripping away all those cultural trappings, only by dropping the pretense that we are anything but highly evolved mammals, could we understand biologically what sex really is. And these questions of normal versus abnormal, natural versus unnatural, love versus lust, these were distractions, weapons in the hands of the church and politicians telling us what to do, and when to do it, and who to do it with. As Gothorn Hardy writes, quote,

The law and convention, the prudes and the moralists described a lot of activities as unnatural. Kinsey countered by demonstrating that they occurred in nature, among animals. Human beings were animals, ergo, they were natural to us. The only kinds of abnormal sex, Kinsey said, are those which cause harm. In fact, Kinsey countered, it was the law itself that was doing immense harm, right under their noses.

None of these armchair academics or coastal critics understood. They had not been out in the field. They had not seen what he had seen. Prior to publication, Kinsey's quest for more interview subjects had taken him into the prisons and penitentiaries of America. And in many of those cells, he didn't find rapists or monsters. He found people who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person.

As Jones writes, quote, Another friend of Kinsey's remembered a story about a man who had agreed to be castrated to avoid a prison sentence. Quote,

Kinsey would tell you that story with his eyes suffused with the beginning of tears and he turned pale with the horror of it. He was so sorry for people that you felt that you'd never noticed human beings at all. America's prisons were filled with people whose only crime had been to stray outside the bounds of Christian sexual morality. Homosexuals and adulterers and fornicators and chronic masturbators. And while their behavior violated sexual taboos and offended the public's sense of propriety, writes Jones,

They did not inflict physical harm on others. Kinsey believed that these offenses had no place on the criminal code books. The law's definition of deviancy was so wide and indiscriminate that many functionally innocent people had been caught in its tangle, their lives irreparably damaged by archaic legal codes. And it all weighed very heavily on Kinsey. As Jones writes, quote,

Kinsey identified with the sex offenders he interviewed in jail. He felt their pain and sorrow as deeply as if it were his own. The man who enjoyed shocking people by declaring that 90% of all American males had broken the nation's sex laws knew that he too was a sex offender. All Kinsey had to do was compare his history with those of many of the sex offenders he interviewed in prison. If they had been caught, who was to say that he would not be next? Now, if Kinsey understood anything, it was that he too was jailable.

But it is worth noting that not all of Kinsey's interview subjects were just misunderstood innocents. His quest for more data ended up taking him to some very, very dark places. And the darkest place of all was the home of a man named Mr. X. Mr. X's real name, or perhaps alias, was Kenneth Green, a 60-something civil servant living on the East Coast.

Unlike many of Kinsey's subjects, Mr. X was not in prison, but he should have been. In fact, if the law had ever gotten a hold of him, had ever discovered the full extent of what he had done, he probably would have been serving several life sentences. In June 1944, writes James Jones, Kinsey and Pomeroy traveled some 1,800 miles to interview Mr. X, their longest trip ever to take a single history.

At the time we saw him, wrote Pomeroy, this man was 63 years old, quiet, soft-spoken, self-effacing, a rather unobtrusive fellow. And despite his unprepossessing appearance, it took a record 17 hours to record Mr. X's case history, which, as Pomeroy put it, quote, astounded even us, who had heard everything. There was not even a word to describe Mr. X's sexual experiences. Eventually, they settled on the term omni-phile, omni being the Latin word for all,

"phile" being the Greek word for "love." But the reality was far more sinister than that academic label, as Jones writes, quote:

Mr. X's bizarre sexual behavior, it seems, was a family legacy. The product of a home poisoned by cross-generational incest, he had sex with his grandmother when he was still a young child, as well as his father. In the years that followed, the boy had sexual relations with 17 of the 35 relatives with whom he had contact. And this was just the beginning. After he reached adulthood, Mr. X was obsessed with sex. A walking id with polymorphous erotic tastes.

By the time he was brought to Kinsey's attention, wrote Pomeroy, quote,

and had employed elaborate techniques of masturbation. The scope of the abuse, the reach of the hurt was beyond imagination, but like a moral car crash, Kinsey could not look away. He was fascinated, transfixed by a specimen so rare in its repugnance, so unique in its absence of ethics, it was like discovering a new species.

One of Kinsey's assistants had that very same thought, remarking that for Kinsey this was, quote, like finding the gall wasp which would establish not a new species but a new genus. Mr. X was way off the line, way off the scale, beyond anything else that Kinsey knew about. And now what Kinsey should have done was walk right out of that room and report the man to the police. But that is not what he did. According to one historian, quote, science would have been better served had Kinsey not allowed his lust for data to obscure his judgment.

Viewed from any angle, his relationship with Mr. X was a cautionary tale. Whatever the putative value to science of Mr. X's experiences, the fact remains that he was a predatory pedophile. Betraying a huge moral blind spot, Kinsey took the records of Mr. X's criminal acts and transformed them into scientific data.

Chapter 5 of the finished book, Early Sexual Growth and Activity, offered a finely graded discussion of pre-adolescent male sexuality, and much of this chapter was based on materials Mr. X had provided.

The question arises, writes Gothorn Hardy, should Kinsey have done this? For members of Kinsey's own research team, the answer was an emphatic no. As one told Kinsey directly, quote, I don't think that belongs in this book. Critics and historians tend to agree. As one wrote decades after Kinsey's death, quote, Looking to sexual molesters for information on childhood sexuality is like drawing conclusions on the sexuality of adult females from the testimony of rapists.

