Columns

They Tell Me You Like Sex.

 
 
There’s this guy. He sent it like three orgies on the fourth of July: sparkles, banners, and whole lot of pheromones. Alfred Kinsey collected thousands of interviews for both Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He’s ostensibly the man who changed our gaze on getting it on. While getting it on … with his male assistant … who was also having an affair with Kinsey’s wife …
In any case …
Kinsey’s approach to these interviews was complete tolerance, lack of judgement, sympathetic interviewers, and a set of questions that slowly revealed the interviewees’ sexual histories to create a substantial pool of empirical data. It was a tremendous achievement at the time and fully undermined social preconceptions about sex, like premarital intercourse (which was happening, surprise surprise …). Kinsey did have some peculiarities, though: he tried to take humans away from their “perceived” centrality in sexual relations, so if you’ve ever wanted to stroke a goat amorously or lick a possum dick, he would have probably given you two thumbs up.
Sure, there were some issues. Kinsey didn’t interview African Americans. Sexual success was strictly equated through the number of orgasms the person had, though one might argue, as have a certain school of feminists in the 1970s who explored ‘outercourse’ (i.e. all kinds of erotic touching except orgasm), that the value of sex lies in more intricate and multiple sources of pleasure than simply la petite mort. Understandably, his work on women was less informative than what he discovered about male sexuality.
Much like one of the other crucial figures in modern sexuality, Havelock Ellis, Kinsey sought to dislodge the notion of ‘normalcy’ from sexual behavior. One of Kinsey’s most famous inventions is the ‘Kinsey scale’, which charts a range of sexual behaviour, moving American perceptions away from the homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual as the tripartite dictators of sexual preferences. His scale goes as follows:
 
1. Exclusively heterosexual.
2. Predominantly heterosexual, but incidentally heterosexual.
3. Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual.
4. Equally heterosexual and homosexual.
5. Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual.
6. Predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual.
7. Exclusively homosexual.
 
Though seven categories may be a bit much, they do serve to re-evaluate normative classification of our sexual preferences and extend flexibility to our sexuality, which was hitherto unheard of.
So baby, are you a 1 or a 5 tonight?