Inside America's Famous Sex Study

Summary

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Episode Summary: "Inside America's Famous Sex Study"
Release Date: June 17, 2025
Host: Kate Lister
Guest: Historian Donna Drucker

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Introduction to Kinsey's Revolutionary Study

In this compelling episode of Betwixt The Sheets, host Kate Lister delves deep into the controversial and groundbreaking work of Alfred Kinsey, a pioneering figure in sexology. Joined by historian Donna Drucker, the episode explores how Kinsey's research fundamentally altered American perceptions of sexuality and the societal upheavals that followed.

Alfred Kinsey: From Entomology to Sexology

Kate sets the stage in 1948 Bloomington, Indiana, painting a picture of post-war America where traditional values were seemingly unshaken. She introduces Alfred Kinsey, originally an entomologist with a Ph.D. focused on the taxonomy of gall wasps. Drucker explains, "Alfred Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey... he finishes his bachelor's degree at Bowdoin College and later pursues a doctoral degree at Harvard, studying ants" (09:36).

Notable Quote:
"One of the best things about Kinsey is you think that he would have just been studying insects his entire life, but he really isn't. He just does this mad 180 tangent, doesn't he?" – Kate Lister (08:37)

Transitioning to Sex Research

By the mid-1930s, Kinsey felt he had exhausted his contributions to entomology and accepted a position at Indiana University. Facing financial constraints, he began writing junior high and high school science textbooks, which gradually steered him towards addressing gaps in sex education. As Drucker notes, "Students start coming to him individually, one on one, with questions they don't feel comfortable asking" (14:07).

Notable Quote:
"Kinsey's lectures are very straightforward. He does not want to sugarcoat any element of having sex." – Donna Drucker (12:36)

Methodology: Gathering and Analyzing Data

Kinsey's innovative approach involved conducting in-depth interviews with approximately 18,000 individuals, a monumental task for the 1950s. To ensure privacy, responses were encoded, and his all-male team, including Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gebhard, and Clyde Martin, meticulously handled data entry using punch card machines (25:22).

Notable Quote:
"They are etching all of this data, they're punching stuff into cards... it's to be phenomenal." – Kate Lister (29:25)

Publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male"

In January 1948, Kinsey published his first volume focusing exclusively on white American men. Despite its dry, data-heavy content—spanning 800 pages of text, graphs, and tables—the book became a bestseller, astonishing the public with revelations such as:

• 10% of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between ages 16 and 55 (34:12).
• 37% had engaged in homosexual activities during their lives.
• 50% of single men by age 35 had experienced homosexual encounters (36:00).

Notable Quote:
"This is one of the most extreme ones, though. A little bit of both" – Donna Drucker on Kinsey’s significance (06:39)

Public Reaction and Controversy

The publication ignited a spectrum of responses. Evangelists like Billy Graham decried it as a threat to American morality, while others praised it as a triumph of scientific inquiry. Drucker highlights, "Religious leaders had a minimal mix of view because it actually shows that the more religious you are, the less... sexual experience you have" (37:04).

Notable Quote:
"Billy Graham... thought it was like the worst thing that could have happened to American democracy." – Donna Drucker (37:04)

Expansion to Female Sexuality

Encouraged by the success of the male volume, Kinsey embarked on his second major work, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," published in August 1953. Despite high expectations, the female volume faced harsher scrutiny and backlash. Key findings included:

• Equal prevalence of extramarital and premarital sexual activities among women.
• Controversial assertion that vaginal orgasms did not exist, attributing female sexual satisfaction solely to clitoral orgasms.

Notable Quote:
"He stated directly that the vaginal orgasm did not exist... only clitoral orgasms." – Donna Drucker (45:18)

Ethical Concerns and Methodological Flaws

Critics have long pointed out ethical shortcomings in Kinsey’s studies, such as:

• Lack of informed consent and minimal ethical oversight.
• Sampling bias, as efforts to include non-white populations were limited.
• Privacy issues despite the use of coded data, especially considering the intimate nature of the questions.

Drucker critiques, "If you were the woman on his team, what might you guide him towards? Change? Just so it was..." (47:11), emphasizing the need for a more holistic approach to factors like contraception and disease prevention.

Notable Quote:
"He filmed sex parties with his team in his attic...feet are being filmed by a filmmaker." – Donna Drucker (49:26)

Legacy and Untimely Death

Despite significant contributions to sexology, Kinsey's career was marred by controversy. The Rockefeller Foundation withdrew funding due to public pressure, and the incessant scrutiny led to immense stress. Kinsey died of a heart attack at 62, leaving many of his subsequent works unfinished.

Notable Quote:
"He dies at 62. As a final question then... just pointed out to him?" – Kate Lister (46:25)

Conclusion: Impact on Society and Future Research

Kinsey's studies undeniably transformed the discourse on human sexuality, challenging prevailing norms and paving the way for future research. However, modern scholars like Drucker acknowledge both his groundbreaking insights and the ethical lapses inherent in his methodology.