But if Kinsey had any crisis of conscience about including data like this, it was undetectable. To him, dealing with someone like Mr. X was a necessary sacrifice for the greater scientific good. As Jones continues, "...convinced that cold, hard facts alone would persuade the public to develop more tolerant sexual attitudes, Kinsey was determined to provide those data. And if that meant trafficking with someone like Mr. X, then so be it."

The end justified the means. As Pomeroy put it, quote, Kinsey would have done business with the devil himself if it would have furthered the research. Kinsey interviewed Mr. X in 1944, and six years later, in 1950, that morbid thrill of discovery had given way to an intense and all-consuming anger. After all the work, all the miles, all the moral compromises that he had made to compile the most detailed report on sexual behavior in the history of the world, he

He was under attack from the people who should have been supporting him. Other scientists. He had expected the priests and the prudes to attack him, but to come under scrutiny from his own community, his own people. How dare they? Who did they think they were? They were just jealous. Jealous of his book's success. Jealous of his place in history. And rather than support him, rather than help him, rather than offer their encouragement, they were just trying to tear him down.

But for now, Kinsey had to put all that aside. He had to look forward, to focus on what came next. Most Americans, writes Jones, could hardly have cared less what academics thought. They wanted to hear what Kinsey had found out about American women. Sexual behavior in the human male had surpassed all expectations, making mountains of cash in the process. And Kinsey didn't take a dime for himself, instead funneling all that money back into the ISR, back into the research. And the Institute would need every single penny.

because it was time to start writing the sequel to the male volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. But while Kinsey may have been able to plow forward and ignore the critics, his financial backers were not so confident. In smoke-filled rooms and austere offices, phone calls were being exchanged. Kinsey didn't know it yet, but his benefactors were beginning to have second thoughts about the entire project. His funding, and by extension his crusade, was hanging by a thread.

It's April 4th, 1951. We're in a small conference room in Princeton, New Jersey. There's nothing particularly special about this conference room, being, of course, a conference room. It has all the trappings one might expect. A long wooden table, squeaky, uncomfortable chairs, a pitcher of water in the center, in case anyone gets a sudden case of boredom-induced dehydration. But

But despite its drab, pedestrian appearance, this room is very important. At least for a couple hours. Because today, it is hosting an event that only happens once a year. An event that involves some of the most powerful people in the United States, if not the world. Today is the annual board meeting of the Rockefeller Foundation. Around the table, 16 chairs have been arranged. One for each of the trustees. Today's venerable guest list includes titans of industry, a former senator, and not one but two future secretaries of state.

Needless to say, that's a lot of power crammed into 16 uncomfortable chairs. But their purpose here is not political. Their agenda is not nefarious. The Rockefeller Foundation is and was, first and foremost, a philanthropic organization. A non-profit entity dedicated to, in its own words, quote, "...promoting the well-being of humanity throughout the world. It seeks to inspire and foster large-scale human impact that promotes the well-being of humanity by identifying and accelerating breakthrough solutions, ideas, and conversations."

That's a very elaborate way of saying we raise money for important causes. How much money, you might ask? Well, the Rockefeller Foundation wasn't just stuffing a few bills in the collection basket. They were generating tens of millions of dollars a year. And the most considerable chunk of that change was earmarked for public health projects. Virus research in India, sanitation in Venezuela, psychoanalysis in Chicago. The list went on and on.

But whether you're a family of four or a global organization, building a budget is no easy task. And that's why once a year, every year, the Rockefeller trustees gathered in a room for an annual meeting to approve or deny grants to certain organizations and research projects. Naturally, when that much money is flying around, emotions can run high. Things get tense. Egos clash as the pennies get pinched.

But today's meeting was going to be especially contentious. As the opening remarks were made, one name was burning on the tip of everyone's tongue.

Alfred Kinsey. Few board meetings in the Foundation's history, writes James Jones, had generated debates that could match the heat and the venom of what followed. Back in part two of this series, we briefly discussed how Kinsey was able to secure funding from the National Research Council in 1942 by hosting its representative, Robert Yerkes, in Bloomington. Over the course of several days, Kinsey had dazzled Yerkes with his methodology and theories. He'd even managed to take Yerkes' sexual history.

Of the 12,000 interviews that informed sexual behavior in the human male, Yerkes was one of the first. But at the end of the day, Yerkes was just a middleman. He didn't actually write the checks.

In fact, technically, the National Research Council didn't even write the checks. In truth, almost every dime Kinsey and his institute ever received originated at Rockefeller Foundation headquarters in New York City, underwritten and approved by the 16 men in this conference room. By the mid-1940s, over half of the Rockefeller budget for medical sciences was going to Kinsey and his team out in Indiana. And in the beginning, Kinsey and his project seemed like a dream come true. Finally, a real pioneer with something real to contribute.

But as time went on, members of the board began to regard the eccentric professor with a growing sense of unease. Before long, they were calling Kinsey their, quote, problem child. The problem, in their eyes, was publicity. Specifically, too much of it. Knowing full well that funding from a world-famous and universally respected outfit like the Rockefeller Foundation gave him instant credibility, Kinsey flashed those credentials with abandon.

The truth was, he wouldn't shut up about it. He even asked one of the board's trustees, Alan Gregg, to write the preface for his book. And this made other members of the board uncomfortable. Kinsey's research was important and valuable to be sure, but it was also controversial. It attracted a lot of attention and political heat. And Kinsey, they claimed, lacked discretion. Why couldn't he just research sexual behavior quietly?

