by Alton L. Blakeslee
[Alton Blakeslee covered science for The Associated Press from 1952 to 1978. Among the papers he left behind at his death about a year ago was an unfinished manuscript containing recollections of science journalism in an era that now seems almost unrecognizably remote. Portions of the manuscript have been made available to ScienceWriters by his daughter, Sandra, now a writer for The New York Times.]
Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey was probably the bravest scientist I ever knew. He dared to study SEX in a Puritanical America where mere mention of the dreadful word often shocked polite society. It was a time, 1930-40, when the surgeon-general of the U.S. Public Health Service was instantly cut off in a radio address when he said “syphilis” instead of “a social disease,” whatever that puzzling euphemism conjured up in listeners’ minds. When a newspaper story said a woman had been viciously beaten, suffering multiple injuries, but assured its readers that she had “not been criminally assaulted.” If newspapers did use the word “rape,” it was only in commodity-market reports. Sex education in schools did not exist.
Kinsey, professor of zoology at Indiana University, became bothered that he couldn’t answer students’ questions about human sexuality. In his college days, when his roommate asked what he should do about the awful fact that he masturbated, Kinsey could only reply that they should kneel and pray.
So Alfred Kinsey, scientist, set out to learn what American men and women actually did in the bedroom (and elsewhere), by persuading thousands of them to answer intimate questions about their actual deeds and beliefs. He set up his Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, and enlisted a staff.
Their first book, detailing male behavior, was rather a bombshell. It reported, for example, that some 95 per cent of men could be jailed under various laws for acts they considered quite normal.
In 1953, Kinsey was ready with his eagerly awaited volume concerning females, based on interviews with nearly 6,000 women. To give reporters ample time for reviews, Kinsey invited successive groups, some 10 at a time, to Bloomington, to read galley proofs, over a few days’ time.
What to do with it? Touchtype as fast as you can, as much as you can, since you don’t yet know what you will want to select. Indiana in July is a bug heaven. Typing with a desk light in a student-vacated dormitory with NO screen on the window, my typewriter keys killed two moths. Bits of them still remain on my notes.
Back home, I was instructed by the executive editor to hold the PMS break, Aug. 20, to 600 words, and the night lead to 400. I just couldn’t obey. Sometimes you get the sense that some story is the powerfully significant opening of things to come. Like the first A-bomb. The first transistor. The first organ transplant. Cracking of the genetic code.
Just so, for me, was Kinsey’s work, a powerful stimulant to the so-called sexual revolution, a challenge for people to take their blinders off concerning sex, to drop their fears, embarrassments, evasions, shames and guilts, and braggadocio, too.
The stories were straightforward, clinical where they had to be, publicly acknowledging that men had penises, and women had vaginas and clitorises. But there was only one “orgasm” in 5,300 words. Otherwise, out of deference to sensitivities of the day, I drew on euphemisms such as sexual climax, or satisfaction, or self-stimulation.
The Kinsey female book hit like handing editors a live grenade with the pin pulled.
Kinsey found much that went against current conceptions or wishful thinking, or “things that shouldn’t be mentioned in public.”
Like (this was about 50 years ago) 25 percent of wives commit adultery, while 50 percent of men do. At marriage, about one third of women have never had a sexual climax; practically all men do. Some 10 percent of brides are pregnant on their wedding day. Human sex lives are as different and distinctive as fingerprints (if questioned down to the last belief or act).
The woman called a nymphomaniac is too often simply someone who has more orgasms than the doctor or other person she is talking to. Most women reach a peak of sexual interest and activity in their late 20’s, but maintain it (stay young in sex) to 50 or 60 or so, while men peak about 18, then decline steadily. This, Kinsey said, could be a reason for some marital sexual maladjustments.
The only basic difference between men and women is mental or psychological. Men are more aroused by sights, talk or anticipation of sex. Women are more aroused than men over romantic movies, reading romantic books, or being bitten.
Kinsey said women who have never had sexual experience can’t understand what sex means to other people, especially men. Yet some such women had a hand in writing laws concerning sexual behavior.
It’s not true that the sex response is more emotionally packed for a wife than a husband, Kinsey said.
Ten per cent of wives remain frigid all their lives. Some 14 percent reported multiple orgasms during a single sexual act. One woman said she could give herself 100 climaxes an hour. A woman of 90 was still having regular sexual activity.
And so it went.
Accused by some of destroying moral values, Kinsey in fact wrote that people at times have tried schemes to abandon the family and home, but “none of these schemes has provided satisfactory substitutes for the home… History confirms the importance of family.”