Final Thoughts:
"Kinsey was very much not interested in identity because he saw how identity had been used by police to prosecute men." – Donna Drucker (42:24)

Notable Quotes Highlights

• Kinsey’s Shift from Entomology:
  "He just does this mad 180 tangent, doesn't he?" (08:37)

• Straightforward Approach to Sex Education:
  "He does not want to sugarcoat any element of having sex." (12:36)

• Handling Extensive Data:
  "He's got all of this data. They're punching stuff into cards." (29:25)

• Ethical Shortcomings:
  "If you were the woman on his team, what might you guide him towards?" (47:11)

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This episode provides an in-depth exploration of Alfred Kinsey's influential yet contentious research, highlighting both its revolutionary impact on society’s understanding of sexuality and the ethical questions it raises. For listeners seeking to understand how a pivotal study reshaped American sexual norms, "Inside America's Famous Sex Study" offers a nuanced and engaging narrative.

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References:

• Transcript Timestamps: Indicated in brackets (e.g., 09:36)
• Guest Expertise: Donna Drucker, historian with extensive research on contraceptives and Kinsey

Transcript

[Kate Lister]

Hi, I'm your host, Kate Lister. If you would like Betwixt the Sheets ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

[Josie Santee]

Hey, this is Josie Santee from the Every Girl podcast and this episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Summer's here and Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dressed season ever. From beach days and weddings to weekend getaways in your everyday wardrobe. Discover stylish options under a hundred dollars from tons of your favorite brands like Mango Skims, Princess Polly and madewell. It's easy too, with free shipping and free returns in store order pickup and more. Shop today in stores [e-mail] or download.

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[Kate Lister]

Hello my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. Have you got that right? Is that the podcast that you actually want to be listening to? You haven't mistaken us for something else? Okay then, let's crack a wait. Before we crack on, I have to tell you this is an adult podcast book and my adults to other adults about adultery things in an adultery way of covering range adult subjects and you should be an adult too. Oh God, I feel safer after that. Do you feel safer? Right on with the show. It's 1948 mid afternoon and we are in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. Women in mid length dresses with neatly set hair are pushing strollers down the sidewalk in groups of two and three. There's babies and toddlers everywhere. Probably that baby boom everyone's talking about. Shiny Fords are being driven down the street by men in sharp structured suits. And store windows are crammed full of tinned goods, packaged coffee and Spam. That's my understanding of the time period. They ate a lot of Spam in this picket fence paradise with the sun shining through the dappled trees and the birds singing. It'd be quite easy to believe that babies are delivered by the stork were it not for a book on everybody's lips. The book that broadcast the bedroom behaviors of men and women in America to the world. The best selling Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. And then later, the Female by Bloomington's own Alfred Kinsey. And today we're gonna find out just what he did.

[Donna Drucker]

What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course.

[Kate Lister]

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.

[Donna Drucker]

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

[Kate Lister]

Goodness, what beautiful Dan. Goodness.

[Donna Drucker]

I have nothing to do with it, dearie.

[Kate Lister]

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Cait Lister. How many people are really totally, 100% straight, or 100% gay, for that matter? How often do married people actually have sex? And how many have said married people have done the dirty with somebody other than their spouse? All quite reasonable questions, I think, and ones brought to the interview table in the mid-1900s by scientist and Alfred Kinsey. Well, today I am joined once again by historian Donna Drucker, who, as well as her work on contraceptives, has delved quite intimately into Mr. Kinsey, if you'll forgive the expression. Donna and I are going to discuss just how human sexual behavior became a research topic, what results Kinsey actually came up with, and just how ethical was his research? Got your lab coats and your goggles on. All right, then, let's do it. Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Donna Drucker. How are you doing?

[Donna Drucker]

Oh, I'm doing very well. How are you?

[Kate Lister]

Fabulous. It's so lovely to have you back. I really enjoyed our chat about the pill.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, same here. Same here. Thank you for having me back.

[Kate Lister]

And one of the things we did touch on in that conversation is the topic of conversation today. The one and the only Alfred Kinsey, which to people outside of Sex studies and sex history. I don't know how well known that name actually is, but he's a big deal, isn't he?

[Donna Drucker]

Very much so. He's very much one of the biggest figures in the founding of sexology as an academic discipline in the 20th century.

[Kate Lister]

So that's what he did. He is, he's not, he's not the original. Like there were people that came before him, but he probably. Did he do the biggest study? I mean, we're going to get into all of this, but is it, or is it that his results were the most significant?

[Donna Drucker]

A little bit of both. So over his career as a sex researcher, he and his team interviewed about 18,000 people individually, which to the date of the 1950s, that was by far the largest and most in depth set of sex interviews, surveys, data analysis that had. That had happened. And he also established the 0 to 6 scale and the 10% figure for homosexuality.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, is that the everyone's a little bit gay theory that he had?

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah. In short, yes.

[Kate Lister]

He didn't call it that. We should probably take it back a notch because I've gotten, I've already gotten carried away with myself. For people who are listening and there will be quite a lot out there who've never heard this name before and who are taking a punt on this podcast going, all right, I don't know who this is, but I'll trust you. Who was he? Let's give a bit of an origin story where he came from before we even get to the sex stuff.