Well, as we have seen, quiet was not Kinsey's style. By the late 1940s, Kinsey was name-dropping the foundation at every dinner party and press conference east of the Mississippi. And when Sexual Behavior and the Human Male was published in 1948, the heat got even hotter. As Jones writes, quote,

In Kinsey, they thought they had found a metric-minded, Baconian scientist. They saw him as an instrument, a collecting machine, who would compile the data others would use to develop social policies and programs designed to control human sexual behavior. Instead, they had been co-opted by a genuine revolutionary, a man who intended to use science to attack Victorian morality and to promote an ethic of tolerance. And as the big April meeting was called to order, the board found itself split into two distinct factions.

those who wanted to continue funding Kinsey, and those who did not. Impassioned arguments were made for both sides. The pro-Kinsey faction, writes Jones, "...insisted that no project before the board had greater social relevance than Kinsey's research. His work had brought the light of science to a field that had stood for centuries in the darkness of taboo, and it had done so at a moment in history when the nation badly needed hard data with which to re-evaluate its legal, moral, and educational approaches to human sexuality."

The anti-Kinsey faction was motivated by fears that the intensifying attacks on Kinsey's statistics, samples, and methodology would damage the reputation of the Foundation. It didn't matter that a recent review of Kinsey's data by the American Statistical Association had given him a favorable verdict. It didn't matter that Kinsey's book had sold over a quarter of a million copies and pushed arcane scientific topics into the public square.

It didn't matter that in just a decade he had contributed more data to the field of sex research than anyone in the last 100 years. What mattered was that he was talking too loudly about sex.

speaking too boldly. Frankly, he was pissing people off. No less a figure than J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had found the book personally disgusting. With the file at FBI headquarters getting thicker and thicker, Kinsey had a target on his back, and the Rockefeller board didn't want to be caught in the crossfire. And besides, they said...

It was all so distasteful. Viewed through the cobwebbed prism of Protestant morality, Kinsey's research held no value at all. It was crass. It was graphic. It wasn't the Christian thing to do. As one pro-Kinsey board member recalled, quote, I think it was the old attitude. You see, most of the trustees were men in their late 50s or 60s, and it was the old attitude about sex. Sex was sort of taboo. It was just something that shouldn't be published, something that shouldn't be discussed, something the Foundation shouldn't have anything to do with at all.

Well, in the end, after a bit of shouting and table-thumping, it came down to a vote. A simple majority vote would decide whether Kinsey's project was allowed to continue. Or at least allowed to continue with money from the Rockefeller Foundation. As the votes were cast and counted, the entire room waited in a strained silence. And after what seemed like an eternity, the tally was read aloud. The final vote was 9-7.

in favor of Kinsey. And so the anti-Kinsey faction shuffled their papers, straightened their ties, and stormed out of the paltry conference room in a backdraft of scotch fumes and $300 cologne. Kinsey and the ISR had been saved, for now. But this was not over. 700 miles away in Bloomington, Indiana, Alfred Kinsey had no idea just how close he'd come to the chopping block. But, to be fair, he had much bigger concerns weighing on his mind. Kinsey was troubled by matters of the heart, specifically

Specifically, his heart. Every preacher in America believed that Kinsey was sick. And the truth was, they were right. Alfred Kinsey was a very, very sick man. For decades, his heart had been slowly and surely rotting away. A long gestating heart disease was finally starting to catch up with him. In 1951, Kinsey was in his late 50s.

But he still had memories of a sickly, miserable, guilt-ridden childhood. For the first ten years of his life, his body had been ravaged by a sampler platter of disease. Rickets, curvature of the spine, and typhoid fever kept the little boy confined to his bed all day and every day. But it was a case of rheumatic fever that turned his heart into a block of Swiss cheese, scarring its valves and constricting its blood flow. Little Alfred, the doctors told his austere, puritanical father, was unlikely to live past the age of 21.

But Alfred Kinsey ended up proving the doctors wrong. He grew up into a strong, virile young man who adored hiking and the outdoors. And the farther he pushed himself, the more miles he clocked, the more gall wasps he found, the further he was able to distance himself from those doctors and their fatal predictions.

But that looming sense of mortality was always nipping at his heels. Inside his chest cavity, decade after decade, hike after hike, filming session after filming session, his heart continued to weaken. The idea that he would die young, not surprisingly, made a deep impression on Kinsey, writes John Gothorn Hardy.

It's one of the reasons he flung himself with such furious intensity into anything, however trivial, that he later undertook. By 1951, Kinsey was working 90 hours a week. As much as he hated his father, he had inherited his old man's relentless Protestant work ethic. There was so much to do, and so little time to do it. Kinsey knew he was living on borrowed time, and the resulting compulsion to work as hard as he possibly could bordered on self-destructive.

Clyde Martin, Kinsey's research assistant and great unrequited love, couldn't help but look at his visionary mentor with a mix of pity and admiration. Quote,

I think he was a man of tremendous conviction to the point of harming himself." Another colleague agreed, saying, quote, "I don't think it was clear whether he ran his research or his research ran him. No crisis of confidence weakened his will, no dearth of inspiration clouded his vision, no breakdown of discipline vitiated his work ethic, and no waning of zeal obscured his mission," wrote one historian. Kinsey was not ruined by success. His problem was

was time. There simply were not enough hours in the day, or night, for him to say grace over everything on his plate. When Kinsey went to see a doctor for his annual checkup, the physician pulled the stethoscope away from his chest and told him gravely that his heart sounded like a, quote, concrete mixer.

