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Not medical advice. The Atlas is not a substitute for a clinician who can examine you.

Alfred Kinsey & the Sexual Behavior Reports

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and the Kinsey Scale

Evidence grade 3 of 5, Mixed. Read how the Atlas grades evidence.

The written rationale for this grade is still being prepared.

FDA
Not Applicable (survey research)

Reference only. Not medical advice.

What can go wrong

The reports drew lasting methodological criticism for non-representative sampling. Some of the source data on minors, drawn from problematic informants, remains ethically contested. This biographical entry notes these controversies.

This is something to take to a clinician. The Atlas can tell you what is known about alfred kinsey & the sexual behavior reports in general. It cannot tell you what is happening in your body, and the difference matters most for exactly the symptoms that bring people to this page.

Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist at Indiana University, published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, a statistical survey based on thousands of personal interviews that documented the actual range of male sexual behavior, including masturbation, premarital and extramarital sex, and same-sex experience. The book introduced the Kinsey scale of sexual orientation and, with its 1953 female counterpart, reframed sexuality as a measurable continuum rather than a fixed set of categories.

The zoologist who counted what people actually did.

What people take it for

These are the reasons people give for taking it. They are not effects it has been shown to have.

  • First large statistical survey of human sexual behavior
  • Introduced the 0-6 Kinsey scale of orientation
  • Reframed male sexual behavior as a continuum

How it is supposed to work

Kinsey applied taxonomic and statistical methods to self-reported sexual behavior, treating sexuality as a measurable distribution. The approach was descriptive rather than mechanistic, documenting the range of human behavior rather than its physiology.

What people get wrong

  • Often saidKinsey's data were a perfect cross-section of society

    ActuallyHis samples over-represented some groups and relied on volunteers, introducing bias, a recognized limitation of the reports.

Who profits, and who pushes back

Nobody is named here yet, because we have not done that work on this entry. Read that as unfinished. Somebody almost certainly sells this, and somebody almost certainly disputes it. Assume both until we have checked.

How we got here

Alfred Charles Kinsey trained as an entomologist and zoologist, he was a world authority on gall wasps, before turning his taxonomic instincts toward human sexuality. Frustrated by the lack of data when asked to teach a marriage course at Indiana University, he began systematically interviewing people about their sex lives, eventually building a research program around lengthy, standardized interviews that could run to hundreds of questions. In 1948 he and collaborators Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a dense statistical volume that nonetheless became a bestseller and a cultural earthquake. It reported that behaviors widely assumed to be rare, masturbation, premarital and extramarital sex, same-sex experience, were in fact common, and it introduced the Kinsey scale, rating orientation from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual), with an additional X for no socio-sexual response. A companion volume on the human female followed in 1953. Kinsey founded the Institute for Sex Research, now the Kinsey Institute. His work has been criticized for sampling bias, over-representation of certain groups and reliance on volunteers, but it permanently changed the conversation, establishing that sexual behavior could be studied empirically and that human sexuality is far more varied than prevailing norms admitted.

  1. 1894Kinsey born
  2. 1938Begins interviewing on sexual behavior at Indiana University
  3. 1947Founds the Institute for Sex Research
  4. 1948Sexual Behavior in the Human Male published; introduces the Kinsey scale
  5. 1953Sexual Behavior in the Human Female published
  6. 1956Kinsey dies

At a glance

Lead author
Alfred C. Kinsey (zoologist, Indiana University)
Male report published
1948
Female report published
1953
Interviews (combined program)
~18,000 across the research
Kinsey scale
0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual), plus X
Institute founded
Institute for Sex Research (now the Kinsey Institute)

What this entry does not yet cover

What follows is unfinished work on our side, not a finding about Alfred Kinsey & the Sexual Behavior Reports. A short entry is not a safe entry.

  • Cost and market. We have not documented what it sells for or who sells it.
  • Supply chain. We have not mapped where it is made.
  • Who uses it. We have not documented the user groups.
  • What could change. No forward-looking summary yet.
  • How it compares. We have not set it against the alternatives.
  • Children and teenagers. We have not checked what is known about younger people.
  • Where we land. We have not taken a position on this yet.

Sources

The studies below are named and described, but not linked. You cannot open them from here and check our reading against them, which means this page is our summary of the literature rather than a document you can verify. Weigh it accordingly until the links exist.

The studies that matter

  • Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male1948

    First large statistical survey of male sexual behavior; introduced the Kinsey scale

  • Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female1953

    Companion volume extending the survey to women