[Donna Drucker]

Sure. Alfred Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is where he grew up. And his father was an instructor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. And Kinsey went there for his first two years of college, which he absolutely hated. And so he wanted to be out in nature. He really loved being outdoors. And so he finished his bachelor's degree degree at Bowdoin College in Maine, very remote area of country.

[Kate Lister]

I've never heard of it. Yeah, okay, fair enough.

[Donna Drucker]

There is a small liberal arts college and he decides to obtain a doctoral degree at Harvard. He studies under a man named William Morton Wheeler, who is a specialist in ants.

[Kate Lister]

See, this is one of the best things about Kinsey is you think that he would have just been study insects his entire life, but he really isn't. He just does this mad 180 tangent, doesn't he? He starts, did he do his PhD on ants?

[Donna Drucker]

On an insect called the gall wasp, which is very. Compared to humans, they're probably some of the least Interesting creatures.

[Kate Lister]

They're not even interesting compared. There'll be gall wasp enthusiasts out there. We're very sorry. We're sure that they're fascinating. But he loved them, didn't he? That was his thing.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah. He really wanted to make a mark on taxonomy and science. And the way he thought to do that was here's this area of entomology that no one is really working on. I'm going to make my mark on entomology. And so he goes out, he goes all around the us he goes to Mexico, down to Guatemala, collects all these gall wasps and devises these taxonomies of go. Our species.

[Kate Lister]

You do you. I guess, I mean, one I do like. This is one of my favourite examples of someone getting a PhD in something but then becoming famous for studying something completely different. Because that does actually happen quite a lot.

[Donna Drucker]

Yes, definitely.

[Kate Lister]

This is one of the most extreme ones, though.

[Donna Drucker]

Yes. And that was kind of the question I had when I began to study him is how do you get. From these little insects that die two days after they're born?

[Kate Lister]

You know, that's quite interesting.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah. There's odds and ends about them that are interesting, but he kind of come to the end of what he could accomplish with taxonomy by the mid-1930s. By then he had accepted a job at Indiana University, which is a small public university in rural southern Indiana in the Midwest. And he's also not making a lot of money. And so he decides to start writing junior high high school textbooks on wasps or. No, no, on general science education. So it's a way even now, that professors who looking to make a mark on the field in a different way can make some money as they write a general textbook about. About their field.

[Kate Lister]

Nothing about sex yet, though.

[Donna Drucker]

It's just about getting there. Because what he's finding is that there's lots about reproduction of newts, frogs, but students are not getting very much instruction about their own anatomy and about sex education. And students are starting to come to him as a science educator to say, we need this knowledge, we need to know this information. And he thinks, okay, well, well, why don't I teach a marriage course?

[Kate Lister]

Is that code for just sex? Is that like 1930s code for.

[Donna Drucker]

Actually, it's not. Starting in the Depression era, there was a lot of concern that the decadence of the 1920s had left young people without the skills to have successful marriages. And so this marriage instruction movement starts where instructors at universities who don't necessarily have any.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, it's so weird. It's weird already. I almost don't want you to continue. But what. What is it that they're doing?

[Donna Drucker]

It's not too. It's. It's well meaning. It's maybe a little naive, but it's. You know, how to run a household, you know how to parent children, you know how to find a good partner. But most of them kind of dance around the sexual element of a marriage. And so he decides, okay, I'd like to do this marriage course, but I want to have a more honest element of sex education in it. And for the archivists out there, for the lovers of historical documents, all these lectures still exist at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, so you can actually go back and read them.

[Kate Lister]

How straightforward are they? Is it all very, like, opaque and sort of hinting, or is it much more factual?

[Donna Drucker]

Kinsey's lectures are very straightforward. He does not want to sugarcoat any element of having sex. The courses were restricted to students who were engaged or in the early years of marriage. They include things like a diagram of the clitoris compared to a diagram of the penis in terms of how long the kind of nerves are in each of those appendages.

[Kate Lister]

Interesting.

[Donna Drucker]

Okay, this is mixed in with courses on, like, how to have a household budget or, you know, things like that. And so obviously, this is a sensation.

[Kate Lister]

These courses, were they very popular? Donna, did a lot of people want to know about maintaining households and budgeting?

[Donna Drucker]

Yes. Very exciting. Yeah, they were. Right away, they were covered in the student newspaper. And students started to try to fake engagements to. To get in them.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, but that. That. That kind of tells you that, doesn't it? Like, how desperate this information must be. Because I'm always fascinated about where did people learn about sex, about the birds and the bees? Because this is. It's to. To. Not to use too obvious a pun, but this is a very oral history. This is something that is passed from parent to child, from friend to friend, from sibling to sibling. And often we just don't have the records of it. But information is patchy at best.

[Donna Drucker]

Right. And you know, Kinsey, whatever his flaws are, he is an educator at heart. Like, he wants people to learn. And so the offshoot of this is that students start coming to him individually, one on one, with questions they don't feel comfortable asking.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, no, I suppose that's a good thing. I'm just having flashbacks to my own university days when students would come in for a chat.

[Donna Drucker]

Not.

[Kate Lister]

I'm not trained for this. Help me.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, people feel like they can. They can trust you, but this is.

[Kate Lister]

Like, what this is the 40s and the 30s. Completely different environment back then.

