Had they met, he would have aroused the professional interest of William H. Whyte Jr., a former Marine Corps officer only a year older than Agnew. As a staff writer for Fortune, Whyte had begun to type the Agnews as Organization Men. They might call their work a treadmill or a rat race, but they belonged to the firm—or whatever lay at the other end of their occupational umbilical cord, since junior executives were only one of the many species found in the developments. They included the young physician completing his residency in internal medicine and destined for group practice, the dental intern, the FBI agent, the salaried young attorney working for a prestigious law partnership, the promising young major attending staff school, the physicist in corporate shop, the Ph.D. in a pharmaceutical laboratory, the apprentice engineer at Pratt & Whitney; even the vicar who would wind up a member of the church hierarchy. Most were well aware of the bond that joined them; as some frequently put it, they were “all in the same boat.” They had few doubts about the boat’s destination. Within a quarter-century, when their turn came, they and others like them would set the national tone, becoming what Time would later call the “command generation.” Then they would have their hands full. For the present, they enjoyed their families while they could, met their peers at mixers, and enjoyed the communal sports of the development: canasta, ping-pong, Chinese checkers—and, in that presidential election year when their man lost, hushed conversations about an Indiana University research investigation which was becoming known to the whole world as the Kinsey Report.
***
In a Peter Arno cartoon of the time, a shocked woman looked up from the report (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 804 pages, $6.50, over 275,000 copies sold in 1948) and asked her husband, “Is there a Mrs. Kinsey?” There was, and there were also three Kinsey children, all conceived before he embarked upon his major work. Not that he had been idle before; his passion for taxonomy could be traced back to his school days in South Orange, New Jersey, when he submitted an account of the behavior of birds in the rain to a nature journal, which accepted it. Then, and thereafter, he was a stickler for explicit detail. Until he became interested in certain extracurricular activities of his Indiana students, his fellow zoologists thought he would be remembered for his prodigious study of the gall wasp, a harmless species found in eastern Central America. Kinsey traveled 80,000 miles collecting examples, and he measured, catalogued, and preserved 3,500,000 of them, to demonstrate their individual variations. Peering through his microscope, he recorded twenty-eight different measurements of each specimen. PM called it “a landmark in the history of entomology.” As a scientist he had naturally played no favorites; every gall wasp was just as good as the next one to him; he rendered no judgment on their behavior. It was an attitude which would subsequently prove even more useful to him. It would also amaze the country.
Until the late 1930s the career of Alfred C. Kinsey had varied scarcely a jot from those of thousands of his colleagues: Harvard, graduate study, years of junior faculty teaching, tenure, and all those gall wasps. In Bloomington he had become a familiar campus figure, tall, heavyset, with sandy hair and a preoccupied manner. His students admired his patience and forbearance. He had all the right professorial hobbies: gardening, hiking, pottery, classical music. No scandal had touched him or even come within whispering distance of him. He was, in short, just the sort of educator a cautious dean would choose to teach a course on marriage problems. Certainly Indiana’s dean never suspected that he would create problems—and, to boot, make the university a mecca for collectors of erotica.
Before he could reach even a tentative view of matrimonial difficulties, Kinsey reasoned, he must steep himself in facts about biological transactions between Homo sapiens mates. He went to the university library and received the jolt of his life. There were no facts worth mentioning, in Indiana or elsewhere. The staggering truth was that men and women knew more about gall wasps than each other. Human beings were even uninformed about the erotic behavior of members of their own sex, and therefore had no way of knowing whether or not they were normal. To a disciple of truth, this was unacceptable. He was seized with a determination to right the wrong which would glow within him until the end of his life, sustaining him through long periods of exhausting research. It was at about this time that Mrs. Kinsey said, “I hardly see him at night since he took up sex.”
