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

Two. "A Missing Sense of Maleness": Male Heterosexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and the Crisis of American Masculinity

5 4 two “A Missing Sense of Maleness” Male Heterosexuality,Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and the Crisis of American Masculinity when SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE appeared in 1948, reaction to the volume was instantaneous and impassioned. Kinsey’s study spurred a national referendum on sexual behavior, prompted new research on related topics, and provided ammunition for social reformers of all stripes. The report also, however, affected Americans’ understanding of gender norms and relations, focusing popular attention on the relation between ideal codes of masculinity and actual male sexual behavior, and promoting discussion of what it meant to be a man in the atomic age. Kinsey and his team, as one social scientist put it, might be “mainly concerned with a descriptive account of sex habits,” but their data and the public’s reception of it “reveal more of the cultural dynamics in such behavior than they perhaps realize.”1 In the process of providing a blueprint of American men’s sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male illuminated what the lawyer Morris Ernst called Americans’ “cultural fantasies” of masculinity and male sexuality.2 Kinsey’s book took on meaning for readers and reviewers at a time of widespread concern about the state of American masculinity. A decade after the report’s appearance, the historian and critic Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared that the contemporary United States was suffering from “a missing sense of maleness.”3 The nation, the critic warned darkly in an article titled “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” was increasingly “more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem. The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”4 Schlesinger’s sense that masculinity was imperiled was shared by many other commentators on postwar society, and it is within the context of this discourse that I analyze postwar debates about male sexuality and national character. To many observers, it seemed that the social and cultural shifts transforming the nation posed a profound threat to American men. In their discussions of topics as varied as American politics, labor, leisure, and family life, authorities questioned whether masculinity was in decline. In contrast to the volatile and often problematic terrain of femininity, the existence and lineaments of a specifically male identity had often been assumed to be self-evident and obvious to the observer. Certain kinds of men—heterosexual, white, able-bodied, and financially comfortable— held unquestioned title to masculinity, with more problematic modes of masculinity represented by those whose sexuality, race, body, or class placed them outside of the normative ideal. The postwar years, however, saw attention paid to maleness that was unprecedented in its scope. Theories of marriage and family, patterns of class formation and consumption , and mass culture all focused popular and expert attention on the shifting boundaries and meanings of masculinity. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authorities had periodically decried the “feminization” of civic culture, bemoaning the loss of traditional masculine vigor and aggression. As the historian Nancy Bristow suggests, declarations that middle-class white masculinity was in crisis “continued a lengthy and often anxious public conversation about maleness that has been an almost constant feature of American culture since its inception.”5 As this conversation ebbed and flowed, each anxious rediscovery of the nation’s imperiled masculinity addressed new themes, and its specific trajectory could differ dramatically over time. Depressionera discussions of masculinity had focused on the effects of unemployment , while World War II discourses addressed war’s emotional and physical effects on soldiers. Postwar discourse on masculinity, by contrast, was notable for its intensity, its expansiveness, and its focus on the plight of average heterosexual white men. Although expert and popular opinions over what exactly had “gone badly wrong with the American” male differed, commentators agreed that American men’s public and private lives were undergoing fundamental 5 5 “ a m i s s i n g s e n s e o f m a l e n e s s ” change. They described the postwar male as a subject whose definitions of masculinity, sense of self, and sexual behavior all differed dramatically from his father’s. Beginning well before the war’s end, social scientists questioned how American GIs would adjust to peacetime...