[Donna Drucker]

This is 1938 is when the marriage starts.

[Kate Lister]

Right? Okay. Yeah.

[Donna Drucker]

And so the students are coming to him. And as a taxonomist, as a scientist, kind of more broadly, he starts thinking, this data is amazing. And people are just coming to me and bringing me this data about that.

[Kate Lister]

So they're telling him they're going to him with like. Like personal problems.

[Donna Drucker]

Oh, yes, very much so. Because the.

[Kate Lister]

I mean, you can see why they would, I guess.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah. Because the course is like a lecture format. They're delivering the lecture, then they leave. There's not really kind of a discussion format. So. Okay, that's where he gets the idea. Maybe I should actually just interview these folks and start keeping records. And eventually the medical director of the university starts getting wind of this course and how popular it is. It's a small town, small school. Information travels.

[Kate Lister]

What did the director of the university not know he did this?

[Donna Drucker]

Aside from the medical staff, we'd never.

[Kate Lister]

Get away with that. Now, could you even imagine if I decided I'd just do an extra class where students can come and tell me about their sex lives? Oh, my God. I don't think that you would last two minutes at your university if you came up with that particular idea. I think you would be out on your ear pretty quick. Smart.

[Donna Drucker]

And it wasn't that even that he was wrong. It's that he was now on the turf of the school physicians. And the school physicians were very territorial and said, you know, we're the ones who guide students in their physical health, not who are you, and you're an entomologist. Like, what are you doing exactly?

[Kate Lister]

When you say it like that, they did kind of have a point. The bug guy.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah. Well, interestingly, he, you know, kind of like any academic who's starting a new topic. You know, his whole library, again, is still at the Kinsey Institute of Indiana. And, you know, he's reading all the sexology that he can find. He doesn't read German, but a lot of sexology is in German. So he hires a translator to help him read.

[Kate Lister]

He's methodical, isn't he?

[Donna Drucker]

He starts talking to a statistician because he's realizing, okay, I'm going to need more statistical knowledge to be able to process this data. And the university president has to intervene and basically says, okay, this is about two years down the road. You can either teach the marriage course or you can start. Keep doing these interviews.

[Kate Lister]

But he doesn't fire him.

[Donna Drucker]

No, actually, this president is in the world of American university history. Fairly well known for his support of intellectual freedom. And he says, you know, go for it.

[Kate Lister]

I'm impressed. I thought he would have been out on his ear with his bug collection.

[Donna Drucker]

Standing in the middle of the road, which still exists. But no. The man's name is Herman Wells.

[Kate Lister]

And Wells says, thank you, Herman Wells.

[Donna Drucker]

Do it. And Kinsey, by then, this is 1940, he had already started traveling to Indianapolis and to Chicago. And he's talking to anybody who will listen to him. He's going into poor neighborhoods, he's going into African American neighborhoods. Of course, America is still very segregated. And so here's this like, kind of nerdy, buttoned up university professor wandering around the prostitutes and pimps of Indianapolis going, hey, would you talk to me about your sex lives? And they do.

[Kate Lister]

And that's something else that as a modern academic, I don't know if. Well, I mean, you might. You probably could get ethical clearance for that. But we are a long way away from going, yeah, I'll go and talk to random people. In industry, you'd never, ever be allowed to do that. Now you have very, very rigorous ethic committees that you have to go through, don't you?

[Donna Drucker]

Absolutely. You have to get human subjects permission and have consent forms signed and things like that. So he's realizing, okay, I have. There's all this data and people are willing to talk to me. How am I going to gather this? And so what he does is create a form. It's a one page form that holds information for up to 300 questions. Some people with very extensive experience can be asked up to about 520 questions. But most people's sex histories get covered.

[Kate Lister]

In about what kind of questions. I've got to know.

[Donna Drucker]

I've got to know what? Yeah, it's actually all published. It kind of starts at your childhood and kind of moves forward. So we know, did you see your parents undressed? When did you see other boys and girls without clothes on? You know, when do you start, you know, you know, touching your genitals? They're very straightforward questions. They're not. He's not using euphemisms, but he is using language that people of different social classes would understand. So he kind of is code switching in a way that makes people feel comfortable. And so to keep the privacy of the interview subjects, the interview sheet is in code. And so you can look at these sheets and there's just like X's and o's and little dots and stars and things. And so the outside reader or viewer could never perceive what was on the sheet. And he memorized the questions and his team memorized the questions. So your privacy was guaranteed because no one could interpret the code. No one could have their private behavior discovered.

[Kate Lister]

Now one of the things that. And there's been a number of stuff that over the years, people have gone back to Kinsey's work and gone. Hang on a minute there, mate. The ethical part of it is definitely one issue. But another thing that you'd have to consider today is your sample. Who is it that you are talking to? Does your data set skew some of the responses? Who was he and his team talking to? How did they make sure that they had like an equitable and a balanced sample set?

[Donna Drucker]

This was a big concern. And he starts small with people who he already knows. And what he does is go for, start talking to like the heads of different organizations. So it would be like you talk to the president of the fraternity or you talk to president of the Lions Club or the Rotary Club or whoever and say, okay, get their sex history. And then the president or leader will say, okay, now everybody, I wonder how.