His friends saw him, though not informally. While on the job he no longer thought of them as friends. As an objective investigator he regarded them as just so many specimens, to be measured and catalogued in all their variations. Working with them, he developed his basic two-and-a-half-hour, 300-to-500-question interview. It covered the whole sexual spectrum—masturbation, nocturnal emissions, lewd fantasies, petting, intercourse before and after marriage, adultery, inversion, frequency of ejaculations, oral sex, anal sex, relations with animals, exotic pleasures. Whether his friendships survived this test is unknown, but in Bloomington and elsewhere word got around that he was turning over rocks no one had come near before. Nothing was beyond his scope. Babies, measured in the nursery with special instruments, were found to experience orgasms at the age of four or five months. Elderly spinsters confided that restrictive clothing brought them to climax. One preadolescent child had 26 orgasms in 24 hours; a scholarly and skilled attorney had averaged over 30 ejaculations a week for over 30 years.
Bankers, tramps, criminals, writers, diplomats, poets, pimps, editors, cowboys, teachers, cab drivers, literary agents, hospital orderlies, idle patricians—the responses of all of them were transcribed in code, filed, and later fed into IBM computers. As the completed interviews mounted into the thousands, Kinsey acquired a staff; university funding was supplemented by grants from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation. By the time the first volume on the human male reached the manuscript stage, Kinsey and his three chief interviewers had devoted forty man-years to the compilation of over 12,000 case histories. Now they were breaking down data on the human female. The first volume was scheduled to reach book counters in January 1948.
Americans since grown jaded by literature on mate swapping and the St. Louis laboratories of Masters and Johnson—where nurses and doctors’ wives volunteered, in the name of science, for intercourse with total strangers—may find it hard to recapture the innocence of sex before Kinsey. Youths in their early teens held sotto voce discussions with other youths, spreading ignorance. Adults talked of it only to their spouses, and here too the blind were leading the blind. Kinsey interviewed thousands of married couples who said they had never experienced intercourse; gynecological examinations of the women confirmed them. One Kinsey investigator found 1,000 wives who were virgins and had no idea why their marriages had been childless. (Their husbands were equally perplexed.) For millions like them, the facts of life were mysteries as obscure as the interior of unexplored Brazil.
Apart from the dubious studies of Havelock Ellis—over a third of Ellis’s patients reported that they had been seduced in their parents’ homes by servants of the opposite sex, which suggests the narrowness of his social base—educated Americans lacked qualified guides. The rest of the population had no guides at all. Marriage manuals going back to Ovid’s, in the first century of the Christian epoch, were flawed by error. In the absence of knowledge, superstition flourished. Boys believed that masturbation was a practice of degenerates; girls were told that “deep” or “French” kissing led to pregnancy and venereal disease. Because the sex drive is stronger than fear, onanism and mutual exploration by boys and girls continued—to be followed by paroxysms of remorse. What is perhaps hardest to grasp is the conviction of powerful social institutions that they had a sacred obligation to propagate these private terrors. Both church and secular leaders believed that only children scared stiff could be counted on to approach the altar as virgins. (How they would conquer their irrational fright in bed that first night was unmentioned and, like the rest of it, unmentionable.) Except for hurried and inept father/son, mother/daug
hter sessions, mature society went along with the incubi and the bogeys. The general feeling was rather like that of lodge brothers toward an initiate. They had been hazed; so must their offspring.
All this was predicated upon the assumption that the system worked—that boys who had been properly reared “saved themselves” for well-bred girls who had remained “pure”—hence white for brides—and that after marriage and until death they remained faithful to one another. Male homosexuals, usually called fairies or perverts, were considered indistinguishable from the criminally insane. Even among sophisticates such practices as pederasty, fellatio, cunnilingus, and sodomy with barnyard quadrupeds were presumed to exist only in fantasy and locker room jokes.
Then Kinsey told Americans this about themselves:
Eighty-five percent of all married men had engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage.
The average groom had experienced 1,500 orgasms before his wedding day.
Fifty percent of American husbands had committed adultery.
Fifty percent of American females “were nonvirgins, if single, or had been nonvirgins before marriage.”
