Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  They were wondrous times, I think, and begin to understand my watchman circumstances, and all the things that happened back in those days and those nights when I was never bored.

  A KINSEY REPORT

  Nothing human was alien to him. On the other hand, nothing alien was alien to him. And he looked, in his brush cut, bow tie and baggy suits savvy as a high school coach in a small town, like a man with liquor on his breath. Though he didn’t drink. Only to impress what he persisted in calling the “lower levels,” only to put them at their ease, only for science, for the sake of the “sample.” As, already in his late forties, he took instruction in cigarette smoking for the same reasons, as he altered his diction to suit the circumstances, all over you with argot or expertise, depending. But a little compromised, as out of synch as a white man’s slam-dunk or the razzle-dazzle chorea of a brother’s salute—all hip handshake’s fancy footwork. Patronizing, our patron saint of sex, obsessed, finally, as a scientist in Hawthorne—Chillingworth, Rappacini’s daughter’s old man.

  Yet, bother his methods, or sample either, that less than scientific, catch-as-catch-can collection of the impositioned, came back with the news—our sexual Founder. And this morning, on Donahue, Christians with books. Flogging biblical liberty on national TV, scriptural passion, positions, oral stuff, God’s blessings on the marriage bed, on all the humpty kinky dumpty hymeneal frictions, His go-for-it opinions. Because it wasn’t always as it is today, singles’ bars uninvented, consenting adults, the Pill. Sexual dark age, lust’s hairy palms. When one sat home nights or paid for it in bad neighborhoods. (Me, for example. An old boy from the old school. Driven to the whores. Sure. In 1948, on Labor Day, Sluggo drove Butch—not their real names, but they know who they are—and me in Sluggo’s uncle’s Olds the fifty odd miles from Chicago to Kankakee to nurse three beers, and not a whole courage between us, in the tavern across from the Illinois Central tracks until the bartender himself pressed the buzzer and sent us through the secret door. Surprised, once one became used to the railroad men in their bed ticking overalls, that there were actually whores in whorehouses, girls in open shifts, casual as the loitering switchmen, firemen and engineers, the girls old, most of them, as our mothers and politely hustling sex like a box of candy, a bowl of fruit, as if, as if—as if there were no bad neighborhoods. So surprised and relieved and a little moved, too, by the gentle daguerreotype civilities there, the railroaders browsing newspapers, magazines. It could have been a barber shop.) When sex was a big deal and Petty’s and Vargas’s slim art deco girls food for thoughts.

  Queen Victoria dead forty-seven years when Alfred Charles Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, fifty-two years and still spinning when Sexual Behavior in the Human Female came out in 1953, and though the real effects wouldn’t be felt for years he’d raised the shades and opened the closets, he’d cleared the cobwebs and aired the attics. He dusted, did windows, and it was the greatest, noisiest spring cleaning sexuality ever had. But it’s a Columbus notion finally, for-want-of-a-nail reasoning, the idea that a single man alters history. Rome wasn’t built in a day and Kinsey never got anybody laid. History happens piecemeal, in add-ons, in incremental software integers and suffixions and adjunctives. By frill and circumstance and fringe benefit. It’s this all-the-trimmings life we live, our starter-set condition, the world continually trading up. (Because only bad men change the world single-handed.) Yet if there’d never been a Kinsey I’d never have seen Jacqueline Bisset’s breasts, Jane Fonda’s, Julie Andrews’s, for God’s sake. If there’d never been a Kinsey there’d have been no personals in the classified columns of The New York Review of Books. MWM would never have found SWM, and most of us would have gone to our graves believing only models or showgirls were these lovely flowers of meat under their clothes. (Because what he did, what he did really, once we took it all in—and it’s still hard to take in—was to democratize flesh, return us to innocence by showing us guilt—Freud did the same but didn’t have the numbers—transporting us back to the Garden itself perhaps, hitting us where we lived and breathed, our mutualized lust like a kind of cloud cover and parting our scandalous needs like a Red Sea.)