[Kate Lister]

He talked them into it. I wonder how he did that. Because that like to go up to somebody in the 30s, like, I have a really private quiz about when you started masturbating and who you've seen naked and what your sexual fantasies. Would you mind giving it the once over? That would be a difficult cell today. That would be tricky. Do we have any idea of how he recruited people, what he explained he was doing? They must have thought he was a lunatic.

[Donna Drucker]

It's hard to see. There's only a few video clips of him that survive. They're a very formal setting, so it's hard to get a sense of like how he was. But he really framed it as a contribution to scientific knowledge to say, you know, you are going to be part of a big project that will really shed a lot of light on how, how people behave. And it doesn't cost anything. This is how you can contribute. And I think kind of from a psychological perspective, a lot of people who had kind of guilt about what they had done or they were ashamed about, you know, maybe having an affair or something like that. It was completely nonjudgmental. He operated from the premise, not that people hadn't done anything, that you had already done everything and you were kind of taking away from like a person who had done everything. So it wasn't like, have you ever had extramarital sex? It would be, when was the last time you had Extramarital sex. And then it was on you to deny it. If you. If you hadn't, with the question being framed that way, you could see. Well, you know, if it's framed that way, then probably lots of people have. And I don't have to feel as much shame about kind of being truthful about that part of my life.

[Kate Lister]

Who was on his team? Who did he recruit? Because that must have been another safety concern, because I'm sure as somebody that researches and talks about sex as I do, you will have encountered that 99% of people are lovely and are interested, but there is that 1% who have a funny reaction to it that might be that they don't like it, or it might be that they think that that's an opportunity to tell you quite intimate things about themselves. Who was on his team and how did he make sure that they were okay?

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, he ends up having a team of four, including himself. They're all men, they're all married. And there's a whole story about how he tried to recruit a female interviewer, but it just. For various reasons, it just never worked out. There are three men. One of them is a recent Harvard PhD in anthropology, and the other two, one has a master's degree, the one has a bachelor's degree. The youngest one is a student at the time, and he kind of gets grandfathered into. Into the project after it's started. But these men, their names are Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gebhard and Clyde Martin. And they also have to memorize the interview code. They have to memorize the sheet. And they are also responsible for managing the data, which means they enter it all in punch card machines. So, of course, there's no computers in the 1940s, so you have to. If you want to do any big calculations, you put them through a punch grip machine. And so it's hot, loud, it's tedious. Even if you're punching every time someone had an orgasm from, you know, masturbation or premarital sex or whatever, you're punching that into a card. And so he had to trust them implicitly. They were all married, but they all had all kinds of sex with all kinds of people.

[Kate Lister]

Well, that's interesting. So were they polyamorous people? Were they. What was going on there?

[Donna Drucker]

I don't know if I'd say that exactly, but it's slutty. They'd say they have. Clyde Martin's a little less on board with this, but Kinsey and Pomeroy and Gebhardt, they all have open marriages, but they all stay, as far as I can tell, happily married. Kinsey's married to one woman his whole life. And later on in the story, they gather data by. By filming. Filming sex in Kinsey's attic.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, we might have just gone to a strange place.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah. So we can come back to that.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah.

[Josie Santee]

Okay.

[Kate Lister]

Okay. But so far we haven't got to attic filming.

[Donna Drucker]

No, we're not there yet.

[Kate Lister]

That might be the point where you go, do you know what? I found a boundary. I found that that's too far for me. I'll be back with Donna and Kinsey after this short break.

[Unknown]

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[Hannah]

Hi guys, it's Hannah from Giggly Squad with some around the corner. I wanted to tell you guys how I'm staying comfy and stylish. Lululemon is my secret weapon. There are plenty of copycats out there, but nothing compares to the Lululemon fabrics and fit. I've literally had my pair of Lululemon leggings since college and I'm out of college. I know I don't look it, but I am. The quality is next level. I especially love the Lululemon Align collection. It's made with this weightless, buttery, soft nulou fabric that feels like next to nothing. It's so soft. Whether you're in align pants, shorts, a bra, tank, skirt, a dress, you get non stop flexibility in every direction so you can stretch the summer limits. Align even wicks, sweat and as a sweaty girl, I love this. You know it's going to be my best friend when I play tennis this summer. Shop the Align collection [e-mail] or your.

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[Kate Lister]

He's got all of this data. They're punching stuff into cards. This is thousands and thousands. And if it's like up to 500 questions per person, the amount of data that they must have was to be phenomenal. So they get it all and then what?

[Donna Drucker]

As they gather, they're starting to analyze it. And I won't go into the statistical techniques because it's. I figured them out mostly, but it's quite dry. But basically, Kinsey thinks, I have this enormous amount of data. I want to publish it, but I want it to be not salacious. I want it to be published by a respectable, tricky publisher. And so he chooses a medical publisher in Philadelphia to publish a volume just on the American men who are white. As his first volume, he plans a series of six. That was his original plan.

[Kate Lister]

Why did he go with all that data? And they go, this is brilliant, but we only want the white men. It's not very scientific, is it?

