B
committed to morality-it has been dealt with by religion, social
philosophy, and literature. But now science seems to be the only
y virtue of i�s intrinsic nature and
.
�lso �ecause of its draone of our institutions which has the authority to speak decisively
matic recept10n, the Kmsey Report, as 1t has come to be
on the matter. Nothing in the Report is more suggestive in a large
called, is an event of great importance in our culture. It is
cultural way than the insistent claims it makes for its strictly scienan event which is significant in two separate ways, as symptom and tific nature, its pledge of indifference to all questions of morality at
as therapy. The therapy lies in the large permissive effect the Report
the same time that it patently intends a moral effect. Nor will any
is likely to have, the long way it goes toward establishing the com
science do for the job-it must be a science as simple and material
munity of sexuality. The symptomatic significance lies in the fact
istic as the subject can possibly permit. It must be a science of statisthat the Report was felt to be needed at all, that the community of tics and not of ideas. The way for the Report was prepared by Freud,
sexuality requires now to be established in explicit quantitative terms.
but Freud, in all the years of his activity, never had the currency or
Nothing shows more clearly the extent to which modern society �as
authority with the public that the Report has achieved in a matter
atomized itself than the isolation in sexual ignorance which exists
of weeks.
among us. We have censored the folk knowledge of the most primal
The scientific nature of the Report must be taken in conjunction
things and have systematically dried up the social affections which
with the manner of its publication. The Report says of itself that it
might naturally seek to enlighten and release. Many cultures, the
is only a "preliminary survey," a work intended to be the first step
most primitive and the most complex, have entertained sexual fears
in a larger research; that it is nothing more than an "accumulation
of an irrational sort, but probably our culture is unique in strictly
of scientific fact," a collection of "objective data," a "report on what
isolating the individual in the fears that society has devised. Now,
people do, which raises no question of what they should do," and
having become somewhat aware of what we have perpetrated at
. .
it is fitted out with a full complement of charts, tables, and discusgreat cost and with little gain, we must assure ourselves by st
.
�t1st1cal
sions of scientific method. A work conceived and executed in this
science that the solitude is imaginary. The Report will surpnse one
way is usually presented only to an audience of professional scienpart of the population with some facts and another �art with oth�r tists; and the publishers of the Report, a medical house, pay their
facts, but really all that it says to society as a whole 1s that there 1s
ritual respects to the old tradition which held that not all medical
1 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy,
or quasi-medical knowledge was to made easily available to the
and Clyde E. Martin. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948.
general lay reader, or at least not until it had been subjected to pro-
212
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fessional debate; they tell us in a foreword for what limited protoward life. The tendency to divorce sex from the other manifestafessional audience the book was primarily intended-physicians, tions of life is already a strong one. This truly absorbing study of
biologists, and social scientists and "teachers, social workers, personsex in charts and tables, in data and quantities, may have the effect nel officers, law enforcement groups, and others concerned with the
of strengthening the tendency still more with people who are by no
direction of human behavior." And yet the book has been so sucmeans trained to invert the process of abstraction and to put the fact cessfully publicized that for many weeks it was a national best seller.
back into the general life from which it has been taken. And the
This way of bringing out a technical work of science is a cultural
likely mechanical implications of a statistical study are in this case
phenomenon that ought not to pass without some question. The
supported by certain fully formulated attitudes which the authors
public which receives this technical report, this merely preliminary
strongly hold despite their protestations that they are scientific to the
survey, this accumulation of data, has never, even on its upper edupoint of holding no attitudes whatever.
cational levels, been properly instructed in the most elementary prin
These, I believe, are valtd objections to the book's indiscriminate
ciples of scientific thought. With this public, science is authority. It
circulation. And yet I also believe that there is something good about
has been trained to accept heedlessly "what science says," which it
the manner of publication, something honest and right. Every comconceives to be a unitary utterance. To this public nothing is more plex society has its agencies which are "concerned with the direction
valuable, more precisely "scientific," and more finally convincing
of human behavior," but we today are developing a new element in
than raw data without conclusions; no disclaimer of conclusiveness
that old activity, the element of scientific knowledge. Whatever the
can mean anything to it-it has learned that the disclaimer is simply
Report claims for itself, the social sciences in general no longer prethe hallmark of the scientific attitude, science's way of saying "thy tend that they can merely describe what people do; they now have
unworthy servant."
the clear consciousness of their power to manipulate and adjust.
