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164 Conclusion I am almost certain that the results of your studies with Cynips, et al., helped to give you further and more profound insight into the possible activities of man, particularly the sexual life of man which . . . plays such an astounding role in man’s social and psychological nature. Edmund E. Jeffers to Alfred C. Kinsey, January 31, 1948 Kinsey’s life and work, and the intertwined nature of the two, continue to draw academic and public interest. One of the reasons for that ongoing interest is the difficulty in classifying the man himself. Many are intrigued by the highly sexed and voyeuristic Kinsey, who quietly filmed sex acts—his own and those of many others, including his own staff and various sadomasochists—in his attic, while his wife Clara served coffee and persimmon pudding to the tired participants after they put their clothes back on. For others, he fits the image of the scientist in tireless pursuit of truth, working himself to death for the cause. To his harshest critics, he was an abuser of the innocent, proven or not. Sexologists see him as a founder of the field and an inspiration, despite the mistakes that mark his work by present standards. For entomologists, his work has become part of the history of the genus Cynips. And for the many people who have found their place on the Kinsey scale, he is an architect who provided them a key to one aspect of their identity. There are other Kinseys, too: the collector of six or seven million gall wasps, the loving husband, the father who gave matterof -fact sex education to his children, the diligent college and graduate student, Conclusion 165 the closeted bisexual, the man staying up late to punch cards full of orgasms into big, noisy, punched-card machines. He was the interviewer who got so many people to tell him, a stranger, every fragment of their sexual histories. He wrote the story of those histories in two volumes, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, books that irrevocably shaped the gendered and sexualized world in the United States, Western Europe, and beyond. Kinsey, as a person, is difficult to place in one category. The intention of this book was not, of course, to be a biography of all of these Kinseys, jostling together in literature, film, and people’s imaginations. It was rather to draw attention to Kinsey the classifier, who wove his academic life together with organizational techniques, who made the sciences of taxonomy and classification into arts. This book has illustrated how Kinsey’s passion for classification structured his scholarship from his earliest graduate career through the Female volume. He organized vast collections of all sorts of objects: Mexican oak galls, poisonous and nonpoisonous mushrooms, photographs of women in leather fetish gear, erotic Japanese prints, and the number of orgasms from masturbation per week for unmarried white men between eighteen and twenty-five years of age with a high school education employed as skilled laborers . He classified such a wide range of entities not only for the sake of making small areas of a wide world comprehensible to himself and to his readers; his patterns of classification were also scientific techniques with a broad range of further aims, including to trace the evolution of cynipids in the Northern Hemisphere, to teach high school students to recognize evolution happening all around them, to show residents of the Northeast how to turn “wild” foods into domestic consumables, to look for patterns of how sexual interest manifested in visual culture, and to argue against unjust discrimination regarding the consensual sexual lives of teenagers and adults. Kinsey’s ability to use classification to illustrate and to explain his perception of the natural world on widely different scales, with widely different entities, shows that he could wield a general scientific tool in the service of different ontological purposes. Studying Kinsey’s classification of gall wasps, edible wild plants, and human sexual behaviors over his research career reveals how he used techniques of data gathering, organization, and categorizing as part of his efforts to comprehend the natural world. In adhering to his views that nakedeye observation was the best means of ensuring scientific objectivity, he and his assistants produced extensive entomological and sexological works with paper- and machine-based classificatory technologies. He repeatedly affirmed his faith in observation as the method that would come closest to revealing scientific truth.1 That observation manifested...

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