Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Inside America's Famous Sex Study

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

How could recording people having sex be 'for science'? Same question for sleeping with your colleagues? Well, these were just two of the practices embraced by the subject of today's conversation.Donna Drucker is returning to the podcast to discuss pioneering sexologist, Alfred Kinsey. Donna, from Columbia University, is author of The Classification of Sex.This episode was edited by Nick Thomson. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwikster Sheets. Have you got that right? Is that the podcast that you actually want to be listening to? You haven't mistaken us for something else.

Okay, then. Let's crack on. Oh, wait, before we crack on. I have to tell you. This is an adult podcast book and my adults to other adults about adultery things in an adulty way covering on to adult subjects and you should be an adult too.

Oh, God, I feel safer after that. Do you feel safer? Right. On with the show. It's 1948, mid-afternoon, and we are in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. Women in mid-length dresses with neatly set hair are pushing strollers down the sidewalk in groups of two and three. There's babies and toddlers everywhere. Probably that baby boom everyone's talking about.

Shiny fords are being driven down the street by men in sharp, structured suits and store windows, a crammed full of tinned goods, packaged coffee and spam. That's my understanding of the time. In this picket fence paradise with the sun shining through the dappled trees and the birds singing, it'd be quite easy to believe that babies are delivered by the stalk. Were it not for a book on everybody's lips. The book that broadcast the bedroom behaviours of men and women in America to the world. The best-selling sexual behaviour in the human male, and then later the female,

by Bloomington's own Alfred Kinsey. And today we're going to find out, just what he did. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixtor Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. How many people are really totally 100% straight or 100% gay? for that matter. How often do married people actually have sex? And how many have said married people have done the dirty with somebody other, done their spouse? Hmm. All quite reasonable questions, I think, and once brought to the interview table in the mid-1900s by scientist Alfred Kinsey. Well, today, I am joined once again by historian Donna Drucker, who, as well as her work on contraceptives,

have delved quite intimately into Mr Kinsey, if you'll forgive the expression. and I are going to discuss just how human sexual behavior became a research topic, what results Kinsey actually came up with, and just how ethical was his research. Got your lab coats and your goggles on? All right then, let's do it. Hello and welcome back to Betwicks the sheet. It's only Donna Drucker. How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing very well. How are you? Fabulous. It's so lovely to have you back. I really enjoyed our chat about the pill. Yeah, same here. Same here. Thank you for having me back. And one of the things we did touch on in that conversation is the topic of conversation today,

the one and the only, Alfred Kinsey, which to people outside of sex studies and sex history, I don't know how well-known that name actually is, but he's a big deal, isn't he? Very much. So he's very much one of the biggest figures in the founding of sexology as an academic discipline in the 20th century. So that's what he did. He's not the original. There were people that came before him, but he probably, did he do the biggest study? I mean, we're going to get into all of this,

but is it, or is it that his results were the most significant? A little bit of both. So over his career as a sex researcher, he and his team interviewed about 18,000 people individually, which to the date of the 1950s, that was by far the largest and most in-depth set of sex interviews, surveys, data analysis that had happened. And he also established the zero to six scale and the 10% figure for homosexuality. Oh, is that that everyone's a little bit gay theory that he had?

Yeah, in short, yes. He didn't call it that. We should probably take it back a notch because I've gotten, I've already gotten carried away of myself. For people who are listening, and they will be quite. a lot out there who've never heard this name before and we're taking a punt on this podcast going all right, I don't know who this is, but I'll trust you. Who was he? Let's give a bit of an origin story where he came from before we even get to the sex stuff. Sure. Alfred Kinsey was born in 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is where he grew up. And his father was an instructor at the

Stevens Institute of Technology. And Kinsey went there for his first two years of college, which he absolutely hated. And so he wanted to be out in nature. He really loved being outdoors. And so he finished his bachelor's degree at Bowden College in Maine, very remote area of country. I've never heard of it. Yeah, okay, fair enough. There's a small liberal arts college. And he decides to obtain a doctoral degree at Harvard. He studies under a man named William Morton Wheeler, who is a specialist in ants. See, this is one of the best things about Kinsey is you think that he would have just been studying sexes entire life, but he really isn't he just, just this mad 180 tangent, doesn't he?