  And if Kinsey himself seems to have been uninterested in sex except as a subject that could be measured (his subject, as Communism was Joe McCarthy’s, just that jealous; he even repudiated Freud, was out of sorts with Krafft-Ebing), it was only because he was a taxonomist, a measurer, a sexual census taker, trained as a biologist at Bowdoin and at Harvard’s Bussey Institution where he began to collect the American Cynipidae—the gall wasp—a parasite whose larvae lived and fed in a bruised oak tissue it irritated into being rather like a pearl growing an oyster, taking twenty-eight different measurements, a collection to which he devoted almost twenty-five years of his life and which ran to over four million specimens before it was finally donated to the American Museum of Natural History after his death. But more sociologist than scientist and, finally, more evangel than either. (Because maybe it’s different for people with data, maybe the data permits, even obliges, them to fight back, maybe you question their data you question their honor. Maybe it wasn’t thin skin or self-righteousness that made him impatient with critics, that deflected his science and lent him the aspect of someone besieged or gave him this ancient mariner mentality. It was almost like outrage, like someone trying to clear his name. He was certainly good enough at it, a real sweet talker. A friend of mine, Dr. Lee Robins, Professor of Sociology in Psychiatry at Washington University, heard him at a roundtable dinner at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1954. The subject was “Psychiatric Implications of Surveys on Sexual Behavior” and the famed psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, was one of the speakers. Hell, they were all famed psychiatrists: Kinsey’s report had infuriated them; they questioned the reliability of a sample in which 75 percent of the 5,940 women represented had attended college and only 3 percent hadn’t gone beyond grade school; they wanted to know, as Lionel Trilling and Margaret Mead and Reinhold Niebuhr did, where love had gone, and Kinsey told them. Lee remembers his speech—Kinsey never prepared a talk, he didn’t even refer to notes—as a sermon, a barnburner, Kinsey, the avenging evangel, the John Brown of sexuality.) The studies that would become Kinsey’s famous reports actually began as a noncredit, interdisciplinary marriage course offered by Indiana University in the late 1930s. (This was the age of Emily Post, of etiquette columns in the daily papers, of marriage manuals and all the soft instructions.) Asked by the university to coordinate the course and by the students to counsel them, he found that no formal statistical studies of human sexual activity existed, and he began to take data—histories—from the students themselves, to conduct extensive interviews about what people actually did, to themselves and each other, and gradually to codify his questions. Ultimately, each history would include between 350 and 521 items in face-to-face interviews and would take anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours to administer, longer if necessary. His goal, never achieved, was to collect the sexual histories of 100,000 people. When he died in 1956 there were 18,000 such histories in his files, 8,000 of which he had personally taken.

  Which makes him a kind of intellectual Casanova, a scientific Don Juan, whatever the boozy, set-’em-up-Joe, torchsong and touchsing-song equivalencies are for the ear’s voyeurism, all the scandals of the heart and head, all the gossip of the imagination. Because this wasn’t even psychiatry, you see. It wasn’t, that is, passive. Kinsey came on like a prosecuting attorney. Not did you, but when did you; not have you but how often have you—all the D.A.’s bad cop/bad cop ploys and insinuations. That he got these people to talk at all—this was 1938, this was 1939, this was 1940 and all the 1940s; this was when men wore hats and women looked like telephone operators, their flower styles and print arrangements like those dumb sexual displays in nature, the bandings and colorful clutter on birds, say, who do not even know that what they are wearing is instinct and evolution, that innocent, that naïve,
up to their thighs in silk stocking, sitting on underwear, a buried treasure of corset and garterbelt, all the comfy, invisible bondages of flesh, their curly hair submissively tucked under in pageboys like a sort of wimple—was largely a matter of flourishing his 76 trombones science like the metallic glint of a flashed badge, using science, always Science, capitalized and italicized too, like a cop pounced from a speed-trap, pulling them over to the side, badgering, hectoring, demanding—he was famous now, famous enough to be invited to talk to all sorts of groups, to chambers of commerce and rotaries and lions, to Sunday school classes, to cons in the pen, faggot Rush Street’s boon companion, the guest of honor on Times Square (who’d cruised on the weekends: “I am Dr. Kinsey, from Indiana University, and I’m making a study of sex behavior. Can I buy you a drink?”)—cooperation in the project, shooting for a hundred percent sample, turning the heat on, having them sing for his supper. Kinsey didn’t accept fees for the talks he gave, and which he didn’t prepare anyway, was paid off in low-down, intimacies, other people’s sex lives like the open stacks in the IU library, assuring them of perfect confidentiality, on his scientific honor like a high horse, offering his objectivity, pledging all his scientific, nonjudgmental markers and swearing he would never betray them. Which he never did. Talking in code to his Bloomington associates. Wardell Pomeroy, who assisted him and took almost as many histories as Kinsey, has described their cryptic shoptalk: “I might say to Kinsey, ‘My last history liked Z better than Cm, although Go in Cx made him very er,’ Translated: ‘My last history liked intercourse with animals better than with his wife, but mouth-genital contact with an extramarital partner was very arousing.’” Talking in tongues, parlor car stories like the periodic table of the elements, all the tender confidences of the nuclear age.