Kinsey's clock was ticking, and there was still so much left to do. While the Rockefeller Board was debating the survival of Kinsey's project, the good professor was elbow-deep in typewriter ink. Progress on the sequel to his best-selling book, Sexual Behavior and the Human Female, was moving along at a blistering pace. But a book on the sexual habits of American women presented unique problems. For Kinsey, the biggest hurdle to understanding what made women tick was his own preconceptions.

Kinsey's attitude towards women reflected the cultural values of his youth, writes Jones. He saw women as largely uninterested in sex, morally pure, and devoted to reforming men. Paul Gebhard later remarked that, quote, basically he had a rather Victorian image of female sexuality. He had the feeling that females were essentially receptive, passive individuals, and the males were the ones who were sexually active and aggressive. In Gebhard's judgment, there was no gainsaying that Kinsey was, quote, a bit of a misogynist in that sense.

Kinsey had always had a better grip, so to speak, on male genitalia, according to one historian. But as he interviewed more and more women, took more and more histories, an elaborate and complex world began to open up. With every new interview, Kinsey's stereotypical image of women began to melt away. As it happened, American women were just as sexually active and experimental

as American men. Kinsey's interviews revealed that quote, "62% of the women in his sample had masturbated, 66% had nocturnal sex dreams, 90% had petted, nearly 50% had had premarital intercourse, 26% had had extramarital intercourse, and 13% had had at least one homosexual contact that resulted in an orgasm." Not only that, conventional understanding of female sexual response was so far off the mark it was laughable.

Even today, you'll hear jokes about men not being able to find the clitoris. Well, in the late 1940s and 50s, most American men didn't even know it existed. Women who couldn't orgasm during sex were said to suffer from frigidity. In other words, they were too cold and dead inside, broken in some way, to enjoy the efforts of their partner. But Kinsey's data revealed a startling and emasculating truth.

Most men just weren't touching their wives and girlfriends correctly. As Jones writes, quote, He baldly stated that a large amount of women's sexual activity, especially coitus, remained anorgasmic. By contrast, most men preferred coitus above other outlets, almost always proceeding to orgasm. Hence, coitus was a feasible proxy only for men's arousal rates, while women routinely endured intercourse without orgasm.

Just like gall wasps and American men, the variation in the female population was absolutely enormous, infinite, and kaleidoscopic. Jones continues, quote, A small minority of women went their entire lives without experiencing a single orgasm, and relatively large numbers of women did not have orgasms every time they had intercourse or engaged in other forms of sexual behavior, nor was the intensity of their orgasms at all.

all comparable. For some women, the sensation was extremely mild, while other women had orgasms strong enough to make them faint, with most women falling somewhere between these poles. One 35-year-old woman from the Midwest wrote to Kinsey about her experiences, vividly illuminating the outer margins of what was possible. Quote, I have an outlet—that means orgasm—

of approximately 130 a month. I know of at least six women whose husbands could only partially satisfy them. And these six women and myself had made penises for ourselves out of spun rubber and an inner core of hard rubber. One woman said she never knew anything could be so wonderful. I'm afraid you won't believe me, but she came over a hundred times in one evening. So don't blame it on the women for such low output. What man could stay hard that long? I'll also have you know that I am in the best of health. I don't jump every time the phone rings nor scream at other noises.

I consider myself a well-oriented person. When he was finished reading, Kinsey placed the letter on his desk and took a deep breath. His heart was pounding, but these days it was always pounding. He didn't think anything would be able to top his first book, but my God, sexual behavior in the human female was going to blow the roof off America. All he had to do was stay alive long enough to finish it.

During the past few weeks, almost every magazine and newspaper have carried reviews of Kinsey's newest book. His findings are being discussed wherever people congregate. He has used over 800 pages to give the most intimate details of the private lives of 5,940 women. It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America.

None of the sordid details are spared. Young people are encouraged to have premarital experiences. The moral laws governing marriage have been scorned and immorality advocated. After reading this book, happily married husbands and wives are going to start suspecting each other when they read that one out of every four wives is unfaithful to her husband. But Dr. Kinsey's report gives itself away when it says that seven out of ten women who had premarital affairs said that they had no regrets.

This is an indication that Dr. Kinsey's report is completely lopsided and unscientific. He certainly could not have interviewed any of the millions of born-again Christian women in this country who put the highest price on virtue, decency, and modesty. I do not know any Christian woman who would submit themselves to such a probing and analysis. Thank God we still have millions of American women who still know how to blush and who believe that virtue is the greatest attribute of womanhood.

That is the famous American televangelist Billy Graham, testing the limits of his microphone in a radio sermon delivered on September 13th, 1953. It had only been a few weeks since Kinsey's second book, Sexual Behavior and the Human Female, hit the stands. And that was plenty of time for the Southern Baptist minister to digest the horrors within. Graham went on to call Kinsey's report a, quote, "...indictment against American womanhood."

compiled by, quote, secret agents. His listeners could hear the unmistakable anger and moral panic in his voice continue to soar throughout the sermon. This book is going to teach young people how to do it and how to get away with it. It is going to teach young people that if so many other people are doing it, then it must not be so wrong. It is going to teach our young people moral perversions that they had never even heard of before. Apparently, Dr. Kinsey has completely disregarded the teachings of the church and the moral code of the Bible. But

But the thing that disturbs me most is the fact that the American people have become so callous to these things that we're no longer appalled at what is happening. Yes, old baby Billy was hopping mad. And he was not alone in his indignation. A week after the female volume was released, a congressman from New York demanded that the post office ban it from circulation.