[Donna Drucker]

Well, his rationale for this was that there was men who had some men who had thousands of partners who had done everything under the sun with all kinds of folks and all kinds of non folks, meaning animals.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, hello. Okay.

[Donna Drucker]

And his view was that if we had African Americans in there, any readers of this book would think, oh, building on stereotypes, the kind of extreme data could be attributed to African Americans in the sample. And he wanted to say, basically, white men do everything that, you know, you could possibly do.

[Kate Lister]

But you know what? I think he's probably right, isn't he? Oh.

[Donna Drucker]

It'S not a kind of a rationale you would kind of use today. But he was kind of. He was fighting a particular stereotype in a way, by excluding African Americans from the first book.

[Kate Lister]

All right, so the first book, it comes out, what, a small little publication.

[Donna Drucker]

Specialist, limited run, I think about 5,000 copies. Something. Something like that.

[Kate Lister]

Okay.

[Donna Drucker]

January of 1948. So it's only two and a half years after the war, and you wouldn't expect it, but it lands like a thunderbolt. It's just astonishing.

[Kate Lister]

Huge, right?

[Donna Drucker]

Yes. And Kinsey becomes very famous right away. People buy it Even though there's absolutely no pictures in there. If you're like looking for kind of a fun sexy read, this is one of the least sexy books about sex you can find.

[Kate Lister]

It's like where sex meets maths is.

[Donna Drucker]

What it is, basically.

[Kate Lister]

So why were they buying it then? What information was contained within that made it so popular?

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, it's 800 pages of just basically text and lots of graphs and tables. And what he has basically done and his team, he and his team have done is taken all this Data up to 500 points from over 5,000 people, kind of organized it to show what is the earliest date people have started to have orgasms. How many men have had extramarital affairs, how common is masturbation.

[Kate Lister]

That was a big reveal in that book though, wasn't it?

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, I mean, I think probably any man who read it was like, oh, okay, I'm definitely not alone here.

[Kate Lister]

What was the general cons? I mean, it's difficult because there's never one opinion on sex out history. But the kind of the public forward facing consensus on masturbation at the time.

[Donna Drucker]

Was what likely that most people had engaged in it. But it wasn't widely discussed and it.

[Kate Lister]

Was, it was linked with health problems right at the time. It's coming out of the 19th century. We're kind of into the 30s and 40s by now. So I hope that's starting to fall away. But it's still there.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, that comes out like the 1910s is really. And 20s is really when that hits the US I think it's a little earlier in the UK is when that kind of moral panic about masturbation really occurs. But people start reading it, they think they find out about masturbation. There's a lot of material about teenage sexuality, about same sex sexuality. And really that's the extramarital element. I think it's about a third of men interviewed had had an affair. Kinsey wouldn't have used that word, extramarital sex to orgasm. And then the most bombshell material was in the chapter on homosexuality.

[Kate Lister]

And what was that?

[Donna Drucker]

The figure that is most well known is this idea of 10% of men being homosexual. The actual phrasing is 10% of the males are more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. This is one male in 10 in the white male population. So he's not saying 10% of men are homosexual for life, but 10% are exclusively homosexual for about three years.

[Kate Lister]

How does that stand up with modern research? Is that right? It doesn't sound right that you could be gay for a bit and then go, oh, I'm finished now.

[Donna Drucker]

I don't know the up to date statistics. It still depends like who you ask and how you ask and things like that. Because he was really measuring behavior more than identity, so.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, I see. Oh, so he's more like when did you have a homosexual encounter as opposed to do you identify?

[Donna Drucker]

Yes.

[Kate Lister]

Hahaha.

[Donna Drucker]

Yes.

[Kate Lister]

Okay, that's okay, I'm with you.

[Donna Drucker]

So I should back up and say like all the data about extramarital affairs, premarital affairs, anything like that, it's all measured in orgasm in the time. How many times have you had an orgasm doing this particular behavior?

[Kate Lister]

See that kind that's. That wouldn't get through an ethical committee today. An orgasm is not a unit of measurement. As much as I wish it was. That's not a marker. There'll be a whole load of people, especially women, if like, if the only way you've cheated is because if you actually had an orgasm, I mean, our figures are going to be way off, quite frankly.

[Donna Drucker]

That's what happened when the male, the female volume came out.

[Kate Lister]

No women have ever cheated, ever. According to Kenzie.

[Donna Drucker]

All angels, every single one.

[Kate Lister]

Okay, so everybody's shocked by his book, but then can't stop reading it. It must have been a proper earthquake moment of like. Because homosexuality is illegal at this point, punishable by jail and awful things. I think in the UK that it was chemical castration of people like Alan Turing. And then so along comes this book and says it's completely normal. 10% of white men that we know of have engaged in this activity to orgasm at some point.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, that's for the three years. And then he says 37% of the total male population has had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age. And then 50% of the males who remain single until age 35 have had overt homosexual experience too. Orgasm. So it's all the time, everywhere.

[Kate Lister]

How was this book received? I'm choosing my words carefully. Was there outrage about it? Was it celebrated? What was the reaction to it?