  And the reports themselves as aseptic, as bland, the hot stuff cooled down into charts, graphs, the point something something decimals of neutrality, Masters and Johnson undreamed of yet, all their wired protocols of flesh, the special lenses uninvented, the down-and-dirty genitalia like locations, sets, special effects, the body’s steamy skirmishes and star wars. (Dr. Masters himself the first to admit that if it weren’t for Kinsey and Indiana University, Washington University would never have permitted Virginia Johnson and himself to have begun their astonishing investigations and observations of the physiology of sex—the timid Alphonse and Gastonics of research, the politics of science, progress waiting on convention, red tape, green light and go-ahead while all that gets tested are the waters.) Published by the W. B. Saunders Co. of Philadelphia, medical textbooks to the trade. And the trade had never seen anything like it, 200,000 copies in hardbound the first two months after the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in January 1948, and a roughly equivalent number for the female volume almost six years later. All this a blow for the First Amendment, free speech good for business, freedom of the press climbing with a bullet. And maybe what he did for academic freedom and the First Amendment even more important than ever it was for love, the times easier now, more churlish but easier, less polite but easier, etiquette disappeared from the columns, and the streets too, I guess, and marriage-manual mentality all gone, sex by the numbers, but redress of grievance thriving, blooming, anger, outrage, and protest on the big board now and euphemism out of the portfolio altogether—it’s a judgment call this business of influence—and though this was barely perceived during Kinsey’s lifetime it was perceived, because that’s what all the shouting was about, wasn’t it, all that resistance? No in thunder just another weather forecast about your barbarians at the gate. So, it is to the everlasting glory of Indiana University and its president, Herman B. Wells, and its conservative trustees that they not only permitted Kinsey his research but stood foursquare behind it, continuing to pick up the check for at least a third of the Institute’s expenses after controversy and criticism forced the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw its support, the university hanging in there as friend of the court in a suit brought by the Institute—the Institute for Sex Research was incorporated in 1947, Kinsey transferring the ownership of his files and assigning all royalties from the publication of his books to the new corporation—against the government to reclaim “pornographic materials” meant for the Institute’s library (which has what are probably the largest holdings of erotica in the world) but seized in 1950 by Customs. The suit, settled after Kinsey’s death in favor of the Institute, had a dynamite impact, all landmark and precedent, on the freedom of scientific research.

  But what did he do for love?

  Well, that’s harder because love had been doing o.k. It just hadn’t known it is all, until Kinsey’s flawed sample and scientific nonjudgmentals dropped by to reassure it.

  For one, he discovered if not homosexuality then an incidence that until the publication of his books had been grossly underestimated. Kinsey had devised a “0-6 heterosexual to homosexual rating scale,” which indicated that 13 percent of the male population was predominantly homosexual with an additional 20 percent sitting on homosexual fences; the figures for women were lower but still high enough to suggest that putting people in prison for what had been regarded as deviant behavior was not only impractical but unfair.

  Genius is something in the air. It makes waves. Its waves are principles, all the connected dots and applied mathematics of being, some what’s-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander cosmology, and every good lesson democratic. In a peculiar and even farfetched way, then, the waves that Kinsey made go beyond the bedroom to, well, Death Row. When the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional not because it was cruel and unusual punishment but because it was a punishment unequally applied, it was using exactly the argument Kinsey had used when he questioned the rationale for treating homosexuals as sex offenders. Justice as quantity, liberty returned to its Nineteenth-Century, utilitarian underpinnings.