He starts, did he do his PhD on ants? On an insect called the gall wasp. Which is very, compared to humans, they're probably some of the least interesting creatures. They're not even interesting compared to. There'll be gold wasp enthusiasts out there. We're very sorry, that I'm sure that they're fascinating. But he loved them, didn't it?

That was his thing. Yeah, he really wanted to make a mark on taxonomy and science. And the way he thought to do that was, here's this area of entomology that no one is really working on. I'm going to make my mark on entomology. And so he goes out. He goes all around the U.S. He goes to Mexico,

down to Guatemala, collects all these gall wasps. and devises these taxonomies of co-o-s species. You do you, I guess. I do like this is one of my favorite examples of someone getting a PhD in something, but then becoming famous for studying something completely different, because that does actually happen quite a lot. Yes, definitely. This is one of the most extreme ones, though.

Yes, and that was kind of the question I had when I began to study him, is how do you get from these little insects that die, two days after they're born, you know. Two days. Well, that's quite interesting. Yeah, there's odds and ends about them that are interesting, but he kind of come to the end of what he could accomplish with taxonomy. Okay.

By the mid-1930s. By then, he had accepted a job at Indiana University, which is a small public university in rural southern Indiana in the Midwest. And he's also not making a lot of money. And so he decides to start writing junior high, high school textbooks. On wasps? No. On general science education.

So it's a way even now that professors who are looking to make a mark on the field in a different way can make some money as they write a general textbook about their field. Nothing about sex yet, though? It's just about getting there because what you're finding is that there's lots about, reproduction of newts, frogs, but students are not getting very much instruction about their own anatomy and about sex education. And students are starting to come to him as a science educator to say, you know, we need this knowledge. We need to know this information. And he thinks, okay, well, why don't I teach a marriage course? Is that code for just sex? Is that like 1930s code? Actually, it's not. Starting in the,

in the Depression era, there was a lot of concern that the decadence of the 1920s had left young people without the skills to have successful marriages. And so this marriage instruction movement starts where instructors at universities who don't necessarily have any... Oh, it's so weird. It's weird already. I almost don't want you to continue. But what is it that they're doing? It's not too. It's well-meaning. It's, it's well-meaning. It's, It's maybe a little naive, but it's, you know, how to run a household, you know, how to parent children, you know, how to find a good partner. But most of them kind of dance around the sexual element of a marriage. And so he decides, okay, I'd like to do this marriage course, but I want to have a more honest element of sex education in it.

And for the archivists out there, for the lovers of historical documents, all these lectures still exist at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington. So you can actually go back and read them. How straightforward are there? Is it all very opaque and sort of hinting or is it much more factual? Kinsey's lectures are very straightforward. He does not want to sugarcoat any element of having sex. courses were restricted to students who were engaged or in the early years of marriage. They include things like a diagram of the clitoris compared to a diagram of the penis in terms of how long the kind of nerves are in each of those appendages.

Interesting. Okay. This is mixed in with courses on like how to have a household budget or, you know, things like that. And so obviously this is a sensation. these courses. Were they very popular, Donna? Did a lot of people want to know about maintaining households? And budgeting, yes. Very exciting.

