Supplement
Anticipating Masters and Johnson
by Wardell Pomeroy
(Excerpt. Wardell Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, Harper & Row, New York, 1972)
At an early point in the development of our research, Kinsey began to feel a certain impatience with the fact that the data we were collecting was necessarily secondhand. Like any scholar, he yearned for original sources, and while it was true that what we were doing had not been done before, and therefore could be classified as original research, it occurred to him that we ought to observe at first hand some of the behavior we were recording.
In those days, before the advent of Masters and Johnson, this was a revolutionary idea in the field of sex research, and one not easy to carry out. Nevertheless, Kinsey began looking for opportunities to observe. He was acutely aware of the serious dangers implicit in such work and proceeded cautiously, knowing that he could expect little understanding of what he was doing if it was ever disclosed. Those who already believed the project was immoral would be outraged, he knew, and not even many scientists could be expected to condone it. Few people would believe in the scientific purity of his motives. There was always in the back of his mind the clear and present danger that the Institute might be deprived of its support, from the University as well as the Foundation, if it was subjected to the kind of public attack the revelation of such activity would certainly provoke.
In this conflict between his scientific zeal and the strictures of society, Kinsey characteristically decided in favor of science. Considering that the life of the project itself might be at stake, the decision took considerable courage. But even with the decision made, it was not easy to initiate. Our first tentative efforts were in Indianapolis, where we sometimes paid prostitutes to let us take their histories. During the history taking, a girl might remark that her “spur tongue,” as she referred to her clitoris, was two inches long. Kinsey might express some disbelief at this figure, but for another dollar the prostitute was willing to let him see for himself.
This observation of anatomical differences—and it typified the kind of research Kinsey knew would be attacked if it was known—was the first step toward observing actual behavior. As Masters and Johnson were later to document, a firsthand understanding of basic structures was essential to acquiring knowledge of behavior.
With the idea of recording what he hoped to observe, Kinsey hired Bill Dellenback, who was Clarence Tripp’s partner in a photographic studio in New York. On one of his early visits to New York Kinsey had been photographed by Tripp, and was immensely pleased with the results; he thought they were the best pictures he had ever had taken up to that time.
Photographers who worked with him later were not so fortunate; with them Kinsey was characteristically unsparing. Shortly after the Male volume was published, he wrote to a Conde Nast photographer who had taken a picture of him two months before:
It was very good of you to have taken the picture. I appreciate your interest in doing so. I hardly know how to assure you of my appreciation and yet to disapprove as strenuously as I do of the picture. I think it very bad and essentially slanderous. I very much wish you would destroy the negative and all prints of it. If you will do that, I will be glad to give you additional time when I am next in New York to take additional pictures, but again, with the understanding that we will have some control over their release.
I am not sure that you realize the import of a picture of this sort. There are a good many people who would go to any lengths to put a stop to the research we are doing, and publication of the sort of picture you have taken would materially help their cause.
Of course, it was not as dreadful or portentous a picture as all that. Kinsey simply felt much as President Lyndon Johnson did when he was confronted with an oil portrait, executed by a noted artist, which displayed him as something less than noble.
To the end, he remained sensitive about how he was photographed. In 1953, Luther Evans, who was then the Librarian of Congress, decided that the Library should establish a collection of photographs of eminent persons, to be taken by Dr. Albert R. Miller, the well-known Washington photographer. When Miller wrote, in December of that year, to ask if he could photograph him, Kinsey agreed—getting a little tangled in the editorial "we" he usually employed, saying that “we are complimented in having you propose to add my picture”—but cautioned Miller: “I should warn you that I am a difficult subject to photograph and I should want an agreement that our okay would be necessary before you could use any of the photographs you took."
What was this uncertainty about how he looked to the world? A complicated matter, surely, which will emerge in a clearer light, I think, as I tell the story of his life. It had to do with his conception of himself in relation to other people, and was never more apparent than when he was removed completely from his own sphere.
But if Kinsey was positive about himself as a camera subject, he was tentative in his approach to photographing others, particularly when the subject was sexual behavior. In persuading Dellenback to leave his New York studio and come to work in Bloomington, he was well aware that it would not be easy to put Bill on the payroll. The University authorities, who had to approve our budget, quite naturally wanted to know why we needed a photographer. Kinsey told them, truthfully, that he wanted to photograph animal behavior, but he did not add that he included humans in this category.
Dellenback could not have been a better choice for the job. His personality was not only congenial to the staff members, but it was exactly right for what he was to do. In essential attitudes, he was like those of us who did the interviewing. His technical abilities were superb, and if he had a fault, as noted earlier, it was his tendency to be a perfectionist. Except for matters of lighting and angle, however. Bill had little opportunity for perfection in the actual filming—there were no retakes—but he made up for it with the infinite care he took in the darkroom to produce his prints.
More accurately, Dellenback was a cinematographer, although he was equally skilled with the still camera and took photographs for us when they were required. His work was mostly on film, since motion pictures were the only way sexual behavior could be adequately recorded.