  Because in Kinsey’s book sexuality was not so much a physiological phenomenon as a sociological one. (He never heard of G-spots but knew vaginas like the back of his hand and showed—something else the fuss was all about—that women were lusty as sailors, as capable of orgasm, bringing the spilled beans of their fevers and kindling points.) He knew this, I think, all his “science” notwithstanding, that that DSc Harvard had given him and that had fooled him into thinking that those four million gall wasps in his collection, like all the pressed and faded roses of love, represented something more than they did. Because it’s as if Kinsey had studied not two sexes but four—upper and lower level males, upper and lower level females. People were stacked in these categories on the basis of their education; grade and high school were lower level, college upper level. (He interviewed blacks but left them in those separate-but-equal days to be considered in future studies. In a related way, though he was no bigot, he wouldn’t hire an interviewer who had a hyphenated or Jewish name. He wouldn’t hire foreigners or women or bachelors or people whose handwriting was not up to snuff, or anyone whose politics could be regarded as radical. He thought he was protecting the project, judgmental only here, at the base of things, assuming not his convictions but others’, presuming their prejudices.) And his argument, generalized and oversimplified, goes, approximately, like this. The lower levels screw, the upper levels sublimate. Though Kinsey regarded all orgasms—which he called “total outlet”—as created equal whether brought on by intercourse, nocturnal emissions, masturbation, petting—fellatio was only a sort of heavy petting—getting it on with animals or any other of the assorted sodomies, and admitted the vast differences between the preferences and practices of individuals within a social group, he seemed to imply that blondes didn’t have more fun—only more total outlet—than the sweating and swarthy of Earth did, your huddled masses yearning to breathe heavily.

  Petting, for example. Nowhere, he claimed, were the social levels farther apart: “The lower educational levels see no sense in [petting]. They have nothing like this strong taboo against pre-marital intercourse and . . . acc
ept it as natural and inevitable and a desirable thing. Lower level taboos are more often turned against an avoidance of intercourse . . . against any substitution for simple and direct coitus. It is just because petting . . . substitutes for actual intercourse, that it is considered a perversion by the lower level.”

  They seem, Kinsey’s LLMs and LLFs, to have been sexual snobs, put off, rather, by anything not the old in-and-out, not the old one-two, not the old biff-bam. Even the erotic stimulation provided by books or pictures did not, it would seem, sing to them. “The upper level male,” Kinsey wrote in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, “is aroused by a considerable variety of sexual stimuli,” and then, in what itself may be one of the strangest and most frankly snobbish passages in the book, suggests that “The higher degree of eroticism in the upper level male may also be consequent on his greater capacity to visualize situations which are not immediately at hand.” (A queer and clubby elitism here, a colorless—blacks were to come later—racism from the old freedom fighter.) But even the attitudes toward nudity along Kinsey’s great chain of being were, well, revealing. About 90 percent of ULMs in his sample of 5,300 had sex nude, 66 percent of the men who go only through high school (MLMs?), but only 43 percent of those who didn’t go past grade school. Kinsey’s LLMs regarded nudity as “obscene,” “deep kissing” as “dirty, filthy . . . a source of disease,” “mouth-breast contact . . . perversions.” Only 4 percent of the males who went no further than grade school and 15 percent of those who did not go beyond high school had ever had “mouth contacts with female genitalia” inside marriage, though 45 percent of those who went on to college did. “Lower social levels,” Kinsey said, “rationalize their patterns of sexual behavior on the basis of what is natural or unnatural. Pre-marital intercourse is natural, and it is, in consequence, acceptable. Masturbation [though between 92 and 97 percent of the total sample had masturbated] is not natural, nor is petting as a substitute for intercourse, nor even petting as a preliminary to intercourse.” Maybe because they knew where it had been, yet it’s odd, a contradiction, that Kinsey’s natural man should have been the squeamish one, hung up on fastidy and reserve. (But, come to think of it, it’s true, that Kankakee whore wouldn’t kiss me. It wasn’t extra, it was out of the question.)