Two out of every three single women had engaged in premarital sex of some kind.
Ninety-five percent of all males were sexually active before their fifteenth birthday, and maximum activity occurred at sixteen or seventeen.
The average unmarried male had three or four orgasms a week.
One girl in every six had experienced orgasm before adolescence, and one in four by the age of fifteen.
By the age of forty, more than one wife in every four (26 percent, or over seven million) had committed adultery at least once. (In view of the tendency to conceal infidelity, Kinsey believed that the actual figures were much higher.) Adultery tended to increase as a marriage lengthened.
One male in every three, and one female in every seven, had some adolescent homosexual experience.
Ten percent of the male population was “more or less exclusively homosexual” for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five.
Four percent (2,600,000) of American men were “exclusively homosexual throughout their lives, after the onset of adolescence.”
Women who weren’t virgins on their wedding day were twice as likely to commit adultery.
One in every six American farm boys had copulated with farm animals.
Nearly 70 percent of men had had relations with prostitutes by the age of thirty-five.
Among the thousands of interviewees were 2,094 single women who reported a total of 460,000 acts of sexual intercourse; 476 of them had become pregnant. To Kinsey’s surprise, four out of five of the unmarried mothers expressed no regret.
Among American females, three out of every four nonvirgins did not regret their sexual experiences. The least regretful were those who had been the most promiscuous, the most regretful those who had had the least sex activity. Asked why they remained chaste, 22 percent of the virgins “frankly conceded lack of opportunity.”
Nobody was neutral about the Kinsey Report. Sacks of mail descended upon the professor’s office on the second floor of Bloomington’s old Zoology Building. Kinsey became one of the first instant celebrities. His face, or something resembling it, appeared on the cover of Time, and to his horror strangers sought him out to reveal closely guarded secrets of their estral lives—secret to them, but to him repetitive accounts of acts practiced by millions. Late in the 1940s a teen-age sex club craze swept the country; girls were admitted to membership after coupling with a boy in the presence of the group and promising to engage in sexual congress at least once a week thereafter. When the wave reached Indiana, a reporter asked Kinsey to comment. In his matter-of-fact way—it was this, as much as anything, which offended those who held sex to be sacred—the zoologist pointed out that according to his studies there were 450,000 acts of fornication in Indiana every week. “And that,” he said, “is why I don’t get excited when the newspapers report three or four teen-agers having such experiences.” On December 31, 1948, the New York Times reported that fake telephone calls from spurious Kinsey interviewers were harassing respectable matrons. After a year of Kinsey statistics people were beginning to wonder just what respectability was, and the issue was further clouded when the Times switchboard was jammed by female New Yorkers eager to be put in touch with real interviewers.
There was something peculiarly American about both the Kinsey project and its reception. “No other people has been so curious about itself,” Clyde Kluckhohn observed, “nor so willing to subject itself to scientific analysis, nor so avid to read even the most sneering and superficial criticisms of outsiders…. More than anything else, the Kinsey studies testify to the continued vitality of a childlike trust in knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, as an instrument for individual and social improvement.” Within a generation it appeared that the country had come to regard the statistics as a challenge; if the new thing was to have bigger and better orgasms, the U.S. intended to be first. In 1970 the two best-selling titles on U.S. nonfiction lists told readers how to make themselves more sensual by extrapolating from Kinsey data. Indeed, by the late 1960s and early 1970s the children of Americans who had felt guilty about strong sex drives were becoming anxious if they weren’t lusty enough. “America had no sooner got rid of being ashamed about sex,” wrote Louis Kronenberger, “than it grew ashamed about the lack of it.” In the Nixon years advocates of a vigorous new feminism waged a running battle with their critics over whether careers for women masculinized them or increased their sexual gratification. Both sides accepted Kinsey’s figures as valid and, more significantly, both agreed that satisfied desire was important to the individual and even to society.