His first assignment originated with a trip Kinsey made to New York for the purpose of taking the histories of a homosexual group consisting chiefly of writers, artists, architects and others occupied with creative work. This group held frequent sex sessions, to one of which Kinsey was invited as an observer. For the benefit of skeptics, let me say that Kinsey possessed the ability to observe actual sexual behavior with the same objectivity he maintained during interviews; he was always the scientist, and in this respect so were we all. Another useful aspect of Kinsey’s remarkable personality in this situation was his easy way of observing without making the observed feel they were being spied upon.
Dellenback recalls that during these sessions Kinsey seemed much more unobtrusive in his manner than usual, no doubt because he understood the need to move cautiously in this unknown and potentially dangerous territory. He would move quietly around the room, never intruding, occasionally whispering a direction to Bill. He always complimented the subjects after a session and reassured them about the quality and value of what they had done. If they had failed to perform satisfactorily whatever act was involved, Kinsey would say, “You did very well. Just great.” He was the absolute observer; there was no personal involvement whatever.
On one occasion his caution and objectivity led to an amusing incident. During a session recording male masturbation, the subject went on and on with the act until the camera began to overheat and Bill knew he was about to run out of film. He made a despairing gesture to Kinsey, indicating what was happening. Prok leaned forward to the subject and said gently, politely, “If you would just come now...”
“Oh, sure,” the subject said, and immediately came to orgasm just as the film ran out. The man had misunderstood and thought Kinsey wanted a lengthy sequence of masturbation, which he was prepared to keep up indefinitely.
In his utter objectivity about his work, Dellenback could hardly remember who was present in many of the sessions, because he was so busy and had so many details on his mind. As far as he was concerned, the situations were completely nonerotic; it was just a job, to which there was no subjective reaction.
If I appear to be overemphasizing this point, it is because I know how hard it is for the layman, or even the scientist in nonsexual fields, to believe it. But it must be understood that objectivity is attained in such situations when erotic content is removed from the observation—exactly opposed to the attitude of the voyeur, who is sexually stimulated by what he sees. Since there is something of the voyeur in nearly everyone, it is understandable that nonscientists find it hard to accept that scientists may not react the way they do; some would even consider it a kind of condescension. The layman can scarcely imagine viewing a sexual scene without having feelings either of stimulation or of disgust, depending on the state of his inhibitions.
We experienced neither emotion. There was, for us, no more erotic content in viewing the sexual activities of the human animal than in observing any other mammal. If that seems to some readers like a dehumanization of sex, I can only cite again Kinsey’s reply to the professionals such as Mead and Menninger who criticized him on this score—that he was not studying emotional or psychological content in sex acts, but only what was actually done and how. Unlike his critics, he believed the physical elements could be divorced from the others for purposes of study, an idea now much more easily accepted since Masters and Johnson have demonstrated it on a large and convincing scale.
Speaking for myself, I cannot recall a single instance of sexual arousal on my part when I was observing sex behavior, and I am certain this was equally true of Kinsey and the other staff members. We were so busy observing, and recording what we observed, that we had no time to think of anything else.
To return, then, to Kinsey’s New York visit: in observing the sexual activity taking place at the group’s party to which he had been invited, he was particularly intrigued by the intercourse of a homosexual couple in which one of the partners had an orgasm of such intensity that he was in a frenzy of release, quite unconsciously beating the other man around the shoulders with his clenched fists. With the idea, as always, of getting as much range and variety as possible in his sampling, Kinsey invited the two men to come out to Bloomington, expenses paid, and be photographed in intercourse. They agreed. By this time, they must have been impressed by the attitude
Kinsey had displayed at the party, resisting every attempt to draw him into the activity, but in such a way that no one was offended and everyone understood his purpose in being there.
In Bloomington, Dellenback photographed the intercourse and orgasm Kinsey had observed in New York, while Gebhard, Martin and I joined him.
It was the first of a series of observations. It must be understood that, while they anticipated in some respects what Masters and Johnson were to do later, our films were in no way comparable to what the Saint Louis scientists were able to accomplish. Ours was an extremely small sampling: twenty homosexual couples, ten heterosexual couples and about twenty-five males and females engaged in masturbation—hardly a scientific sample, nor intended to be. We drew no conclusions from what we saw, and the observations were useful only in the way they were intended—that is, for the first time to provide us with firsthand knowledge of what actually occurred in a wide range of sexual behavior. Later the films were studied and data organized from them.
Such experimental work had been done before. Kinsey, who was fascinated by the concept of individual differences, and especially intrigued by physiologic differences and variations in response, had made an earlier trip to Loma Linda, California, where scientists were studying heart rate and respiration during intercourse. He wanted to hire a physiologist to study these phenomena at the Institute, because it seemed to him there was a tremendous lack of knowledge about such matters, but we had no money for an expansion of our activities. It was Kinsey’s determination to make some observations of his own, nevertheless, that led him to hire Dellenback and undertake the series of observations which began in New York.
In several ways our work was lopsided and incomplete. For example, we found it easier to obtain the consent of homosexual couples to be photographed, so there were twice as many of them. Further, they were all homosexual males; we were unable to obtain any lesbians. What diversity there was existed mostly in the several types of orgasm displayed.
