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

Three. "Much the Same Desires as Men": Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and the “American Woman”

8 6 three “Much the Same Desires as Men” Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and the “American Woman” SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE had prompted a public uproar and made American sexual behavior a popular subject of discussion among scientists, politicians, and commentators on popular culture. Five years later, anticipating the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the public braced itself for even more shocking revelations. While the first volume had spawned unprecedented coverage of Americans’ sexual behavior and focused attention on the gap between moral ideals and actual practices , the second volume entered into an already heated discourse on sex in the United States. In addition, its focus on a specific group—white women who were predominantly middle-class and married—automatically rendered its results, in the words of one magazine, “stronger stuff” than those of the first volume.1 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female confirmed some long-standing ideas about women’s sexuality, but it also allowed for the development and articulation of new, often conflicting theories of female desire and behavior . In their responses to the report, which received even more popular attention than had its predecessor, experts addressed the question of what kinds of female sexual behavior fostered or threatened public interests. Theories of female heterosexuality had often relied on an opposition between “good” and “bad” women, defined as sexually chaste versus sexually active. Although this dichotomy was still powerful, its influence was on the wane and, ultimately, it could not serve to satisfactorily explain the findings of the Kinsey Report and what women’s changing sexual behavior meant culturally to postwar Americans. In fact, experts’ reliance upon the figure of the average American woman helped to call into question the very existence of a uniform female heterosexuality or a normal femininity. Popular readings of and responses to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female revealed a growing anxiety about the stability and naturalness of traditional female roles and the sexual double standard. As Americans discussed the volume, their popular ideal of the average American woman— white, middle-class, usually married, and presumably heterosexual—was increasingly contested. The reception of the Kinsey Report on female sexuality shows widening rifts in this image: the gulf between women’s prescribed social and sexual roles and their actual desires and behaviors could no longer be ignored. the cultural context of female sexuality Much of the commentary that anticipated and greeted Sexual Behavior in the Human Female insisted that female sexuality had hitherto been an unexamined topic, but neither Kinsey’s study nor the ideas about female sexuality that countered it emerged from a void. Insistence on the topic’s novelty allowed critics to position themselves as daring moderns and to link contemporary sexual behavior to recent shifts in American culture rather than take a longer view. Earlier popular and scholarly works on women’s social roles and on female sexuality had familiarized readers with major theories. Within this literature, two different paradigms of female sexuality struggled for dominance. In the first, women were portrayed as passive and sexually quiescent; in the second, their sexual desires were seen as rapacious and socially destructive. Both visions were shaped by the increasing popular interest in and acceptance of psychological thinking. Although the number of Americans actually in analysis was never large, psychoanalysis reached a peak in popularity after World War II, as therapeutic culture and expert advice were popularly celebrated. The period’s emphasis on personal fulfillment and happiness emphasized sexual pleasure, as did the postwar celebration of marriage. High expectations for personal life had been an important feature of upper-middle-class intellectual life for some time, but during the postwar years the audience for these ideas expanded. As the children and grandchildren of immigrants formed families—or, as noted in later 8 7 “ m u c h t h e s a m e d e s i r e s a s m e n ” chapters, explored same-sex attractions—unprecedented numbers embraced an ethos of exploration and personal entitlement in their personal lives, including their sexual lives. Whether they sought the familial happiness promised by women’s magazines by participating in quizzes and reading columns designed to evaluate their degree of happiness and adjustment or by exploring their psyches with representatives of the burgeoning mental health professions, Americans’ intense scrutiny of the self became a leitmotif...