SEXIS WRONG

Everybody’s Sin Is
Nobody’s Sin
Alfred Kinsey and the Breaking of Sexual Silence
David Steinberg
In the late 1930s, Alfred Kinsey had what he thought was a
rather simple idea: Given that no one had the slightest idea
what people really did and did not do sexually, and given—as
he discovered from a questionnaire he distributed to his students—that
a lack of simple information about sex was causing
massive confusion and heartache, why not do a survey
that would provide some hard information about people’s
sexual practices? Why not talk about the unmentionable (sex)
and replace sexual ignorance and myth with sexual information
and education?
A simple idea, perhaps, but hardly a simple task. How could a
group of researchers hope to get people to talk truthfully about
their sexuality—about what they did sexually, what they fantasized
about, how they felt about it all—when hardly anyone
felt free to talk to anyone about sex in the first place?
Kinsey, a dedicated rationalist with precious little understanding
of social graces but a disarmingly straightforward way of
talking openly about sexual matters, believed that with sincerity
and obvious scientific objectivity people
could be put sufficiently at ease that they
would disclose their sexual histories, their sexual
feelings, their innermost sexual secrets.
Kinsey’s basic method—a contribution to sexual
science as profound and long-lasting as the
data he produced—was to transcend socially
enforced sexual silence so directly and unapologetically
that the very act created a bubble of
sexual sanity inside a sexually crazy world, a bubble in which
speaking honestly and openly about sex was not only permitted
but even highly valued and encouraged.
psychological judgment behind, since it is the fear of being
morally or psychologically judged that causes people to keep
sexual secrets in the first place.
Engage subjects personally and directly, Kinsey explained to
his staff. Make clear that their information is to be used entirely
for science, not for prurience, and that anything they
confide will be held in strictest confidence. Most of all, demonstrate
to subjects—by the nature of the questions asked,
by your own demeanor, tone of voice, body posture, facial
expressions—that whatever they reveal about their sexuality
will be received sympathetically and respectfully, without
judgment, without scorn, in the spirit of objectivity and scientific
neutrality.
Even if interviewers could make their subjects comfortable
and trusting, there was a second problem Kinsey needed to
address. What about representative sampling? How could
Kinsey get anything like a representative sample of all Americans
when he would be lucky to get a significant number of
Kinsey’s basic method was to
transcend socially enforced
sexual silence so directly and
unapologetically that the very act
created a bubble of sexual sanity
inside a sexually crazy world.
people to talk to him at all? Obviously, whoever chose to give
Kinsey’s researchers their sexual histories would be a selfselected,
statistically skewed group.
If one wanted to hear people’s sexual truths, Kinsey understood,
the most important thing was to leave both moral and
Kinsey’s response—a response acknowledged today to be
only partly helpful—was to make his sample as large as pos-
EVERYBODY’S SIN IS NOBODY’S SIN 57