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

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in his 1999 biography of Alfred C. Kinsey, observes that "America is at once the most licentious culture since Rome and the most puritan country in the world."¹ Miriam Reumann's study of how Kinsey's reports were received in the United States reads like the result of a massive national Rorschach test on American attitudes toward sexuality in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Long-cherished hopes and fears about female chastity and virile heterosexual masculinity were revealed for what they were: fantasies without grounding in hard-nosed scientific data. Unsurprisingly, the furor after the publication of the best-selling work, especially of the female volume, tells us almost as much about American sexual character as the Kinsey studies themselves did. Reumann does a good job of portraying the details of the kind of double-vision about sex in American culture to which Gathorne-Hardy referred in 1999.

While it seems counterintuitive that the men who won World War II and then went home to father the largest age cohort in American history should have doubted their virility, Reumann presents convincing data (pp. 54–85) that there was a "postwar masculinity crisis" (p. 59) to which the Kinsey male volume added fuel when it was published in 1948. Society was becoming feminized, critics wailed; men had lost their identity; and, perhaps worst of all, homosexuality, like Communism, was lurking behind every corner, even in the respectable middle-class suburbs. Reumann quotes liberally—and revealingly—from the tidal wave of homophobic panic that swept over popular magazines and newspapers in response to the data on same-sex relationships that appeared in Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The concept of latent homosexuality, widely discussed in the popular press and in the fiction of the day, cast doubt on even the most hairy-chested specimens of virility, and for confused American males it raised the possibility of an attraction to their own sex of which they themselves were unaware. Reumann's depictions of this nonrational monsters-under-the-bed reaction reminded this reader of General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, with his fears for the corruption and depletion of America's "precious bodily fluids." Given the historical timing, it is even possible that some of this dialog was inspired in part by the Kinsey debates.

Almost as disturbing as the reports on male sexuality, according to Reumann, was what the 1953 volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, revealed about American women. Social conservatives reeled at data that suggested that half of all women had coitus before marriage, that more than a quarter had extramarital affairs, and that one in five had had an illegal abortion. Desperate for a counterargument, many of those to whom this news was unwelcome reacted as they were to do in 1976 when Shere Hite's Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality was published: the nearly six thousand women surveyed by the researchers could not have been representative. Reumann observes that "these debates about the report offered a graphic version of the deep cultural dualism about women's sexuality that allowed them to be displayed as two groups, one pure and maternal and the other abandoned and actively sexual. What lay at the heart of this division was a deep anxiety that these two drastically different women could not be separated, that they were in fact the same figure" (pp. 102–3). Conservatives could not even make the racist argument that the inclusion of black women had skewed the numbers, for Kinsey and his team had so few data on this group that they decided not to include them.

American Sexual Character is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality, and is practically mandatory for those whose work occupies the space in which science and sexuality...