For example, at one end of the scale, there were both males and females whose orgasms were accompanied by almost no overt body movements. With them, the orgasm was more like a long sigh. Often their partners would not even know it had occurred. At the other extreme, there were those whose orgasms were violent. It was convulsive behavior, almost like an epileptic fit, the body twisting and jackknifing, thrown about in an ecstatic storm. Sometimes these people struck their partners violently on the head and shoulders. In between, of course, were the majority, who came to a more commonplace climax.
We observed directly more human sexual responses than any other scientist before Masters and Johnson. Later, the Saint Louis team showed that on some points we were simply wrong, and they recorded many observations we missed. Making their large body of observations under controlled laboratory conditions, they wove what they saw into a coherent pattern covering the entire cycle of female and male response, and that is the essence of their enormous achievement.
Looking back on this phase of our research, limited as it was, I can see that we were not more successful simply because we were far too anxious and cautious about what we were doing, and consequently missed many opportunities to get subjects because we did not think it safe to ask.
Kinsey was as aware of the potential danger as anyone. When it became known that he was observing homosexual behavior, for example, a few of the scant number of people outside the Institute who knew about it immediately concluded that he must be homosexual himself. Nonetheless, he persisted in following through the observation portion of the research because he believed it was scientifically necessary, and that was enough for him. He set aside space for a laboratory after he returned from the initial photographic session in New York, and began looking for subjects.
As Masters and Johnson have since demonstrated, it is no trick at all, in spite of what the public believes, to obtain people for sexual observation, nor are they prostitutes, exhibitionists, or any other kind of variant from the conventional norm, as is popularly supposed. They are people of every kind, as eager to help the cause of scientific research as the 18,000 who gave us their histories. Our limited observation, overwhelmingly confirmed by Masters and Johnson, as well as by every other available piece of evidence, demonstrates repeatedly that what people will accept and what actually occurs are not necessarily the same thing. The folk belief that no “decent” person will allow himself to be observed is only one more illustration of the vast distance between what Americans say they believe and what they do.
In our case, the public would have been astounded and disbelieving to know the names of the eminent scientists who appeared at the Institute from time to time to examine our work and talk with Kinsey, and who volunteered before they left to be photographed in some kind of sexual activity. It was abundantly clear from our interviewing, furthermore, that there were any number of men and women who would be willing to cooperate.
To cite a single example of the ease with which this could be done, a medical school researcher from another university, who was studying infertility, wanted to find out whether the number of sperm cells per ejaculation, or per cubic centimeter of semen, was lowered in cases where a man ejaculated two or more times in rapid succession. He came to us and asked if we could find subjects in his area who were capable of repeated ejaculation, and who would come to his laboratory. On our next trip to that part of the country we found a number of men willing to cooperate.
The same was true of women. Some who had multiple orgasms, for example, were willing to have coitus under observation when they were told that science was almost completely ignorant of this phenomenon. I remember one woman who was capable of from fifteen to twenty orgasms in twenty minutes. Even the most casual contact could arouse a sexual response in her. Observing her both in masturbation and in sexual intercourse, we found that in intercourse her first orgasm occurred within two to five seconds after entry. She was in her sixties when we made these observations, and curiously enough, had never had an orgasm before she was forty. What we would have liked to explore was the possibility of a physiologic difference between such a woman and one who must experience thirty minutes or more of intense erotic stimulation before she achieves a single orgasm. Unfortunately, we were never able to make the observations that might have resolved the issue of these extreme variations in response.
Another remarkable thing about our multiorgasmic sexagenarian was her ability to achieve full relaxation as soon as her partner did. Immediately after his ejaculation, she relaxed in complete satisfaction. By that time she might have had twenty orgasms, or only one or two, but in any case, her partner’s ejaculation marked a happy termination to her sexual drive.
Sometimes people from whom we had taken histories volunteered to be photographed, and one must suppose that an element of exhibitionism was involved in a few of these cases. That was true of the male partner in one couple who volunteered, though his wife was merely compliant and would never have come forward on her own initiative. Whatever the motive, we were not likely to refuse these fortuitous happenings. We believed we were demonstrating something that would help us better to understand what human sexual behavior, particularly orgasm, was like.
In one instance, at least, a volunteer couple gave us a film of more than ordinary potential usefulness. They had heard of our work and wrote to offer their histories, adding that they also had a film of themselves in intercourse we might like to have. It had been taken by a friend whom they had asked to come in and record their activity. The seven-minute sequence depicted the woman lying on her partner, with her hand palms down behind his head, raising the upper part of her torso from his body so that her face was clearly visible. It concluded with a perfectly photographed orgasm. Obviously a therapist with a female patient who had never had an orgasm, and could not even visualize one, might well show such a film to the woman and her husband, together, so they could see for themselves what intercourse ending in orgasm was like. Of course, one must add, the illustration would have to be in the context of whatever total therapy the case might call for.