Yeah, they were right away. They were covered in the student newspaper, and students started to try to fake engagements to get in them. Oh. But that kind of tells you that, didn't it? How desperate this information must be. because I'm always fascinated about where did people learn about sex, about the birds and the bees, because this is, it's to, not to use too obvious a pun, but this is a very oral history. This is something that is passed from a parent to child, from friend to friend, from sibling to sibling. And often we just don't have the records of it, but information is patchy at best. Right. And, you know, Kinsey, whatever his flaws are, he is an educator.

at heart. Like he wants people to learn. And so the offshoot of this is that students start coming to him individually, one-on-one with questions. They don't feel comfortable asking. Oh, no. I suppose that's a good thing. I'm just having flashbacks to my own university days when students would come in for a chat. It's just like I'm not, I'm not trained for this. Help me. Yeah. People feel like they can trust you. But this is like, what, this is the 40s or the 30s, completely different environment back then. This is 1938 is when my marriage was. Right. Okay. Yeah.

And so the students start coming to him and as a taxonomist, as a scientist, coming more broadly, he starts thinking, this data is amazing and people are just coming to me and bringing me this data about that. So they're telling him, they're going to him with like personal problems? Oh, yes. Very much so. because the... I mean, you can see why they would, I guess. Yeah, because the course is like a lecture format.

They're delivering the lecture and then they leave. There's not really going to have a discussion format. So that's where he gets the idea. Maybe I should actually just interview these folks and start keeping records. And eventually the medical director of the university starts getting wind of this course and how popular it is. It's a small town, small school information travels. But did the director of the university not know? He did this aside from the medical staff.

I never get away with that now. Could you even imagine? I decided I'd just do an extra class where students can come and tell me about their sex lives. Oh, my God. I don't think that you would last two minutes at your university if you came up with that particular idea. I think you would be out on your ear pretty quick smart. And it wasn't that he even met he was wrong. it's that he was now on the turf of the school physicians and the school physicians were

very territorial and said, you know, we're the ones who guide students in their physical health, not who are you at, and you're an entomologist? Like, what are you doing? Yeah, exactly. Why are you doing? Actually, when you say like that, they did kind of have a point. You're the bug guy. Yeah. What interesting. Interestingly, he, you know, kind of like an academic who's starting a new topic. You know, his whole library, again, is still at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana. And, you know, he's reading all the sexology that he can find. He doesn't read German, but a lot of sexology is in German.

So he hires a translator to help him read. It's pathetic. He starts talking to a statistician because he's realizing, okay, I'm going to need more statistical knowledge to be able to process. this data and the university president has to intervene and basically says, okay, this is about two years down the road, you can either teach the marriage course or you can start keep doing these interviews. But it doesn't fire him. No. Actually, this president is in the world of American University history fairly well moaned for his support of intellectual freedom. And he says, you know, go for it. I'm impressed. I thought he would have been.

out on his ear with his with his bug collection standing in the middle of the road which still exists but no the man's name is Herman Wells and Wells says thank you Herman Wells do it and Kinsey by then this is 1940

he had already started traveling to Indianapolis and to Chicago and he's talking to anybody who will listen to him he's going into poor neighborhoods he's going into African American neighborhoods of course America is still very segregated. And so here's this like kind of nerdy, buttoned-up university professor

wandering around the prostitutes and pimps of Indianapolis going, hey, would you talk to me about your sex lives? And they do. And that's something else that as a modern academic, I don't know if, well, I mean, you might, you probably could get ethical clearance for that. But we are a long way away from going, yeah, I'll go and talk. to random people in the street. You'd never, ever be allowed to do that now. You have very,

very rigorous ethic committees that you have to go through, don't you? Absolutely. You have to get human subjects permission and have consent forms signed and things like that. So he's realizing, okay, I have, there's all this data and people are willing to talk to me. How am I going to gather this? And so what he does is create a form. It's a one-page form that holds information for up to 300 questions. Some people with very extensive experience can be asked up to about 520 questions, but most people's sex histories get covered in about. What kind of set, what kind of questions? I've got to know. Oh, yeah. It's actually, yeah, I'll published. It's, it kind of starts your childhood and kind of moves, moves forward. So, you know, did you see your parents