Just as they had decried Kinsey's mail volume five years earlier in 1948, religious leaders, traditionalists, and conservative publications howled in outrage at the audacity of Kinsey and his research. But for all their fire and brimstone, they could not stop Kinsey's findings from finding their way into the eyes and ears of millions of Americans. The conspiracy of silence around sex had been shattered forever.

The coverage, writes James Jones, was surpassed only by the death of a president in power or war. It was unprecedented for a book then and has never been repeated since. And the proof of that apparent victory was splashed in full color across the pages of Time magazine, which gave Dr. Alfred Kinsey a feature cover story in August of 1953. As Jones writes, quote,

Kinsey's crowning moment came on August 24th, 1953, when his face appeared on the cover of Time magazine. A flattering likeness by the artist Artsiba Shef, hopefully I didn't butcher that, the portrait was suffused with symbols. Birds fluttered overhead, a solitary bee hovered above beautiful pink roses with sharp thorns, and a somber-faced Kinsey, wearing a bow tie, peered resolutely out into space. Appropriately, his lips were tightly sealed, and his eyes looked faintly sad, like a man who had seen too much.

In his 15 years of research, Kinsey had seen a lot, and his team had amassed roughly 18,000 interviews. They had traveled across the country, meticulously cataloging, contrasting, and cross-examining multitudes of men and women who told their stories and revealed their inner lives with heart-wrenching candor. And it wasn't always pretty. Sexual histories, Kinsey wrote, often involve a record of things that have hurt.

of frustrations, of pains, of unsatisfied longing, of disappointments, of desperately tragic situations, and of complete catastrophe. The interviewer must, for a while, share these feelings, even though he might not altogether be neutral. And as he distilled all of this raw data down to a series of coherent conclusions, Kinsey worked himself like a man possessed. Ever the perfectionist, writes Jones,

He refused to settle for anything less than his best effort. Kinsey read passages out loud while he wrote, trying to decide whether the cadence and rhythm of his language was pleasing to the ear. He devoted even greater care to the clarity of his expression, struggling to find the right words. He wrote and rewrote, polishing his prose until it captured his exact meaning.

Originally, Kinsey had wanted to complete the female volume in two to three years, but it ended up taking him five. And when the book finally dropped, it appeared to be worth the wait. No scientific text had ever engaged with female sexuality like this before. According to one historian, "...that he had accorded women the same treatment as men was extraordinary, since it implied that female sexuality should be given parity with male sexuality."

But Kinsey had done much, much more. Throughout the female volume, he depicted women as sexual beings. He resolutely separated sex from procreation. He documented the full range of female sexual outlets. He celebrated masturbation as the behavior most likely to result in orgasm, thereby deflating the importance of the penis to female sexual pleasure. He showed great concern for the stability of marriage, and he consistently depicted marriage as a partnership of equals that required sexual satisfaction for both parties.

And instead of relaxing, instead of lounging on his laurels, Kinsey chose to spend his time answering letters. Once again, his mailbox was flooded with correspondence. Ordinary people congratulating him, praising him, but most of all, thanking him. "I want to thank you for the wonderful work that you are doing in teaching men and women the facts, the truth, about sex," wrote one California grandmother. "It is the most important work, the most curative, the most constructive, the most godly, that can be done on Earth."

"I have just finished the book," another woman wrote. "To me, it is the book of the century, and of my life. I feel that ultimately it will do more toward improving relationships between the sexes than any other work to date. I love you and your coworkers. Your courage in stating what you find, rather than what supports the age-old myths, is the mark of true greatness." "Were it in my power," said another, "your book would become a required text in every high school in the nation.

Perhaps you've broken the ice, and by the time my six-year-old son has found my future daughter-in-law, she will have a much happier time of all-around living. But it wasn't all praise and gratitude. Just like before, Kinsey received endless questions from desperate, confused people begging for help. As one historian wrote, quote, Kinsey received numerous letters from women who decried their ignorance of birth control techniques, admitting that they had often been left paralyzed with fear of unwanted pregnancies.

These and other complaints from distressed women poured into Bloomington with each day's mail. Yet, whatever their problems, a common thread ran through the letters. Almost without exception, the women who wrote to Kinsey spoke of their ignorance of sexual matters and of keeping their pain secret. Many of the women described failed romances and marriages, tragedies that they blamed in many instances on their disastrous sex lives.

Some spoke candidly of their total absence of sex education in childhood and their lack of preparation for conjugal relations. Whatever the question, whatever the anxiety, Kinsey responded to every single letter. It was a chore that could have easily been delegated to a secretary or a staff member, but the professor insisted on answering as many people as he could.

And through it all, his health continued to falter. Even when he could barely pick himself up out of a chair, he refused to put down his pen. But the research team at the ISR hardly had time to celebrate before their high spirits were punctured. A swift and furious backlash was materializing in the press. Like white blood cells mobilized against an infection, publications around the country attacked the book en masse. By unveiling the sexual lives of women, they said, Kinsey had crossed a line. This time, he had gone too far.

According to one historian, "...in the ultra-conformist late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans had little tolerance for challenges to cultural orthodoxy. Much of the public's concerns centered on threats to the image of women, to the traditional family, and to prevailing gender roles. For all the talk about wanting openness about sex, many Americans found it disconcerting to learn that their growing anxiety about declining female morality had some basis in fact."

Americans placed a premium on home and family, and many did not want to hear that the percentage of women who engaged in premarital and extramarital sex had increased since 1910. If anything, they were distinctly hostile to Kinsey's portrait of female sexuality. They preferred to deal with him by ignoring or denying his message. And Kinsey wasn't just swimming against a tide of moral traditionalism.

