| designed
to prepare students for fulfilling marriages. As
Kinsey prepared for the class, he was shocked by the
dearth of scientific literature about sex and the
misinformation spread by doctors and ministers.
Kinsey, an ardent atheist, considered most of what he read
about sex prudish because it was based on traditional
"Judaeo-Christian" ethics he considered
repressive.
Even though Kinsey's
liberal attitudes and open support for contraception
quickly led the I. U. administration to replace him in the
sex ed. class, Kinsey's interest in sex research
grew. He believed that scientifically conducted
interviews would lead to greater insights about sex, and
by 1940, he secured a grant to begin his project.
By the mid-1940s, Kinsey
had recruited and trained a team of interviewers and he
opened the Institute for Sex Research (since renamed the
Kinsey Institute) on Indiana University's campus. By
1947, he was convinced that he had enough data to support
a book about sexual behavior in men, and in 1948 it
appeared on bookshelves as Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male. Kinsey's reputation as a scrupulous and
disinterested scientist made sex, still a taboo topic in
1948, acceptable to read about and printing after printing
of the book sold out. Some religious critics thought
the book was immoral, but Kinsey and his readers didn't
much care.
After finishing the male
volume, Kinsey and his cohorts at the Institute for Sex
Research began work on Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female, a companion work that hit bookstores in 1953,
but the female book suffered an icy reception. In the five
years that had elapsed since the male book was published,
the cold war was in full swing and many Americans believed
the communist enemy was trying to undermine American
morals. The Reece committee, one of the red-chasing
arms of Congress, suspected that Kinsey might be allied
with communist elements, and that his books were designed
to destroy American morals and make her vulnerable to
takeover.
Kinsey was no communist,
and when the Reece committee threatened to investigate him
and the Institute, he dismissed their charges, but the
agency that funded his work was frightened into canceling
his grant. Without funding, Kinsey was unable to
launch his next planned project, a study of the
perversions, and work was everything to him. He grew
depressed, and just
two years after he lost his funding, he died of a heart attack. |
