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

Introduction

Introduction 1 in 1948 and 1953, the United States was rocked by events that observers compared to the explosion of the atomic bomb: the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, respectively, popularly known as the Kinsey Reports.1 These two massive sex surveys, compiled by the Indiana University zoologist Alfred Kinsey and a team of researchers, graphically presented the results of interviews with thousands of American men and women, including information on their age at first intercourse, number of partners, history of premarital and extramarital sex, incidence of homosexuality and lesbianism, and virtually every other imaginable sexual statistic. The studies’ findings shocked experts and the public alike, as Kinsey demonstrated that much of Americans’ sexual activity took place outside of marriage, and that the majority of the nation’s citizens had violated accepted moral standards as well as state and federal laws in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female struck a nerve within the American public. Despite their complex graphs and charts and abstruse scientific language, the volumes became best-sellers and spurred unprecedented public discussion of national sexual practices and ideologies. Praised by some experts for their breadth, precision , and dispassionate approach to human sexuality, the books were also the targets of virulent criticism and were widely condemned as immoral, perverse, and damaging to the reputation of the United States. Upon the appearance of the first volume, Kinsey was simultaneously hailed as a liberator , denounced as a pornographer, compared to the scientific martyrs Darwin and Copernicus, and declared a Communist bent on destroying the American family, all themes that would persist in discussions of his work.2 Public uproar over the volumes spread well beyond the world of science, as millions of Americans purchased and discussed them, rendering the reports’ vocabulary and sensational findings a part of everyday knowledge. Kinsey’s statistics on pre- and extramarital sex prompted a national forum on the state of the nation’s morals and marriages, and his findings on the extent of same-sex sexual behaviors spearheaded debate about homosexuality in the United States. Omnipresent in postwar mass culture, the volumes featured centrally in discussions of virtually every topic imaginable, as references to the reports abounded in postwar political coverage, social science and medical writing, general-interest journalism, and even fiction. This book examines the cultural dynamics and social dilemmas that informed the construction of American sexual character—a term I use to describe sexual patterns and attitudes that were understood as uniquely American—between the close of World War II and the early 1960s. It was initially spurred by my curiosity about why a sex survey repeatedly cropped up in discussions of topics that it ostensibly had nothing to do with. While scanning postwar books and articles, I was repeatedly struck by the pervasiveness of the two reports: articles on gender, marriage, and the family devoted extensive attention to the studies, but so did texts probing the effects of suburbanization, assessing the national zeitgeist, comparing Americans to their counterparts in other countries, and analyzing the state of contemporary theater. As I noted more such examples, I was struck by how often and how prominently the findings of the reports, along with public and media responses to them, featured in discussions of American society and national identity after World War II. Postwar commentators saw Kinsey’s research as expressing profound truths not only about Americans’ sexual behavior but also about the nation itself, as charts and graphs from the two studies were brought to bear on analyses of America’s class mobility and race relations, attitudes to work and leisure, and international political position. In brief, this book examines the processes by which Kinsey’s statistical data became cultural narrative . It is not a history of the reports per se; rather, it maps the broader field of American sexual character by looking at themes and tensions in social scientists’ and cultural critics’ writings about sex in the United States. i n t r o d u c t i o n 2 It examines the ways in which normative categories such as heterosexuality, masculinity, femininity, and Americanness itself were constructed and questioned. In the process, it chronicles some of the microstruggles that constituted the meaning of sex, including popular responses to the two Kinsey Reports, discussions of the...