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142 6 The Boundaries of Sexual Categorization The present volume constitutes the second progress report from the study of human sexual behavior which we have had under way here at Indiana University for some fifteen years. It has been a fact-finding survey in which an attempt has been made to discover what people do sexually, what factors may account for their patterns of sexual behavior, how their sexual experiences have affected their lives, and what social significance there may be in each type of behavior. —Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE, released to the public the first week of January 1948, immediately generated numerous responses from readers across the United States and the world. The twenty-five thousand articles gathered by the newspaper clipping service that the Institute for Sex Research employed eventually filled seventy-two oversized binders.1 The Male volume sold 185,000 copies in the first two months of publication.2 Academic criticism of and interest in the Male volume was similarly extensive and swift across numerous academic fields, including a special conference organized by the American Social Hygiene Association devoted specifically to the volume (which Kinsey did not attend).3 Kinsey became an instantly recognizable American household name; he received thousands of letters, and suddenly all kinds of people wanted access to him—offering their own sex histories or records of activity, wanting to confess their sexual indiscretions, asking for an interview to gain deeper insight into his research, or seeking counseling for personal sexual problems. Meanwhile, he and the ISR team kept taking histories of men and women, reading new research, and collecting art, books, and ephemera. They also began to research and write the Female volume, the second of the nine volumes that Kinsey had The Boundaries of Sexual Categorization 143 envisioned from the outset of his sex research project.4 The research team knew that they would break new ground with another large study, now with 5,940 of the women’s histories that they had gathered through January 1, 1950. Pomeroy remembered, “As we began to correlate the data for the Female volume, we experienced the exciting feelings of discovery in a relatively unexplored field that had occurred as we prepared the first volume.”5 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was published on August 20, 1953, with great fanfare. Some writers dubbed it “K-Day,” comparing the book’s release to dropping an atomic bomb.6 The Female volume aimed to address broad questions regarding human sexual behavior: “discover[ing] what people do sexually, what factors may account for their patterns of sexual behavior, how their sexual experiences have affected their lives, and what social significance there may be in each type of behavior.” That was a more far-reaching set of goals than those of the Male volume, which lists only the first of those two goals in its opening paragraph.7 From the Female volume’s first paragraph onward, readers knew that it addressed a more extensive set of issues, including not only what people did sexually and why but also how those experiences influenced their lives as well as the wider social impact and meaning of those experiences. Each of the volume’s chapters on sexual behavior has in its second part a long summary comparing the statistics of the Male volume to those just discussed from women. Those lengthy side-by-side comparisons encourage readers to look for patterns and discrepancies in the interview data. Though the book is called Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, it contains analysis of sexual behaviors and bodies across the human race. The Female volume, in its three parts: “History and Method” (three chapters), “Types of Sexual Activity among Females” (ten chapters), and “Comparisons of Female and Male” (five chapters), highlights Kinsey’s ability to integrate material from an even larger range of sources than he had used for the Male volume, including not only his interview data but also numerous other resources and texts: over one thousand secondary sources in English, Spanish, French, German , Dutch, Latin, and Japanese. Kinsey and his increasing number of professional staff members and advisers more than doubled their sources from the Male volume to the Female volume, from 597 to 1,217 items. A larger set of sources and more interview data necessitated a more comprehensive and sophisticated approach to classification than the Male volume had needed. “Even though it has been difficult...

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