undressed? When did you see other boys and girls without clothes on, you know? When do you start, you know, touching your genitals. They're very straightforward questions. They're not, he's not using very euphemisms, but he is using language that people of different social classes would understand. So he kind of is code switching in a way that makes people feel comfortable. And so to keep the privacy of the interview subjects, the interview sheet is in code. And so you can look at it these sheets and there's just like X's and O's and little dots and stuff. stars and things. And so the outside reader or viewer could never perceive what was on the sheet. And he memorized the questions. And his team memorized the questions. So your privacy was guaranteed because

no one could interpret the code. No one could have their private, you know, behavior discovered. Now, one of the things that, and there's been a number of stuff that over the years, people have gone back to Kinsey's work and gone, hang on a minute there, mate. ethical part of it is definitely one issue. But another thing that you'd have to consider today is your sample. Who is it that you are talking to? Does your data set skew some of the responses? Who was he and his team talking to? How did they make sure that they had like an equitable and a balanced sample set? This was a big concern. And he starts small and with people who He already knows.

But he does is go for, start talking to, like, the heads of different organizations. So it would be like, you talk to the president of the fraternity or you talk to president of the Lions Club or the Rotary Club or whoever and say, okay, get their sex history. And then the president or leader will say, okay, now everybody. I wonder how he talked them into it. I wonder how he did that because that, like to go up to somebody, in the 30s. Like, I have a really private quiz about when you started masturbating and who you've seen naked and what your sexual fantasies are. Would you mind giving it the once over? That would be a difficult cell today. That would be tricky. Do we have any idea of how he recruited people,

what he explained he was doing? They must have thought he was a lunatic. It's hard to see. There's only a few video clips of him that survive. They're a very formal setting, so it's hard to get a sense of like how he was. But he really framed it as a contribution to scientific knowledge to say, you know, you are going to be part of a big project that will really shed a lot of life on how people behave. And it doesn't cost anything. This is how you can contribute. And I think kind of from a psychological perspective, a lot of people who had kind of guilt about what they had done.

or they were shamed about, you know, maybe having an affair, something like that. It was completely non-judgmental. He operated from the premise, not that people hadn't done anything, that you had already done everything. And you were kind of taking away from, like, a person who had done everything. So it wasn't like, have you ever had extramarital sex? It would be, when was the last time you had extramarital sex? and then it was on you to deny it if you hadn't.

But the question being framed that way, you could see, well, you know, if it's framed that way, then probably lots of people have. And I don't have to feel as much shame about kind of being truthful about that part of my life. Who was on his team? Who did he recruit? Because that must have been another safety concern.

Because I'm sure somebody that researches and talks about sex, as I do, you will have encountered that 99% of people are lovely. interested. But there is that 1% who have a funny reaction to it. That might be that they don't like it or it might be that they think that that's an opportunity to tell you quite intimate things about themselves. Who was on his team and how did he make sure that they were okay? Yeah, he ends up having a team of four, including himself. They're all men. They're all married. And there's a whole story about how he tried to recruit a female interviewer, but it just for various reasons. It just never, never worked out. The three men, one of them is a recent Harvard

PhD in anthropology. And the other two, one has a master's degree. The one has a bachelor's degree. The youngest one is a student at the time. And he kind of gets grandfathered into, into the project after it's started. But these men, their names are Wardell Pomeroy, Paul Gagher. Ebhard and Clyde Martin. And they also have to memorize the interview code. They have to memorize the sheet. And they are also responsible for managing the data, which means they enter it all in punch card machines. So of course, there's no computers in the 1940s. So you have to, if you want to do any big calculations, you put them through a punch card machine. And so it's hot, loud, it's tedious. You're punching every time someone had an orgasm from, you know, masturbation or premarital sex or whatever.