So that if the Report were really, as it claims to be, only an ac
First for industry and then for government, sociology has shown
cumulation of objective data, there would be some question of the
its instrumental nature. A government which makes use of social
cultural wisdom of dropping it in a lump on the general public. But
knowledge still suggests benignity; and in an age that daily brings
in point of fact it is full of assumption and conclusion; it makes very
the proliferation of government by police methods it may suggest
positive statements on highly debatable matters and it editorializes
the very spirit of rational liberalism. Yet at least one sociologist has
very freely. This preliminary survey gives some very conclusive sugexpressed the fear that sociology may become the instrument of a gestions to a public that is quick to obey what science says, no matter
bland tyranny-it is the same fear that Dostoevski gave immortal
how contradictory science may be, which is most contradictory inexpression to in "The Grand Inquisitor." And indeed there is somedeed. This is the public that, on scientific advice, ate spinach in one thing repulsive in the idea of
men being studied for their own good.
generation and avoided it in the next, that in one decade trained its
The paradigm of what repels us is to be found in the common
babies to rigid Watsonian schedules and believed that affection corsituation of the child who is understood by its parents, hemmed in, rupted the infant character, only to learn in the next decade that
anticipated and lovingly circumscribed, thoroughly taped, finding it
rigid disctpline was harmful and that cuddling was as scientific as
easier and easier to conform internally and in the future to the
induction.
parents' own interpretation of the external acts of the past, and so,
Then there is the question of whether the Report does not do harm
yielding to understanding as never to coercion, does not develop the
by encouraging people in their commitment to mechanical attitudes
mystery and wildness of spirit which it is still our grace to believe
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215
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is the mark of full humanness. The act of understanding becomes
in Europe and in America the sexual mind was haunted by the idea
an act of control.
of degeneration, apparently by analogy with the second law of ther
If, then, we are to live under the aspect of sociology, let us at least
modynamics-here is enlightened liberal opinion in 1896: "The efall be sociologists together-let us broadcast what every sociologist fects of venereal disease have been treated at length, but the amount
knows, and let us all have a share in observing one another, includof vitality burned out through lust has never been and, perhaps, ing the sociologists. The general indiscriminate publication of the
never can be adequately measured."3 The very word sex, which we
Report makes sociology a little less the study of many men by a few
now utter so casually, came into use for scientific reasons, to replace
men and a little more man's study of himself. There is something
love, which had once been indiscriminately used but was now to be
right in turning loose the Report on the American public-it turns
saved for ideal purposes, and lust, which came to seem both too
the American public loose on the Report. It is right that the Report
pejorative and too human: sex implied scientific neutrality, then
should be sold in stores that never before sold books and bought by
vague devaluation, for the word which neutralizes the mind of the
people who never before bought books, and passed from hand to
observer also neuterizes the men and women who are being obhand and talked about and also snickered at and giggled over and served. Perhaps the Report is the superfetation of neutrality and
generally submitted to humor: American popular culture has surely
objectivity which, in the dialectic of culture, was needed before sex
been made the richer by the Report's gift of a new folk hero-he
could be free of their cold dominion.
already is clearly the hero of the Report-the "scholarly and skilled
Certainly it is a great merit of the Report that it brings to mind
lawyer" who for thirty years has had an orgasmic frequency of thirty
the earliest and best commerce between sex and science-the best
times a week.
thing about the Report is the quality that makes us remember Lu
As for the objection to the involvement of sex with science, it may
cretius. The dialectic of culture has its jokes, and alma Venus having
be said that if science, through the Report, serves in any way to free
once been called to preside protectively over science, the situation is
the physical and even the "mechanical" aspects of sex, it may by that
now reversed. The Venus of the Report does not, like the Venus of
much have acted to free the emotions it might seem to deny. And
De Rerum Natura, shine in the light of the heavenly signs, nor does
perhaps only science could effectively undertake the task of freeing
the earth put forth flowers for her. She is rather fusty and hole-insexuality from science itself. Nothing so much as science has reinthe-corner and no doubt it does not help her charm to speak of her forced the moralistic or religious prohibitions in regard to sexuality.