The good doctor had never been a student of geopolitics, but he was well aware that he was releasing his book into one of the most contentious political ecosystems imaginable. The early 1950s marked the height of the second Red Scare. Of all the years, 1953 was probably the worst year to release something radically countercultural, when fears about the Soviet Union and the spread of communism were at an all-time high.

"The Cold War context," wrote one historian, "proved hostile to the 1953 female volume. Cold War domestic politics denounced relativism and behaviorism, and zealots dubbed as un-American research and scholarship urging realism about diverse mores and practices in the population at large."

Instead, critics insisted on conformity to desirable norms, theories, and dogmas, enforced by whatever means necessary. McCarthyites denounced sex research as unpatriotic from the floor of Congress, charging that it undermined the American family and thereby national greatness.

Through this lens, Kinsey's book was seen not as a serious scientific treatise, but a bundle of scandalous propaganda, intended to confuse, distract, and undermine American women in this pivotal moment of global struggle. McCarthyite critics lashed the female volume with a red whip, calling it, among other things, quote, "...a deep, dark communist plot to overthrow and destroy the American home." Another accused Kinsey of, quote, "...aiding the communist aim to weaken and destroy the youth of this country."

Moscow must have been loving this, another critic sneered, quote,

Such things must please the communists tremendously. They would like nothing better than to wreck the morals of the American people. Under the pretext of making a great contribution to scientific research, said one U.S. congressman, Kinsey is hurling the insult of the century against our mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters. Back in Bloomington, at the ISR, Dr. Kinsey tried to control his anger. He had expected attacks. He had expected pearl clutching. But he had not expected for his work to be called un-American.

A friend tried to console him, quote, Well, this is not the first time in the history of the world that scientific research has been accused by a hierarchy of being in league with the devil.

And Kinsey could also take comfort in the opinion of the majority of Americans. Whatever was being said in the newspapers and on Capitol Hill, a poll conducted by George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion found that 75% of Americans believed that it was, quote, a good thing rather than a bad thing to have the information in the female volume available. The male volume had polled even higher, with upwards of 80% of Americans believing it was a good thing.

But then as now, public opinion and scientific facts are not always enough to move the needle in Washington, D.C. By 1954, the accusations against Kinsey and his research had metastasized into a full-scale congressional committee. This committee, led by Congressman B. Carroll Reese, believed in the words of one historian that, quote, sex research is a threat to the American family, leaving the nation ripe for communist takeover. But rather than go after Kinsey himself, they took aim at something much more important.

his money. The principal target of the so-named 1954 Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations—

was Kinsey's key benefactor, the Rockefeller Foundation. It had been three years since the big vote in Princeton that had saved Kinsey's funding, but time had done nothing to soothe the reservations of the board members that had voted against him. In fact, their ranks had only continued to swell. By 1954, the board had decided that it simply could not afford to be associated with Kinsey and his research anymore.

With an angry mob of congressmen threatening their tax-exempt status over their association with sex research, the Foundation decided to distance itself from its notorious problem child. When a request for the ISR's normal $80,000 in annual funding was filed, it was flatly rejected. But in the estimation of some historians, Kinsey had sort of done this to himself.

By constantly publicizing his close association with the Foundation and playing up their support to further legitimize himself, he had made a, quote, crucial tactical error. Such a public partnership for a tax-exempt, non-profit organization was, quote, highly fragile to any blowback.

And so, when the Foundation saw an opportunity to cut ties and save itself from humiliation on Capitol Hill, they took it without hesitation. But this was nothing personal, the chairman of the Rockefeller board, Dean Rusk, was quick to assert. He didn't have any moral axe to grind about Kinsey's research. Far from it. Quote, I myself did not have any reservations about work in that field. I thought it was an important field. I thought Kinsey had done some important exploratory work and some pioneering work.

No, at the end of the day, this was just business. After all, Kinsey had enjoyed lavish funding from the foundation for 13 years. They had indulged every request, supported every staffing decision, bankrolled every cross-country trip. As they say, all good things must come to an end, especially when those good things are bad for our reputation. From now on, Alfred Kinsey was on his own.

It's August 14th, 1956. We're in a car, zipping down a public road and kicking up dust outside of West Lafayette, Indiana. Driving this car, clutching the wheel with fragile, varicose fingers, is Clara Kinsey.

Mack. It's a bad day for a road trip. It's summer in Indiana, when temperatures routinely approach 105 degrees, and today it's turning the car into a sweat lodge on wheels. To make matters worse, Mack's eyes are not what they used to be. At 58 years old, she has to squint to read the road signs as they flash by, careful not to miss a turn or take a wrong exit. But every once in a while, she steals an anxious glance over at the passenger seat.

Her husband, Alfred Kinsey, is staring out the window, looking vacant, looking sad, and looking tired. But on that summer day, Proc was so much more than tired. He was dying. In fact, he had less than two weeks to live. It had been almost three years since the Rockefeller Foundation had pulled their funding from the Institute of Sex Research.

And those three years had been very, very hard on Alfred Kinsey. His first instinct had been to appeal their decision, to summon every ounce of charm and charisma he possessed to sway them back to his side. But that well had run dry a long time ago. Kinsey was not the same man who had dazzled Robert Yerkes in 1942. That was 15 years, two books, and several minor heart attacks ago.

