SEXUALITY FROM ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE: KINSEYAN SEX
Alfred Kinsey stated, “This is first of all a report on what people do, which raises no question of what they should do.” This statement became translated quickly by others to, “This is an outline of what you ought to or could be doing.” The second perspective was now beginning.
The Kinsey reports on male (1948) and female (1953) sexual behavior remain the most complete and reliable references on human sexuality. There has never been and likely will never be another work like them.
Kinsey’s background was in the study of insects. He spent more than twenty years classifying tiny gall wasps. He was a taxonomist who valued size and distribution of sample. He classified more than four million insects throughout the United States and Mexico. If Ellis thought in terms of process, Kinsey thought in terms of classification, or categories. The perspective on sex was changing. We thought now not only about what we did, but where we “fit” compared to other people and new sexual categories.
In the male study, he identified six categories of sexual behavior—”outlets,” he called them—that related to factors that influenced oudet. The energy orientation of the first perspective is clearly present, and “energy-outlet style” was the focus. The six categories were masturbation, nocturnal emission, heterosexual petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual behavior, and sex with animals or other species. A second-perspective vocabulary was evolving. Words such as “leaping” and “devouring” were replaced with “petting,” “mounting,” and the “seeking of outlets.” In some ways, animal sexual behavior became the model for human sex. If animals did it, then we ought to be able to do it. The focus changed from the romantic to the rural.
How are you doing in your category-four behavior? We had started to think in a partialistic, not holistic, fashion about sex. Kinsey studied orgasms as his exclusive measure of a completed sexual experience. Orgasms provided a category; either you had one or you didn’t, so it could be classified. The second perspective brought with it an “all or none” orientation to sexual expression, a less romantic view, a Sergeant Friday ism of “just the facts, ma’am.”
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