Were the couple in this film exhibitionists, or “depraved,” or otherwise outside the bounds of organized society? Hardly. Both of them were (and are still) regularly employed in utterly respectable jobs; they have five children; they are regular churchgoers and Sunday school attendants; their life is quite conventional. At the time the film was made, twenty years ago, they were in their early thirties. There were only two unusual things about them. One was their mutual conviction that sex was fun, so much fun that they wanted to record their delight in it, and they were able to do so with a complete lack of inhibition and a feeling of freedom. The other unusual factor was the remarkable range of their sexual life. They had intercourse fourteen times a week on the average, during which he ejaculated two or three times on each occasion, and she had from five to ten orgasms each time. The film made by this couple was one of several amateur records we acquired for the archives.
Since the archives include the most complete record of sexual behavior in the world, the filmed part of it (comparatively a very small part) also includes stag films and commercial films of a more familiar kind. Kinsey was not much interested in them, except as they added to the collection, because while stag films were real enough, in most cases the reactions of the participants were faked and so were of no real interest to the scientist.
In spite of our lack of an adequate physiological laboratory, we did manage to accumulate a substantial body of data on human sexual anatomy and physiology, some of which form the basis for the chapters in the Female volume on “Anatomy of Sexual Response and Orgasm,” and “Physiology of Sexual Response and Orgasm.” This was the small foundation upon which Masters and Johnson later erected their remarkable structure of scientific fact.
Kinsey and Masters were alike in one significant respect—their compelling drive to accomplish the task at hand. Masters works sometimes eighty hours a week, including an entire night, and Kinsey, as I have described, pushed himself in the same way. The two never met, but I am sure Prok would have been delighted to know that at Washington University, only 220 miles away, Masters was just then beginning the laboratory observations that Kinsey himself had hoped to make, but was never able to launch. Masters picked up the scientific trail where Kinsey left it.
With his background in biology, it was natural that Kinsey would be interested in observing sexual behavior in the human animal, and as logical that he should want to make some comparative films of the same kind of activity in other mammals. His desire to undertake this was stimulated further by his realization that so little work had been done in the field—just as he had been directed toward beginning the project by the paucity of material for his sex education class.
The problem in studying animal sexual behavior had been the extreme rapidity of response, and the fact that it might involve every part of the animal’s body. Consequently it was very difficult, in fact virtually impossible, to observe everything taking place in the few seconds, or the minute or two, comprising the duration of activity. Moving pictures, however, made it possible to examine and reexamine the identical performance any number of times, studying and measuring the details on any single frame of film if it was necessary. With this kind of record, we could analyze the physiologic bases of the action in various parts of the animal’s body.
Before Kinsey died, we had compiled photographic records of sexual behavior in many species of animals. Kinsey, Dellenback and Gebhard began this part of the project with a field trip (followed by several others) to the Yerkes Laboratories in Orange Park, Florida, where we filmed the sexual activities of chimpanzees. Considering the amount of work scientists had already done with the primates, it was astonishing to discover how little was known about the sex lives of these mammals. For example, it was believed (with no evidence to support it) that only female gibbons, among the apes, had orgasm. But Dellenback filmed a female chimpanzee masturbating to orgasm —which she does not experience during intercourse—and doing it with the same clitoral manipulation the human female uses. Watching her perform, one could see why intercourse did not produce orgasm. In chimpanzee copulation, the male approaches, mounts quickly from the rear and the act is over in a moment. Our female chimp took a comparatively long time to produce her orgasm by masturbation.
Kinsey was fond of the chimpanzees, as he was of all animals. After Gebhard had made a later trip to Orange Park to continue the work there, Prok wrote to Dr. Henry Nissen, director of the Laboratories, to thank him for his help, and added: “You have accumulated a very important body of knowledge in your work with the chimpanzees. Dr. Gebhard tells me the chimps like you and I think that is an absolute fundamental in any work with animals.”
Kinsey believed firmly that one had to love animals to work well with them, and that it was wrong to be the complete cold-blooded scientist with them that some researchers were. He extended this belief to people, asserting that it was essential to find something one could respect, or relate to, in the object of study—whether it was an animal or a human whose behavior was far outside the ordinary social patterns—before really effective work could be done. It is an idea still not widely believed by psychologists today, in spite of the abundance of evidence to confirm it.
The animal research was full of surprises, not the least of which was the revelation of how little was known about the sex lives of even the most familiar animals. We found, for instance, that homosexual activity was as common among animals as it is among humans. One of our field trips took us to the Oregon State Agricultural College farm, where Dr. Fred McKenzie, head of the Department of Animal Husbandry, helped us take about 4,000 feet of moving pictures of sexual behavior in cattle, sheep, hogs and rabbits. Cattle were being bred there for purposes of artificial insemination experiments, and it was not unusual to see cows mounting cows, which we filmed. But our prize came the day Dellenback recorded a bull mounting another bull, achieving complete anal penetration, and ejaculating as he withdrew.
An eminent sex researcher to whom we showed this film remarked: “Every judge in the country who has to deal with sex offenders should see this film. It might teach him something about what the word ‘unnatural’ means.”
