Some use an X and Y axis, others map sexuality alongside gender identity, and others focus more on how sexuality can change over a lifetime. In the decades since The Kinsey’s Scale was created, it has been criticized–for excluding asexuality, for instance, or for not including enough numbers on the scale or more nuance–and it has also been built upon. Church leaders denounced the research after it appeared on the cover of the New York Times and TIME Magazine (on the sales of the books Kinsey published, TIME wrote: "Not since Gone With the Wind had booksellers seen anything like it." ) For these reasons, the work was also controversial. “The book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by biologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University, was an utter revelation for a populace living in a time when masturbation was frowned upon, oral sex (even between husband and wife) was illegal in some states, and homosexuality was considered an extremely rare, criminal deviance,” explains one article, reflecting on Kinsey’s scale in the LA Times. It has been credited with helping many lesbian, gay, and bisexual people come out in a time when same-sex relations were still criminalized in America, by affirming that these orientations were more natural and more common than you might, at the time, have thought.
62% of women interviewed masturbated, while half had had premarital sex.Ĭrucially, as a piece of research, it made it difficult for people to argue that sexuality was simply binary. From these interviews, Kinsey found that 92% of men had masturbated, more than half of married men had had an affair and 37% said they’d had some kind of homosexual experience. Kinsey published the scale as part of two publications– Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) – and it was based on thousands of interviews with American men and women about their sex lives. But most famously, Kinsey invented The Kinsey Scale, otherwise known as the Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale, which allowed a person’s sexuality to be rated 0 to 6 – 0 meaning exclusively heterosexual, 3 meaning equally heterosexual and homosexual (so bisexual) and 6 meaning exclusively heterosexual, with the numbers between indicating a grey area. Dr Alfred Kinsey was one of the people to pioneer this idea, and has since been named “the man who invented modern sex”.Īs a sexologist–someone who researches human sexuality–Kinsey was interested in proving that women could experience clitorial pleasure (also a relatively novel idea at the time) and the breadth of sexual practices that couples and individuals really got up to in private.
The idea that sexuality could be on a spectrum, or change over time, felt much more new. In 1948 however, there was a different story.
We have, for instance, have a lot of words to describe the spaces between or falling outside of heterosexuality and homosexuality, like pansexual, demisexual, or “questioning”, to name a few. Today, the idea that sexuality isn’t black and white might not feel so radical to us. The once-groundbreaking model that suggested sexuality could exist on a spectrum.