in terms of mean frequencies of 3.2. No putti attend her: although
At some point in the history of Europe, some time in the Reforma
Dr. Gregg in his Preface refers to sex as the reproductive instinct,
tion, masturbation ceased to be thought of as merely a sexual sin
there is scarcely any further indication in the book that sex has any
which could be dealt with like any other sexual sin, and, perhaps by
connection with propagation. Yet clearly all things still follow where
analogy with the venereal diseases with which the sexual mind of
she leads, and somewhere in the authors' assumptions is buried the
Europe was obsessed, came to be thought of as the specific cause of
genial belief that still without her "nothing comes forth into shinmental and physical disease, of madness and decay. 2 The prudery ing borders of light, nothing joyous and lovely is made." Her panof Victorian England went forward with scientific hygiene; and both demic quality is still here-it is one of the great points of the Report
how much of every kind of desire there is, how early it begins, how
2 See Abram Kardiner, The Psychological Frontiers of Society, p. 32 and the
footnote on p. 44 I.
3 Article "Degeneration" in The Encyclopedia of Social Reform.
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late it lasts. Her well-known jealousy is not abated, and prodigality
was bound to appear and inviting the reader to be on the watch for
is still her characteristic virtue: the Report assures us that those who
it. This would not have guaranteed an absolute objectivity, but it
respond to her earliest continue to do so longest. The Lucretian flocks
would have made for a higher degree of relative objectivity. It would
and herds are here too. Professor Kinsey is a zoologist and he prophave done a thing even more important-it would have taught the erly keeps us always in mind of our animal kinship, even though he
readers of the Report something about the scientific processes to
draws some very illogical conclusions from it; and those who are
which they submit their thought.
honest will have to admit that their old repulsion by the idea of
The first failure of objectivity occurs in the title of the Report,
human-animal contacts is somewhat abated by the chapter on this
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. That the behavior which is
subject, which is, oddly, the only chapter in the book which hints
studied is not that of the human male but only that of certain North
that sex may be touched with tenderness. This large, recognizing,
American males has no doubt been generally observed and does not
Lucretian sweep of the Report is the best thing about it and it makes
need further comment. 4 But the intention of the word behavior reup for
much that is deficient and confused in its ideas.
quires notice. By behavior the Report means behavioristic behavior,
But the Report is something more than a public and symbolic act
only that behavior which is physical. "To a large degree the present
of cultural revision in which, while the Heavenly Twins brood
study has been confined to securing a record of the individual's overt
benignly over the scene in the form of the National Research Counsexual experiences." This limitation is perhaps forced on the authors cil and the Rockefeller Foundation, Professor Kinsey and his coadby considerations of method, because it will yield simpler data and jutors drag forth into the light all the hidden actualities of sex so
more manageable statistics, but it is also a limitation which suits their
that they may lose their dark power and become domesticated among
notion of human nature and its effect is to be seen throughout the
us. It is also an early example of science undertaking to deal head-on
book.
with a uniquely difficult matter that has traditionally been involved
The Report, then, is a study of sexual behavior in so far as it can
in valuation and morality. We must ask the question very seriously:
be quantitatively measured. This is certainly very useful. But, as we
how does science conduct itself in such an enterprise?
might fear, the sexuality that is measured is taken to be the definition
Certainly it does not conduct itself the way it says it does. I have
of sexuality itself. The authors are certainly not without interest in
already suggested that the Report overrates its own objectivity. The
what they call attitudes, but they believe that attitudes are best shown
authors, who are enthusiastically committed to their method and to
by "overt sexual experiences." We want to know, of course, what
their principles, make the mistake of believing that, being scientists,
they mean by an experience and we want to know by what principles
they do not deal in assumptions, preferences, and conclusions. Nothof evidence they draw their conclusions about attitudes.
ing comes more easily to their pen� than the criticism of the sub
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