Whenever we learned of studies that would fill the gaps in our own work, Kinsey was quick to acquire whatever motion picture records had been made. He wrote to Dr. John Scott, of the University of Wyoming, when he heard that Scott had made some movies of mating in the sage grouse, and not only got prints of a film showing some of the characteristic mating behavior of sharp-tailed grouse, but also that of the greater prairie chicken.
Perhaps the most unusual discovery we made in the filming of animals was something that had been learned by Dr. Albert Shadle, head of the Department of Biology at the University of Buffalo, who had been studying the life cycles of porcupines, skunks and raccoons. Before he made his studies, it had been widely believed by zoologists that porcupines had intercourse face to face, a supposition reinforced not only by the obvious fact of their heavy quill covering, but by their observed behavior in mating, during which they maneuver around each other, face to face, in a kind of erotic dance, and the male fairly deluges the female with his urine. Yet Shadle discovered that during actual intercourse, the female flipped her broad, spiny tail over her back, disclosing a smooth surface beneath that offered no obstacle to a conventional mounting position for the male. We persuaded him to let us make a film of this act.
On a trip to Swarthmore College, we learned from another scientist something about the unusual factors involved in the copulations of mink. During intercourse, the male mounts the female and seizes the nape of her neck in his teeth. For an hour or more he throws her about in what looks like the cruelest kind of rape, sometimes ruining her pelt (a serious problem for mink breeders) and occasionally even killing her in his frenzy. In an effort to save the females from death or injury, breeders had been experimenting with artificial insemination but found that it did not work. Further study showed that without going through this fierce ritual, the female would not ovulate.
Kinsey pursued the compilation of data on animal sex behavior with the same persistence he exhibited with the major research on humans. One was, of course, intertwined with the other. At a meeting in New York with Dr. Marc Klein, of the Institut de Biologie Medicale, in Strasbourg, Kinsey learned from this distinguished scientist that he had observed orgasm in the female rabbit, a phenomenon most scientists did not know existed. Kinsey was fascinated. At that time he was not convinced that orgasm occurred in any species of mammal except the human female, and to prove it occurred in the rabbit would be of considerable importance. His own motion pictures of rabbit coitus did not record that the female reached orgasm, although she was obviously responding erotically.
After their meeting, Kinsey wrote to Klein asking him for some specific references. He meant to cite them in the Female volume, then under preparation.
Your descriptions of orgasm for the rabbit female sounded very convincing, but I need to be able to quote authority until I have a chance to see it myself I have spent some time with rabbit observation this year, although a pitifully small amount of time, and have become very acquainted with the characteristic response of the male rabbit in orgasm but have not seen anything that approached orgasm in the female. I have seen the female raise her pelvis at the approach of the male’s orgasm, and give plenty of other indications of erotic response. I have not seen her reach any complete peak of response from which she regressed abruptly into a normal physiologic state. But our observations are so limited that I need the help of you people who have observed abundantly. This is a very important matter, because of the nearly unique or absolutely unique phenomenon of orgasm in the human female.
Klein confirmed what Kinsey wanted to know:
As far as I am concerned, I have very often observed a quite definite peak of response with climax, from which the female falls back abruptly into a quiet state. When the climax is complete, the two partners fall together on one side; at that very moment the female is shrieking and sometimes even the male is shrieking himself. The female thrusts the male aside by a sudden movement of the pelvis and the two animals at once come back to the normal stature on the four limbs. I think that such a climax may be reasonably well called orgasm, the more that it is an individual response of the female which is far from appearing in all females even of a definite strain.
. . . Once you know well the sexual behavior in the rabbit, not occasionally but through personal observations of individual cases over months and years, you are finally aware that there are enormous individual differences in this behavior, and that you find patterns of normal and abnormal plays and responses which remind strongly of human behavior.
Dr. Klein recommended several other sources of information on the subject, and one finds Kinsey doggedly following these leads, intent on pinning down the scientific fact—sometimes in an unconsciously humorous way, as when he writes to Dr. A. S. Barkes, of the National Institute for Medical Research, in London, citing him as one who Klein says is “among the people who really know the rabbit.”
One of the sources recommended by Klein was Dr. John Hammond, of the School of Agriculture, Cambridge University, and in spite of all he had learned from the Strasbourg expert, Kinsey showed himself not quite convinced:
The very active response which occurs in female cats after coitus, had been somewhat difficult to interpret and we are not satisfied whether this should be called orgasm or whether it represents a reflex response which does not bring the release of nervous tension which is the most distinctive characteristic of true orgasm.
Hammond, too, believed that there was orgasm in the female rabbit at copulation:
There is no possible doubt that there is some nervous connection to the brain which sets free the hormone from the anterior pituitary and so causes ovulation. . . . There is another species of animal which behaves in this way, that is, it only ovulates following coitus; this animal is the ferret. I am enclosing a paper on the ferret which gives some details. A film of copulation in the ferret would, I think, show you by the expression on the face of the female that an orgasm did occur. I have repeatedly seen this.