[Donna Drucker]

There was a wide range of responses to it. Someone like Billy Graham, the American evangelists, you know, thought it was like the worst thing that could have, you know, happened to American democracy. But a lot of people think this is a wonderful example of American democracy because you can do science like this. Is that only in America, not in Russia, only in America could you do science that would reveal this kind of data. Other religious leaders have a minimal mix of view because it actually shows that the more religious you are, the less, you know, sexual experience you have. So if you're very dogmatic about your, you know, religious beliefs, you know, keeps people from.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, they must have been quite happy with that then. They must have been quite plead. That's, that's a little bit in there for them. They must have been quite chuffed with that.

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, but they just didn't want. Because they asking the questions at all, I guess. But.

[Kate Lister]

So his name is now, he's world famous. The head of the university must have been well chuffed. What's the next thing for him? So he's published his book on men. The obvious thing to do next is.

[Donna Drucker]

To publish the book on women.

[Kate Lister]

Okay.

[Donna Drucker]

And again, it's about the same number of women, about 5,000. It again does not include anyone who's not white, I should say. As a side note, this data all still exists in its original forms, so you can access it if you have permission at the Kinsey Institute. You can look at the original interview sheets. They all still exist. So a women's book comes out in a quite different atmosphere politically and with a lot more expectations placed on it because no one would have guessed that this entomologist at an obscure state university was going to publish this landmark study. Now everybody knows him and we're further into the Cold War and we don't want the Russians knowing all our sexual secrets. We don't want American white womanhood to be mirrored in any particular way. And so the female volume comes out after a lot of revision, including by some female academics. He sends it out to lots of different reviewers. And the Female Million comes out in August of 1953. The medical publisher called it K Day. And there's funny little cartoons of like, you know, like a bomb, bomb thread hooked to the book and then a little, little, A little Kinsey running away and holding his ears as if it was going to be a nuclear attack on women's sexuality. And it was, was it?

[Kate Lister]

Oh, it was, yeah.

[Donna Drucker]

But not the kind that he expected because the male volume was received much more positively. Of course, the men, everyone's gonna do.

[Kate Lister]

Men terrible things, but they're all expecting to just open up the women's one and just go, oh, no, we're not really interested. Once a week with the lights off with my husband, thank you very much.

[Donna Drucker]

Right, A couple, couple pumps and turnover.

[Kate Lister]

And then we're done. I don't even know when it's happening, happening. Honestly. Lie back and Think of America waiting.

[Donna Drucker]

For it to be over.

[Kate Lister]

But of course, that wasn't what he found.

[Donna Drucker]

No. So of course, you know, women are doing lots of the same things. Shock her. Yeah. Premarital extramarital masturbation.

[Kate Lister]

What was the thing that, that was the most shocking? Well, I'm interested in is that was the lesbian revelation the most shocking? Like it was for the, for the men or were they shocked at different things this time?

[Donna Drucker]

Time. I think it was more of the extramarital data that was alarming. And I guess because there wasn't quite as much stigma, at least publicly attached to lesbian sex or sex between women, there wasn't seen as like against the moral fabric of the society to quite the same degree as male homosexuality still.

[Kate Lister]

Isn'T in the public perception of gay men and lesbian women. I mean, everyone has their struggles, but it's never been quite. I think, I think this is my theory. I don't know if Kinsey's interested. I think it's all about penetration. I think that patriarchy gets so upset about men having sex with men because there's an act of penetration and somebody has to, quote, unquote, be the girl. I think it's all about being terrified of femininity. And lesbians don't have a penis and they can't threaten the heterosexual bottom. They can't make him submissive. That's my theory.

[Donna Drucker]

I mean, Kinsey was very much not interested in identity because he saw how identity had been used by police because to prosecute men. Because he would find when he was interviewing like soldiers and sailors, that if like a police officer came across a men engaging in oral sex, the man who was like giving the blowjob would be prosecuted. But the man who was receiving it wasn't. Because that's what men do is get blowjobs. They don't give them, they receive them.

[Kate Lister]

So who's being the girl? Basically, in very crude terms, I'm being very reductive.

[Donna Drucker]

No, I understand. So if you're in like a submissive position that was associated. Homosexuality was associated with this kind of submissiveness and it got you in a lot of legal trouble. But if you were receiving the blowjob, you wouldn't have been in legal trouble necessarily.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Donna and Kinsey after this short break. Foreign.

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[Kate Lister]

In.

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[Josie Santee]

Hey, this is Josie Santee from the Every Girl podcast, and this episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Summer's here, and Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dressed season ever. From beach days and weddings to weekend getaways and your everyday wardrobe. Discover stylish options under $100 from tons of your favorite brands like Mango Skims, Princess Polly, and Madewell. It's easy, too, with free shipping and free returns in store order pickup and more. Shop today in stores [e-mail] or download the Nordstrom app.

[Kate Lister]

So he's published his book on women have sex. Everybody's shocked. Was this a success as well? Did his reputation suffer after this one?

[Donna Drucker]

It did, but not in the way he would have anticipated. I think he anticipated sort of a very similar reception. Oh, this is great. This is knowledge about, you know, American women that people can, you know, learn, learn about their neighbors, learn about society, so on. As one other note, key finding from the female volume is that he stated directly that the vaginal orgasm did not exist. This was not a thing.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, I thought you were going to say something else then. Hurrah.