Kinsey also said, “The church, home and school are the chief sources if sexual inhibitions,” generating “feelings of guilt which many females carry with them into their marriages.”
Newspapers divided over whether to print the Kinsey female report. Yellowed editorial page clips in my files tell of their dilemma. The Miami Daily News concluded that much detail could “well be omitted for the editors’ own teen-age sons and daughters and that many readers would feel the same way.” So, it added, “certain language is not going to be found in these columns today or hereafter,” (Today, AIDS, condoms?)
The Houston Chronicle regarded the Kinsey book as “an insult to American women,” on the basis of a small percentage saying they had been guilty of marital infidelity. “Ballyhooed” as it has been, “it might well be dismissed as another bit of salacious literature.”
The Indianapolis Star declared “We strongly deny the degradation of American womanhood.”
In eight columns across the top of Page One, the Jersey Journal in Jersey City declared:
THE KINSEY REPORT IS ARROGANT BUNK!
“In The Guise of ‘Scientific’ Research, Basic Morality Is Attacked”
And the lead went on to say: “Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey has dropped an atomic bomb designed to destroy what is left of sex morality in the United States.”
“READ IT TODAY!” the Newark Star-Ledger invited readers, editing the Kinsey story. Just to the left was a two-column editorial, also on page one, saying that Kinsey dropped a bomb that “falls squarely on every structure of sex morality. When the cloud of destruction rises, little may be left standing intact. Sex will have lost its intimate personal character and become the most casual and common of all biological activities of the human animal.” This editorial said Kinsey “roundly assailed” the church, home, and “conventions of a ‘moralistic society,’ calling their influences ‘bad.’”
But, deciding to publish “an important scientific article,” the Plainfield, N.J. Courier-Journal called it “an important step in the trend toward a franker attitude toward all of society’s problems.”
The Patriot, in Harrisburg, Pa., declared “Kinsey provides a challenge to all who have maintained a dangerously secretive stand on the teaching of sex relations.” The challenge to parents, health professionals and clergy is “to depart from their apparently insufficient attitude in providing adequate information on this forbidden topic, in order that the younger generation may learn about sex without prudery and without the salacious overtones provided in conversations from uninformed sources.”
The Los Angeles Times published “because we believe that the first step toward better family and community adjustment is knowing the facts. Misconceptions and fears have caused many personal tragedies…We think the good to be gained by publishing these findings far outweighs the reluctance of some people toward mentioning the subject at all.”
Professionally, the Kinsey book stirred angry criticism from psychiatrists, some of whom regarded sex as their special province alone. They pontificated without benefit of research to support their pronouncements, such as insisting upon a significant difference between a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm. Kinsey’s women reported no such difference.
The second story began: “Ashamed and troubled, a young college student confessed his secret—that he habitually masturbated—to a classmate, appealing for advice on overcoming his ‘weakness.’
Somewhat shocked, his friend could only suggest that they kneel and pray. The youth suggesting prayer was Alfred Kinsey.”
Turning the story in to the feature editor, I went off on a two-month assignment in Japan, India and Vietnam, and a story-visit to my daughter, Sandy, serving in the Peace Corps in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. When I returned, the sex series had not been moved out to member papers.
That series quoted Dr. Paul H. Gebhardt, then executive director of Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research: “We are now past the stage of counting noses and orgasms. The second stage is to study sex in terms of its meanings to the individual, the interaction between individuals and society, sex in its emotional and psychological context…. The sex act is what you make it; intrinsically, it has no meaning of its own.”
Kinsey certainly opened the way to serious studies of sexuality. Along came William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson of St. Louis with research on detailed physiology of sexual activities, mentioning penis, clitoris, vaginal lubrication, sex at ages 70 and 80, taking pictures within the vagina to determine the effectiveness of contraceptives.
Masters and Johnson told me they could never have done their research without Kinsey’s precedence. “In our clinical work, we expect to grow fundamentally into the ‘why’ of the sexual response, not the ‘what.’ For when a society says, ‘Fix something that is going wrong’, we have to have facts upon which to proceed.”
Kinsey’s war, and that of numerous others, is far from victory, or out of the closet. AIDS and herpes and unwed teen-agers mothers are forcing more frankness and reality.
Just imagine the New York Times running this story before Kinsey:
“By Judith Cummins
“Brussels, Oct. 3 [1986] The Second International Whores Convention ended a three-day meeting here with an appeal for universal use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.”
Just 30 words, right between the eyes.
Kinsey was worth the 5,300 words, as a pioneer. He sure kicked the ostrich, in a most available place.