But like a hooked fish who doesn't know it's dead yet, Kinsey thrashed and raged against his circumstances. He journeyed to New York and Chicago and Indianapolis and even Texas in search of new donors, new money that could fill the vacuum the Rockefeller Foundation had left. If you find any Texas oil men who would like to contribute to the support of our research, he told a friend, let me know and I would go anywhere in the U.S. to discuss it with them.

But time and time again, he came up empty-handed. Kinsey hated begging for money. Hated begging for anything. It offended some deep-rooted sense of self-reliance in him. Every appeal that Kinsey made to donors felt fake, weak, self-conscious, and as a result, his pitches came off half-hearted and unconvincing. No new funds materialized. And to make matters worse, Proc's health was rapidly deteriorating.

His heart, perforated from a childhood disease and buckling under the weight of a superhuman work schedule, began to shut down. His heart was dangerously enlarged, writes Cawthorn Hardy, his pulse wildly erratic. Kinsey's co-workers and colleagues became terrified that they would walk into his office one day and find him dead, face down on a pile of half-answered letters. Please slow down, one colleague pleaded. You'll

you'll contribute more in the long run by living longer another told him angrily quote if you want to commit suicide i suppose that's your business but i believe you should give some consideration to your family and to your research colleagues and to this institute

But Kinsey would not, could not stop working. He treated his heart like a recalcitrant employee, writes Glothorn Hardy. He would force it to behave. He would collapse, recover, then work as hard as ever until he collapsed again. And most tragically of all, Kinsey's mental abilities also seemed to be slipping. As Paul Gebhard remembered, "...the last thing I would have ever discussed with him was whether or not there was any intellectual deterioration. That would have outraged him completely, but I felt that there was."

Years after the fact, Wardell Pomeroy could never forget Kinsey's suicidal stubbornness, the battle with his own body. As he recalled, quote, To Kinsey, his body was the enemy, preventing him from doing everything he wanted to do. He began many sentences with the complaint, My heart won't let me do this. The president of Indiana University, Herman Wells, remembered a conversation he had with Clara in 1956. Quote, Mrs. Kinsey said to me, You've got to help me stop him. I said, Out of the blue.

I can't stop him, but he's got to stop himself, otherwise he'll kill himself. Mrs. Kinsey said, that's what he's doing. Well, as the months dragged on and Kinsey's health continued to nosedive, a sense of inevitability started to hang over the ISR. There is tragedy here, writes Cawthorn Hardy, as the vast parabola of Kinsey's heroic endeavor now plunged inexorably towards death.

But on August 14th, 1956, Kinsey got a sudden rare burst of energy. He had been invited to speak at Purdue University in a meeting of the National Deans Association. The speaking engagement was a hundred miles away, but Kinsey insisted on attending. He could not drive himself, he reluctantly admitted, so someone else would need to take him there. Everybody refused. The

The staff, the assistants, everybody said absolutely not. Well, Kinsey said, fine, I'll take the train or the bus if I have to. I'll walk. But I am going.

And in the end, only one person agreed to take him. Mac grabbed her handbag, helped her husband into the passenger seat, and set out towards Purdue. As they approached their destination, she glanced over at her husband. He looked like he was on the verge of death, breathing heavily, blue in complexion, struggling to regulate his heartbeat. Like a fuel gauge rattling at empty, her husband was running on fumes.

But somewhere underneath the infirmity and the bristly gray hair and the tired, drooping eyes, she saw a flash of the same young man she'd clocked on campus 36 years ago. The golden-curled professor with a lean body and an easy smile. The man who would rather make his own campfire than wait on someone else.

The scholar who knew everything about gall wasps but nothing about a woman's body. The husband who taught himself how to please her, who taught others to accept themselves, who taught an entire country to confront their bigotries and re-examine their superstitions. And yet she also saw the husband who had strayed, who had suddenly developed an attraction to men halfway through their marriage, who had dragged her into polyamory, pressured his staff, and exploited their respect and affection for him.

the husband who secretly filmed sex in the attic and used questionable data from questionable people. From every angle, a new facet of this complicated person seemed to catch in the Indiana sunlight. In the end, this was a man who would rather die than give up on his life's work, a professor who would never stop answering letters from people who needed his help, even if it killed him.

And two weeks later, it did. In the last week of August, writes James Jones, Kinsey entered the Bloomington Hospital. He was suffering from pneumonia, which in turn aggravated his heart condition. Not long before entering the hospital, Kinsey had fallen in his garden. The damage was not serious, only a slight bruise on his leg. Still, it was that bruise that produced the embolism that finally killed him. Kinsey died on Sunday, August 25th, 1956, at 8 a.m. He

He was 62 years old. Just as Kinsey's work had ignited a media firestorm, so too did his death. This was a, quote, great loss to the world of science, wrote the Indianapolis News. He was, reflected the New York Times, first, last, and always a scientist. Even Kinsey's most vehement detractors could not withhold their grudging respect for him in death.

an Indiana Catholic publication wrote, "Few could disagree more strongly than we with Dr. Kinsey's views or deplore more deeply the evil influence such views could have on individuals and society. Yet one cannot deny that Dr. Kinsey's unremitting efforts, his patient,

endless search, his disregard for criticisms and ridicule, and his disinterest in financial gain should merit him high marks as a devoted scholar. While we have hurled our share of brickbats at some of Dr. Kinsey's ideas when he was living, and still hold those ideas to be poisonously wrong, we must admit that we would welcome on our side many more scholars with something of Kinsey's devotion to knowledge and

And even if he had been able to read those words, it would have been cold comfort. Kinsey, writes Gothorn Hardy, died a quote, As he gasped his last breath, he believed that he had failed. That his entire life's work had amounted to little more than a few boxes of gall wasps and a pile of sentimental letters. He died knowing that his cherished institute of sex research would wither into underfunded obscurity. His father had won.