Besides these sources, Kinsey pursued the subject with Professor H. Hediger, director of the famous Zoological Gardens in Basel, Switzerland, and with other eminent authorities. He came away from the pursuit convinced that the female rabbit did, indeed, have orgasm, not only in intercourse with males but when females mounted other females and exhibited the same kind of “fainting” orgasm Klein had described. Taken together with his observations of chimpanzees, this research showed that there was ample reason to doubt the widely held belief that human females alone of all the mammalian species experienced orgasm.
From filming animals we were able to arrive at more definite conclusions than the films of humans had produced. In the light of subsequent far more detailed studies, notably Ford and Beach’s Patterns of Sexual Behavior, what we concluded does not now seem so original, although it is still relatively unknown to the general public, much less accepted. Our major conclusion was that the human animal was even more mammalian than we had thought. Every kind of sexual behavior we had observed or known about in humans could be found in animals.
In spite of the importance Kinsey attached to what our cameras were recording, he was constantly apprehensive about this aspect of the research, and fearful of the possible consequences of discovery. Unquestionably, he had every right to be worried. If it had become publicly known, there is little reason to believe the Institute would have survived the publicity. But no one outside the inner circle knew about this phase of our work. We did not talk about it to anyone, and the filming was mentioned only once in the books we compiled—a single cryptic reference in the Female volume.
Something of the trouble we might have had could be seen years later when Masters and Johnson’s work came to public attention before the publication of their first book. The outrage of the moralists was a serious threat to their work. Nevertheless, these courageous researchers broke the barrier and entered a new era of sex research, just as Kinsey had done.
Some time after Kinsey’s death, the Saint Louis team learned of our films and came to Bloomington to see for themselves. To them, as to other qualified researchers, our record of observation, scanty though it might be in sum, was valuable, and so it is to those scholars who visit the archives today and study the film. Only a few sequences cannot be shown to anyone, because there are recognizable persons in them who did not want their identity disclosed outside the Institute.
Perhaps our contribution was small in terms of quantity, but I believe that, in the light of subsequent events, it was not without significance.
. . .
One of the more esoteric subjects Kinsey discussed by mail was sex and social dancing. A researcher at the University of Chicago, undertaking a project to determine the role of social dancing in the lives of adolescents, wanted to know if Kinsey had any information on its erotic aspect. That kind of information was in all our histories, but it had not been analyzed and Kinsey had to give a conjectural answer. Social dancing might lead to some erotic response on the part of the male, he thought, but rarely in the female, although there was a tremendous difference in the response at various social levels, more occurring in the better-educated segment of the population. In any case, he concluded, the amount of erotic response in dancing was certainly much less than the moralistic literature would lead one to believe.
(Kinsey, we must remember, lived in the pre-rock era. What he would make of today’s social dancing, with its surface appearance of eroticism and its lack of touching, I can only surmise.)
More specialized by far than sex and dancing were Kinsey’s observations on lesbianism and the clitoris. One of Kinsey’s good friends. Dr. Carl H. Moore, of the Zoology Department at the University of Chicago, once asked what some might have thought a naive question. He wondered if Kinsey could define exactly what a lesbian was. The popular definition might not be accurate, he suspected, and speculated as to whether lesbianism had anything to do with the length of the clitoris. The women of Lesbos, he reminded his friend, were reputed to have clitorises as long as two inches.
In his answer, Kinsey noted that Sappho’s homosexual experiences were no different from those enjoyed by most other ancient Greeks, both male and female. Her name attached to sexual relations between women was purely a literary consequence, and had nothing to do with the size of the clitorises of the ladies who lived on the island of Lesbos.
There is a tradition, Kinsey noted, that female homosexual histories are often correlated with the size of the clitoris, and our research was trying to determine what truth there might be in this notion, but unless a clitoris was of unusual size, the subject was not able to provide us with an estimate based on her own observation.
In fact, measuring a clitoris is an extremely technical matter, as Kinsey pointed out, even for the best-trained gynecologists. We spent considerable time checking with these specialists on the technical problems of securing exact measurements. We were convinced in the end that it was nearly impossible to do so because of the amount of fleshy material and the position of the material in the prepuce. A woman could certainly get no clear estimate of her own clitoris without technical training on how to take a measurement— and even then it would be difficult except in the case of very large organs.
I might add that taking penis measurements is much easier, obviously, and we had the largest body of penis measurements in existence—another Kinsey collection. It included more than 4,000 sets of measurements made by those who gave us their histories, and more than 1,200 others made by a scientist who turned his records over to us. For the curious, the maximum authenticated record in our files was ten and a half inches in erection, although there were in existence unofficial reports of longer ones. For the worriers, the average length was nearly six and a half inches—and I should note that there is no correlation between length of the penis and sexual ability.
The clitoris, however, is a more complicated organ. Kinsey pointed out to Dr. Moore that there were evidently racial inheritance factors involved in its size. Clitorises measuring more than an inch are apparently very rare in whites, but may occur in 2 or 3 percent of blacks, or at least they did so in the limited number of black histories we took. Long clitorises are well known among black prostitutes, and measurements of three inches and more were obtained from perhaps one out of 300 or 400 black women. Circus sideshows often exhibit individuals with clitorises that may measure as much as four inches. In some of these cases erection is possible, but in many such cases it is not. It is in only a small portion of these cases, then, that coitus could be had both as male or female.
