Everybody's Sin Is Nobody's Sin
Female Sexuality and Liberation Through Alfred Kinsey's Sex Reports
Generally regarded as a rather dull decade of pristine houses, conservative values, and severe morality, the 1950s appear monotonous in this history books, compared to the decades that surround it. Yet, it is within this subverted American era that a revolution of epic proportions occurs: a sexual liberation of females. Though, as one could imagine, the severe temperament of the times attempted to destabilize this sexual liberation—especially a woman’s sexual liberation—by overly generating and perpetuating the notion of the nuclear family with the desexualized mother and wife. Though, as history has proven, revolutions can seldom be quenched. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey published a work of literature that rocked the very foundation of American suburbia and picked at America’s tightly woven moral stitching. Published amidst great controversy Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, dealt with the topic of sex. With the onslaught of Kinsey's book, the seeds of the sexual liberation of women were sown, ready to ravish the unsuspecting United States. The aftermath of said revolution left the States so fundamentally altered, that every facet of American life was affected. Though, the lingering effects of Kinsey's research will only be truly felt during the 1960s, when females begin to grow weary of their role in society—particularly concerning their sexuality.
Surrounded by a whirlwind of controversy, Kinsey is the 2004 tell-all biography of America's foremost sexologist, Alfred Kinsey. Detailed and informative, Kinsey offers the background information on how the field of sexology came to be instituted. Commencing with Kinsey's humble roots as a professor of entomologist at the University of Indiana, Kinsey takes an interesting approach in detailing how the field of sexology was pioneered in the 1940s and 1950s. Obsessed with the lifecycle of the gallwasp, Kinsey's initial interest was discovering one million different types of the gallwasp, a task which he successfully committed with the help of his student, and future wife, Clara McMillan (Kinsey). One could arguably say that Clara was the beginning of Kinsey's sex research, for after years of harshly oppressive and incredibly uninformative information on the subject of intercourse, Kinsey was unable to properly copulate with her on their wedding night (Kinsey). Driven into the office of a physician, Kinsey and Clara were alerted to how inaccurate and misleading all previously published literature on sex truly was (Kinsey). With generations of young adults being deluded, Kinsey turned from his rather dull field of entomology and created the field of human sex research—what we now know as sexology (Kinsey).
Needless to say, it is Alfred Kinsey who sets the stage for the revamped feminine image. Being mass culture’s most notorious sexologist, Kinsey’s reports on sexuality created a frenzy of publicity and media attention (Kinsey). When Kinsey published the first half of his outrageous and renowned Kinsey Report, the tightly guarded taboo that was sex, was proverbially blown out of the water and into the public sphere (Kinsey). With Kinsey’s exceptionally detailed reports, he proved that thousands of Americans, all across the country, actually enjoyed a variety of sexual practices (Kinsey). Ranging from sadomasochism to pre-marital sex to sexual orientation, Kinsey’s books (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female) did what no other books had ever done—they propelled people to talk about sex (Kinsey). Suddenly, with meticulously documented statistics from a variety of different sources, people began open discourses on sex.
It is the information contained within the Kinsey Reports that created a media frenzy when it was first released (Kinsey). The wildly controversial Kinsey raised alarms in 2004 with its highly provocative depictions and representation of taboo subject matters such as homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality and masturbation (Kinsey). The breadth of Kinsey's research was accumulated through mass interviews that he and his colleagues administered in the 1940s (Kinsey). Kinsey devised a questionnaire, which contained incredibly detailed and private information concerning the sexual practices of people (Kinsey). Kinsey was especially interested in the lesser-known sexual idiosyncrasies, (such as homosexuality), and personally interviewed all who were deemed socially deviant (Kinsey). In 1948, when Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published, Kinsey's notoriety for uncovering male sex practices was cemented (Kinsey). Yet, it is with the advent of his 1953 follow up report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, where Kinsey and the film become fractured.
It is in the depictions of the sexual practices of women that Kinsey finds his downfall. Though, what is fascinating is that Kinsey's research—horribly rejected by the conservative mentality of the1950s—will help usher in the incredibly pivotal second wave feminism of the early 1960s. Although Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was a commercial success, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was met with a much harder critique, for, as Clara summaries, "you told [the public] their grandmothers and daughters are masturbating, having premarital sex, [and] sex with each other. What did you expect?" (Kinsey). The concept that females were experimenting with sex and their bodies was highly unaccepted in the 1950s. Women were regarded as androgynous matrons of the household who, as Friedan puts it,
"[were taught] how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents" (Friedan).
Calling it, "the problem that had no name", Friedan opens a discourse on femininity and sexuality that Kinsey propagated with his reports (Friedan). Friedan discusses sexuality as a facet of the problems that confines femininity (Friedan). Through Kinsey's work, women began to embrace the options that come with sexuality. As one woman says in Kinsey, "after I read your book I realized how many other women were in the same situation. I mustered the courage to talk to my friend and she told me, to my surprise, that the feelings were mutual" (Kinsey).
Published in 1963, Friedan's breakthrough The Feminine Mystique denounced the notion that women were merely housekeepers and mothers, and strongly encouraged women to participate in activities that did not, in any way, shape, or form, relate back to the household (Friedan). Asking the all-important question, "Is this all", Friedan’s book became one of, if not the, defining text of second-wave feminism, acting as a uniting cry for the dissatisfaction of the modern women (Friedan). Kinsey's research is absolutely crucial in Friedan's work, for even though Kinsey had no intention of rallying women together, his works exposed the previously unexplored duality of women. Despite being largely rejected by the public, Kinsey's reports on female sexuality provided ample statistics and proof that women were moving away from the traditionalist nuclear family image and mentality. As Friedan states, "over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire—no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity" (Friedan). With Kinsey's questionnaires, females found their voices and utilized them to shatter to preconceived notion of female sexuality.
All in all, the impact of Alfred Kinsey's research on Friedan's work is momentous. Although the link is a subtle one, Kinsey's revolutionary human sex research provided the platform in which Friedan and all other second wave feminists in the 1960s needed to proclaim their messages. Kinsey revealed the schism in society by conduction meticulously crafted surveys and interviews that revealed there was much turmoil and dissatisfaction brewing under the pristine surface of the 1950s America. By symbolically and literally outing America's sex habits, people could finally remove the oppressive scrutiny of their upbringing and embrace their inner desires. For women, urges and longings for a different path are challenged and overcome—and they owe it all to a little sex doctor and his million gallwasps.
Works Cited
Kinsey. Dir. Bill Condon. Perfs. Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Peter Sarsgaard. Film.
Qwerty Films, 2004.
Friedan, Betty. "The Feminine Mystique." 1968.
http://www.hnet.org/~hst203/documents/friedan1.html (March 10, 2008).