The church had won. Every critic and bigot and McCarthyite had won. But that is not what happened. In the years following Kinsey's death, Paul Gebhard, who still refused to shave his mustache, was named the new director of the ISR. He applied for and secured government funding for the institute. By 1972, writes Gothorn Hardy, six complete books using Kinsey's data had appeared in over 50 articles and studies in professional journals. Paul Gebhard was no Kinsey.

but he saved the Institute from oblivion. And until the end of his days, Gebhard remembered the very last words Kinsey said to him. Quote, Don't do anything until I get back. Clara, Mac, never did reveal what Kinsey's last words to her were. But according to James Jones, she, quote, bore her husband's death with dignity and grace.

Friends who attended the memorial service recall her strength and composure. But, in a sense, Kinsey had been preparing Clara for his death for many years. Left alone for so much of the time, she had been forced to follow her own advice to the other Institute wives. Over time, Clara had made a life for herself. One that revolved around Kinsey, yet was not totally dependent on him.

No, Clara was far from devastated by her husband's death. If anything, her sorrow had to be mitigated by relief, for she had borne a great burden and was suddenly free. Clara enjoyed a long life. She died in 1982, outlasting her husband by 26 years. Ironically, for a man who spent most of his life counting and collecting, Alfred Kinsey's legacy is difficult to quantify. His actual output is probably the best place to start.

The publication of Alfred Kinsey's studies of male and female sexual behavior, in 1948 and 1953 respectively, propelled sex into the public eye in a way unlike any previous book or event had done, write historians John D'Amelio and Estelle Friedman. Whether bought, read, debated, or attacked, the Kinsey report stimulated a nationwide examination of America's sexual habits and values. It was an examination that was long overdue. According to James Jones, quote,

Confronted by a nation awash in what one writer called, hush and pretend, Kinsey pleaded for an end to hypocrisy and for a new ethic of tolerance. What people did in the privacy of their bedrooms was their own business and should not be subjected to social or legal sanctions. More than any other figure of his day, he set Americans to thinking about how much authority society should exercise over intimate matters.

At the time, Kinsey's work was understood as a considerable ripple in the culture, if not a mild splash. Only in later decades, during the sexual revolution, the gay civil rights movement, and the feminist movements, did it become clear just how impactful Kinsey had been. His work was the first deep breath before a plunge into a greater paradigm shift. As Cawthorn Hardy writes, quote,

It was on this cusp, on this tension point, one perhaps not fully appreciated, that Kinsey stood. It now becomes much easier to understand why he provoked such anger. It came from the older generations, the majority, who were frightened by the continued threats generated by the Cold War and almost equally tense about the profound cultural revolution they could sense or see taking place all around them. As one colleague of Kinsey's remembered, quote, "...the times were changing anyway, but I think he helped change the times."

Over the course of 15 years, Kinsey and his team collected 18,000 interviews, yielding a vital bedrock of scientific and statistical data. Despite his preoccupation with marginal groups, writes Jones, Kinsey compiled an unprecedented volume of data on people who engaged in the more garden-variety forms of behavior, the kinds that turn up in most people's sexual histories. Both from private experience and from thousands of interviews, he knew that virtually everyone falls short of the rigid sexual code demanded by middle-class morality.

And better than anyone else of his day, Kinsey understood that most Americans felt compelled to hide things about their sex lives.

If subsequent researchers managed to do the job better than Kinsey, their debt to him was nevertheless great. He was a pioneer, an explorer who blazed the trail for those who followed. It was he who convinced most Americans that human sexual behavior could and should be studied scientifically, and, just as important, that scientific data should help inform discussions of social policy. More than any other investigator, Kinsey made sex research respectable. But Kinsey's real triumph, suggests Jones, was a personal one –

Quote,

and use it to transform himself into an instrument of social reform. A secular evangelist who proclaimed a new sensibility about human sexuality. Had he lived a few more decades, he would have found much to celebrate and much to abhor. As an apostle of sexual liberation, he would have applauded the sexual freedom of the 1960s, the addition of candid sex education courses to the curricula of many high schools and colleges, the pill, and Roe v. Wade. In particular, he would have been warmed by the successes of the gay liberation movement.

Still, much that has happened in the decades since his death would have left Kinsey dismayed. He would have opposed the pro-life movement because he supported the right of women to control their fertility. Nor is it difficult to imagine Kinsey weeping over the moral majority's gay bashing in the 1980s and 1990s, just as he was sickened by the sexual witch hunts of the McCarthy era. As for HIV...

Kinsey's public response would have been enlightened and humane. He would have advocated more funds for research, he would have demanded explicit sex education for young people and adults alike, and he would have told anyone who would listen to practice safe sex. Privately, however, AIDS might have been enough to restore his faith in a mean-spirited, vengeful God. It's hard to know for sure what Kinsey would have thought or done or preached if he'd lived. It's hard to know what he really wanted or hoped for as complex and guarded as a man he was.

And despite his time in the public eye, barely any recordings or video footage exist of the professor. Outside his attic, he was notoriously camera shy. But he did give one public glimpse into his motivations. One little flash where the scientific veil slipped for just a moment. In 1948, a journalist asked him what the message of his first book was. Kinsey thought for a moment and then answered, quote,

If I had any ulterior motive in making this study, it was the hope that it might make people more tolerant. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening. I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.