Kinsey said in conclusion that all the records he knew about of females with enlarged clitorises also showed them to have well-developed vaginas and all the other characteristics of females. Many of them had histories of childbearing. Consequently he rejected the idea that they were hermaphrodites.
As we prepared the data for the Female volume, it was logical that Kinsey should extend his interest in the field of gynecology. We had the cooperation of several specialists, one of them an English gynecologist who was among the doctors making tests for us of awareness of tactile and pressure stimulation in women.
Writing to a doctor in San Francisco about this man, Kinsey reported that our English colleague found between 70 and 95 percent of the women he examined aware of tactile stimulation in every part of the vagina, which disagreed with all the other tests. For a while Kinsey corresponded with this doctor and could not discover the source of what he knew must be an error, because there are no nerve endings in the vagina. This was an important question for Kinsey to be certain about because the idea of the vaginal orgasm was still believed in by many psychoanalysts—and in fact this was one of the points on which he was later severely attacked.
The answer was discovered when the Englishman came to America and Kinsey was able to observe him actually making tests. It developed that he was not placing the speculum as deeply as any of the other gynecologists, and consequently was testing only the forward areas of the vagina. Under these circumstances, it was impossible to touch any area in the deep vagina without simultaneously touching vulvar areas.
What seemed most significant to Kinsey was that the English doctor had been holding the speculum with his hands through all these tests. Exploring further, Kinsey found that stimulation of the vagina without touching the speculum brought no response, while moving the instrument without touching the vagina did elicit a response, obviously because external areas were stimulated. That was the answer, Kinsey said. While the doctor held the speculum, thus stimulating external areas, it was inevitable that every test would record interior awareness of tactile stimulation.
It was Kinsey’s knowledge of physiology, learned through his studies in biology, that enabled him to grasp these problems in their most technical details. As a consequence he was capable of discussing such a question as the sexual response in women as measured by the secretion from the Bartholin glands. (The secretion is measured by absorption in a tampon.) He informed an inquiring sociologist from Graz, Austria, that he had found a tremendous individual variation in the amount of secretion from these glands within a single individual. It might be correlated with the individual’s level of arousal, he said, but was not so correlated between individuals. Kinsey could cite cases of women who were highly responsive sexually but were almost completely lacking in Bartholin and cervical secretions.
Here, as in other areas, Kinsey was always ready to challenge previous conceptions, particularly those held by psychoanalysts. One of the psychoanalytic theories he particularly disbelieved was that the vagina must become the prime site of stimulation in order to achieve a satisfactory sexual life. In this theory, clitoral stimulation is denounced as infantile and inadequate for any mature adjustment, although it is admitted that the clitoris is the prime source of sensation in preadolescent years; the mature individual transfers the site of sensation to the vagina. This is the essence of the controversy about whether nerve endings exist in the vagina.
Kinsey employed a half-dozen good gynecologists to make experimental tests of a long series of patients—the English doctor was one of them—to determine the extent to which women were aware of tactile and heavier stimulation in every part of the genitalia. This single aspect of the research led Kinsey into an area where no one had ever explored with any such thoroughness before. When the results were published, there were still those who refused to believe them, notably Dr. Bergler, the New York analyst. Subsequent research, however, most particularly that of Masters and Johnson, has confirmed that Kinsey was right and his critics wrong.
In his remarks on the social significance of masturbation in females, Kinsey laid the groundwork for some of the criticism that was about to descend on him. Declaring that “the vagina . . . in most females [is] quite devoid of end organs of touch” and was therefore “incapable of responding to tactile stimulation,” he flew in the face of the psychoanalysts who believed masturbation interfered with the “vaginal responses” which resulted in the mythical “vaginal orgasm,” the sign of “sexual maturity.” Kinsey asserted flatly what is now believed by all but a few, that “the areas primarily involved in the female’s sensory responses during coitus are exactly those which are primarily involved in masturbation, namely the clitoris and the labia.” He went on to point out that there was evidence to indicate that premarital experience in masturbation might actually contribute to a female’s capacity to respond in marriage. Inexperience in orgasm before marriage, he noted, was often responsible for her difficulty in reaching it in marriage.
Probably the most bizarre of the criticisms against the book were made by Dr. Edmund Bergler, an irascible New York psychoanalyst who was a strong proponent of the notion of vaginal orgasm, an idea since completely discredited and then well on its way to being so. The controversy began with a Bergler article on “Premature Ejaculation” in the August 1950 issue of the International Journal of Sexology, to which Kinsey replied with a scathing letter in which he said, among other things:
You have not fairly represented our position in regard to so-called vaginal orgasm. I have emphasized abundantly that orgasm involves the whole nervous system and not merely the vagina, which happens to be an organ that is least supplied with nerves. Similarly, your statement that the woman is normally vaginally frigid, is your own invention and nothing that we have ever said or thought. Your suggestion that we think orgasm is derived primarily from clitoris manipulation digitally performed, again has no basis in our statement of the situation.