There, as elsewhere, the Truman and Nixon eras seem more than a generation apart. In 1972 the concept of chaperones, say, or the sight of men tipping their hats to approaching young women would seem as anachronistic as microskirts or four-letter words on the screen of your neighborhood theater would have been in 1948. It is singular to recall that when Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead that year, he could convey soldiers’ profanity only by coining a new verb, to fug (fugging, fugger, motherfugger, etc.). In 1949 Joseph W. Gannon, the arbiter of what the New York Times saw fit to print in its advertising columns, revised, bowdlerized, or rejected 1,456 submissions, mostly because he considered them prurient. Gannon had a genius for the right word. He always cut it out. An ad publicizing lingerie as “naughty but nice” was altered to read “Paris-inspired—but so nice.” A night club ad featuring “50 of the hottest girls this side of hell” emerged from Gannon’s laundromat as “50 of the most alluring maidens this side of paradise.” Curves were painted out of models in girdle displays, giving them an eerie, unisex appearance and raising the question of why they needed foundation garments at all, and the Times airbrushes dressed photographs of Sally Rand from clavicle to femur.
Those were desperate days for Sally. Bumping and grinding in Milwaukee, she was arrested for the nth time by a policewoman, Geraldine Sampson. Officer Sampson testified that the defendant had been appearing in a carnival sideshow without panties—“nude as could be.” Indignantly Sally protested that she was stone broke; she didn’t have any pants. Lacking a civil liberties lawyer to rescue her, she was convicted and shown to a cell. The cops took everything she had, including her woman’s right to conceal her age. “I’m sorry, I just don’t tell that,” she demurred, but the bulls wangled it out of her anyhow, and then it was in all the papers. She was forty-six, a prophet before her time. On the West Coast a younger exhibitionist, who in 1946 had changed her name from Norma Jean Baker to Marilyn Monroe, was fired by Columbia Pictures in September 1948 after playing her first part. (Studio comments included “Can’t act,” “Voice like a tight squeak,” “Utterly unsure of herself,” and “Unable even to take refuge in her own insignificance.”) But Norma Jean at liberty under the new name of Marilyn Monroe could make both ends meet by posing naked for girlie ph
otographs, the most provocative of which was reproduced in vivid color on the tip of a best-selling condom.2 That door was closed to Sally; in the world of commercial sex she was over the geriatric hill. Kinsey characteristically saw no difference between Sally and Marilyn, however. To him they were just two more digits to be fed into Bloomington’s computers.
***
“All the standards are harum-scarum,” Mark Sullivan complained after reading the Kinsey Report. “Children running the homes or the President of the United States barnstorming up and down the country—it’s all the same dissolution of traditional, dependable ways.” A Harvard graduate of ’00, Sullivan didn’t accept the New Deal, let alone Truman’s Fair Deal. For men like him the postwar years were especially rough; it was a time of sharp breaks with the past and of accelerating change, that cruel solvent of custom.
The White House wasn’t all that was falling down. The reputation of Brink’s, banker to banks, was set back when a mob wearing Halloween masks heisted it for a million dollars in Boston. In a Jersey election, Frank Hague’s once mighty machine was stripped of its gears by a reform slate. The medical profession was embarrassed when a New Hampshire physician was charged with the “mercy killing” of a doomed and suffering patient. (He was acquitted.) White supremacists were beginning to suspect that the road ahead would be bumpy for them. When the limousine bearing Governor Strom Thurmond approached the reviewing stand in Truman’s inaugural parade, the President found it necessary to turn his back and speak to someone behind him. Washington hotels trying to hang on to Jim Crow during the inauguration were bluntly told to integrate or face condemnation by the District’s Commissioner of Housing. They integrated. In Oklahoma a court order—the first of thousands to come—directed the state university to admit a Negro woman student, and the Nobel Prize was awarded to an American diplomat named Ralph Bunche for negotiating an Arab-Israeli truce. When rednecks and wool-hats heard Bunche was black, they reached for their bottle of Hadacol.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 72