[Josie Santee]

Well done.

[Donna Drucker]

But that clitoral orgasms, you know, were the way physiologically, the way that orgasms happened. And. But that's all gets buried in this avalanche of bad publicity saying, basically Kinsey is trying to weaken American society because he's kind of revealing all our sexual secrets. Wow. And so his funder, this whole time, his primary funder has been the Rockefeller foundation. And they finally decide, okay, this is too hot for us, so we're going to take away your funding. So once that happens, he is really trying to find other funding. He still has plenty of data for the next books. But basically, the stress of trying to fundraise and fend off these attacks on his methodology and his aims is so great that he ends up dying of a heart attack.

[Kate Lister]

I thought you were gonna say he went back to Bugs. Oh, wow, Okay. I didn't.

[Donna Drucker]

No. He dies at 62.

[Kate Lister]

So he dies quite young, even for the 50s and 60s. That's quite young. So as a final question then, and you know, we wouldn't want Kinsey to listen to this because ultimately what he did is huge and it shook things up and it changed things. But if you want to get nitpicky just because it's fun, there were a few blind spots in there if you could go back and work with Kinsey, if you were the woman on his team, what might you guide him towards? Change? Just so it was, I mean, like, the idea, like asking a woman that she only cheats if she's had an orgasm. There's a big one. I would have. I'd have said, no, no, no, no, we need to rephrase that one. What else is in there that you would have just helped him with, just pointed out to him?

[Donna Drucker]

I think the one thing I would do is encourage him to look more closely at contraception and the role of the possibility of pregnancy in heterosexual encounters and the role of possibility of disease in all encounters. Because the question of pregnancy and disease as potential consequences really kind of goes. Fades away into the background. And the reason is, I think, because those were really the only two ways you could get into talking about sexual, kind of polite science society. So he kind of backgrounds those two things. But I think they're so important that they have to be integrated into any. Any study of sexuality. If you're engaging in sex that could be, you know, lead to pregnancy or any kind of sex with a new person, you don't know, you're not going to sit down and interrogate their disease history in 40s, necessarily. So I would say pay attention to those things.

[Kate Lister]

And he should also probably not be filming people having sex, which I said that I was going to ask you about, and I forgot about it. Was that useful for him? Who was he filming? Why was he filming that?

[Donna Drucker]

Yeah, this was, like, fictionalized, interestingly, in the. There's a movie about Kinsey that came out in 2004. It was really to study physiology. Like, it provided some of the background for the work on the physiology and anatomy of orgasm. Like, what actually happened to the body, you know, when you had an orgasm or when you. When you didn't. This is kind of the fun side of Kinsey is that he would basically have these like, for lack of a better word, like, sex parties that were filmed by a filmmaker named Bill Dellemback. And Bill. Yeah. And they would. I think it was. Pomeroy was kind of the main man in these, but Kinsey would do them, too.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, so this was his research team. Yeah, he was getting his research team to have sex parties and filming them. Oh, Alfred, really?

[Donna Drucker]

And his wife would be making snacks in the kitchen downstairs.

[Kate Lister]

No.

[Donna Drucker]

And she'd bring up. Everyone finished, they'd come down and have persimmon pudding.

[Kate Lister]

Excellent. Excellent. Oh, my God. God. See, the good old days before an ethics board got involved. They'd never let you do that now.

[Donna Drucker]

Exactly.

[Kate Lister]

Donna, you have been fabulous to talk to once again and if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[Donna Drucker]

I have a book on Alfred Kinsey and some other books on contraception and fertility technology. Those are available at any bookstore. I am also on social media on Bluesky.

[Kate Lister]

You've been an absolute treat to talk to. Thank you she so much.

[Donna Drucker]

This is a lot of fun. Thank you for having me Again.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Donna for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtory hit.com don't miss our Sex Work series coming out all this month. Find it wherever it was that you found us today. This podcast was edited by Nick Thompson and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

[Josie Santee]

Hey, this is Josie Santi from the Every Girl Podcast and this episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Summer's here and Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dressed season ever. From beach days and weddings to weekend getaways and your everyday wardrobe. Discover stylish options under a hundred dollars from tons of your favorite brands like Mango Skims, Princess Polly and Madewell. It's easy too, with free shipping and free returns and in store order, pickup and more. Shop today in stores [e-mail] or download the Nordstrom app.

[Hannah]

Hi guys, it's Hannah from Giggly Squad. With Summer around the corner, I wanted to tell you guys how I'm staying. Comfy and stylish. Lululemon is my secret weapon. There are plenty of copycats out there, but nothing compares to the Lululemon fabrics and fit. I've literally had my pair of Lululemon leggings since college and I'm out of college. I know I don't look it, but I am. The quality is next level. I especially love the Lululemon Align collection. It's made with this weightless, buttery, soft nulou fabric that feels like next to nothing. It's so soft, whether you're in aligned pants, shorts, a bra, tank, skirt, a dress, you get non stop flexibility in every direction so you can stretch the summer limits align even wick sweat and as a sweaty girl. I love this. You know it's going to be my best friend when I play tennis this summer. Shop the Align collection [e-mail] or your nearest Lululemon store.