Your suggestion that we think that orgasm is not to be expected because the penis does not come in contact with the clitoris, or that intercourse consists of rubbing the penis interlabially against the clitoris, is a travesty which you have invented for your own ulterior purpose of our understanding of the anatomy and physiology involved in coitus. Your article contains other similar misinterpretations and distortions of our position.
If you claim to be a scientist, you are under some obligation to be sure of the accuracy of the statements you make. It is also the function of a scientist whose data are thus misrepresented to see to it that such misrepresentations are not propagated in the literature.
Your treatment of the material smacks much more of a dogmatic effort to win a point than a scientist’s effort to discover the fact. Your evident disdain for the significance of science, especially biologic science, is one more reason for believing that you are not interested in seeing psychoanalysis established scientifically.
Thus began an acrimonious controversy which resulted in the publication in 1954 of an entire book attacking the Report, Kinsey's Myth of Female Sexuality, which Bergler wrote in collaboration with Dr. William S. Kroger, a Chicago gynecologist. No other critic had gone so far (194 pages), or expressed himself so violently, but that was characteristic of Bergler, who far surpassed Kinsey in his inability to stand criticism and contradiction.
In studying marital coitus, Kinsey took the broad view:
Sexual adjustments represent only one aspect and not necessarily the most important aspect of marriage. No balanced program for American youth can be confined to preparing them for sexual relationships in marriage. But it is inconceivable that anyone who is objectively and scientifically interested in successful marriages should fail to appreciate the significance of coitus in marriage, or wholly ignore the correlations which exist between pre-marital activities and the sexual adjustments which are made in marriage.
When it came to extramarital coitus, however, Kinsey was once again in hot water with his critics, as events proved. He was careful to point out that we did not yet have enough data to undertake an overall appraisal of the problem, but he was willing to set down some conclusions based on the experiences of the females who had contributed to our histories.
He observed, for example, that extramarital coitus attracted some people because it gave them a variety of experience with new sexual partners who were sometimes superior sexually to their marriage partner. At times the motivation in either male or female was a conscious or unconscious attempt to acquire social status. In other instances, the female had accepted the experience as an accommodation to a respected friend, even though she might not be particularly interested in the relationship. There were occasions, too, when it was done in retaliation for the partner’s extramarital activity, or for some sort of nonsexual mistreatment, real or imaginary. Sometimes both females and males had used extramarital affairs as a means to assert independence. Some of the females, Kinsey noted, had discovered new sources of emotional satisfaction in extramarital relationships, while others had found it impossible to share such a relationship with more than one partner, and were involved in guilt reactions and consequent social difficulties.
Among Kinsey’s other conclusions about this kind of activity was his notation of a “not inconsiderable” group of cases in which husbands had encouraged wives to engage in extramarital activities, most of them in an honest attempt to give their wives the opportunity for additional sexual satisfaction. Thus, in 1953, Kinsey pinpointed the existence of an interest in what came to be widely known as “mate swapping,” out of which have grown the group sex behavior patterns of the present day.
In another letter Kinsey discussed the subject of male fertility with Dr. Frank K. Shuttleworth, of the Institute of Child Welfare, University of California at Berkeley. He believed that students in the field had all been “too prudish” to make an actual investigation of sperm count in early-adolescent males. His own research for the Male volume had produced some material, but not enough. He could report, however, that there were mature sperm even in the first ejaculation, although he did not yet have any actual counts. The research showed further that males were rarely responsible for pregnancy until they were in their late teens, even though they might have an abundance of intercourse earlier than that without making any attempt at contraception. This subject was one of the detailed studies Kinsey hoped to make later but never completed.
Even in a fellow professional such as Shuttleworth he would not tolerate departures from the scientific method. He writes: “Your statement that the human male finds it easy to reach an orgasm ‘because his contribution to the reproductive process requires an orgasm in order that seminal fluid may be discharged,’ belongs in the realm of purposive philosophy.”
Another correspondence concerned spontaneous orgasm. Dr. Phillip Polatin, of Columbia University, asked Kinsey for information on this subject, about which we had acquired a considerable amount of information. Kinsey pointed out to Polatin that spontaneous orgasm while awake is a little more common in the female than in the male, but masturbation in the female is more often without fantasy. He believed it would not be impossible to find a patient who reached spontaneous orgasm without fantasy, but it might be difficult to explain theoretically the source of the actual stimulation.
Kinsey thought that women who most often experienced spontaneous orgasm were those who were most generally responsive, in a sexual sense, with high rates of outlet. (Kinsey once defined a nymphomaniac as “someone who has more sex than you do.”)
There was nothing wrong with spontaneous orgasm, in Kinsey’s opinion. On the contrary, as he pointed out to Dr. Polatin, some of these highly responsive women who had occasional spontaneous orgasms were among the socially most significant, most efficient and energetic women in all his female histories. Many of them were professionally trained in medicine or psychiatry, or some other field.