American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (review)

Miriam G. Reumann's new book, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports, provides an interesting and provocative window into the heated public discussion of American sexuality from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. She argues that this generation of Americans "outstripped earlier generations in the fervor with which they made sexuality a legitimate topic and the extent to which they insisted on its relevance to postwar social problems" (10). To some extent, this unprecedented debate was spurred by the publication of the Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Reumann focuses her analysis not on the reports per se or on the impact of changing sexual mores on various subgroups in American society but rather on the discourse on sexuality the reports helped to engender. While Reumann does examine the content of Kinsey's studies and summarizes their main findings regarding American sexual behaviors, she relies primarily on a wide array of cultural materials and expert opinions, including general interest journalism; more specialized journalistic sources such as women's magazines; fiction, film, and other forms of mass culture; social science, scientific, and medical writing; sexual and marital advice literature; popularizations of Kinsey's findings; and, to a lesser extent, postwar political coverage and commentary.

Reumann argues that contentious debate about American sexuality was intimately connected to "worries about the stability and strength of the nation and its population" during the cold war era (3). This was an important period for the reconfiguration of American nationalism; America imagined itself as uniquely powerful but also feared nuclear annihilation and internal subversion. As Elaine Tyler May and other historians have argued, cold war ideology encompassed notions of superior American consumerism, suburban family life, polarized gender roles, and marital heterosexuality.¹ In a political and cultural context in which "deviant" sexuality became linked with political subversion, Kinsey demonstrated that "the majority of the nation's citizens had violated accepted moral standards . . . in their pursuit of sexual pleasure" through premarital, extramarital, and homosexual sex (1). Worries about American character abounded, as authorities feared that sobriety, dedication to work, family, and civic duty, and sexual chastity were all in decline. Thus sex became linked to civic health, and concepts of national identity, sexuality, and character intersected in postwar culture. In fact, Reumann places the postwar discourse on sexuality within a broader effort to construct an "American sexual character" suitable for Americans in the modern, cold war era. In so doing, she explores the ways in which sexuality was both a legitimate topic in its own right and a vehicle for discussing other issues and anxieties.

Reumann characterizes this extensive cultural conversation regarding American sexuality as passionate, divided, and focused on the relationship of the private sexual practices of average Americans to the broader public interest (25, 33). Commentators on both the Left and the Right disagreed about what normative American sexuality should look like, but most admitted that the nation's traditional moral codes were out of step with new sexual practices, and they "championed the state's interest in regulating or liberating Americans' sexual behaviors" (35). Reumann argues, however, that the labels of Left and Right do not mesh easily with the diverse analyses of American sexuality in this period. Instead, she suggests that "two contrasting ideas about sex" predominated in this discourse. The "optimistic" viewpoint embraced "sexual openness" and insisted that Americans "could understand and perfect their sexual behavior" to the benefit of the nation as a whole. "Enlightened sexual policies," based on modern information regarding sexual variation, could be constructed and would strengthen marriages, increase personal happiness, and serve national interests. A more "pessimistic" viewpoint predicted dangerous social consequences from new sexual freedoms. Acceptance of premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality, activities in conflict with traditional values, would lead to the decline of gender roles and...