You're punching that into a card. And so he had to trust them implicitly. They were all married, but they all had all kinds of sex with all kinds of people. Well, that's interesting. So were they polyamorous people? Were they, what was going on that? I don't know if I'd say that exactly, but I would say they have. Clyde Martin's a little less on board with this, but Kinsey and Pomeroi and Gephardt,

they all have open marriages, but they all stay, as far as I can tell, happily married. Kinsey's married to one woman his whole life. And later on in the story, they gather data by filming, filming sex in Kinsey's attic. Oh, we might have just gone to a strange place. Yeah, so with that one. We can come back to that. Yeah, okay. Okay, but so far we haven't got to...

Addock filming. No, we're not there yet. That might be the point where you go, you know what? I found a boundary. I found it. That's too far. To me. I'll be back with Donna and Kinsey after this short break. He's got all of this data.

They're punching stuff into cards. This is thousands and thousands. And if it's like up to 500 questions per person, the amount of data that they must have was to be phenomenal. So they get it all. And then what? As they gather, they're starting to analyze it. And I won't go into the statistical techniques because I figured them out mostly, but it's quite dry. But basically, Kinsey thinks, I have this enormous amount of data. I want to publish it, but I want it to be not salacious. I want it to be published by a respectable publisher. Tricky.

publisher and so he chooses a medical publisher in Philadelphia to publish a volume just on the American men who are white in as his first volume. He plans a series of six. That was his original plan. What did he go with all that data and they go, this is brilliant, but we only want the white men. It's not very scientific, is it? Well, his rationale for this was that there was men who had some men who had thousands of partners who had done everything under the sun with all kinds of folks and all kinds of non-folks meaning animals.

Oh, hello, okay. And his view was that if we had African Americans in there, any readers of this book would think, oh, building on stereotypes, the kind of extreme data could be attributed to, African Americans in the sample. And he wanted to say, basically, white men do everything that, you know, you could possibly do.

But you know what? I think he's probably right, isn't he? Oh. It's not a kind of a rationale you would kind of use today, but he was kind of fighting a particular stereotype in a way by excluding African Americans from the first book. All right, so the first book, it comes on what? Small little publication, Specialist Limited Run. I think about 5,000 copies, something, something like that. January of 1948, so it's only two and a half years after the war.

And you wouldn't expect it, but it lands like a thunderbolt. It's just astonishing. It's huge, right? Yes. And Kinsey becomes very famous right away. people buy it, even though there's absolutely no pictures in there. If you're looking for kind of a fun, sexy read, this is one of the least sexy books about sex you can find. It's like where sex meets math is what it is. Basically. So why were they buying at them? What

information was contained within that made it so popular? Yeah, it's 800 pages of just basically text and some lots of graphs and tables. And what he has basically done and his team, he and his team have done, is taking all this data up to 500 points from over 5,000 people and have organized it to show what is the earliest date, you know, people have started to have orgasms. How many men have had extramarital affairs? How common is masturbation? That was a big reveal in that book, though, wasn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think probably any man who were. Reddit was like, oh, okay. I'm definitely not alone here. What was the general concern? I mean, it's difficult in it because there's never one

opinion on sex out of history, but the kind of the public forward-facing consensus on masturbation at the time was what? Likely that most people had engaged in it, but it wasn't widely discussed. And it was linked with health problems, right? I mean, it's coming out of the 19th century. We're kind of into the 30s and 40s by now. So I hope that's starting to fall away, but it's still there. Yeah. That comes up like the 1910s is really, and 20s is really when that hits the U.S. I think it's a little earlier in the U.K. is when that kind of moral panic about masturbation really occurs. But people start reading it. They think they find out about masturbation.

There's a lot of material about teenage sexuality, about same-sex sexuality, and really, that's the extramarital element. I think it's about a third of men interviewed, had had an affair. Kinsie wouldn't have used that word, extramarital sex to orgasm. And then the most bombshell material was in the chapter on homosexuality. And what was that? The figure that is most well known is this idea of 10% of men being homosexual. The actual phrasing is 10% of the males are more or less exclusively. homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. This is one male in 10 in the white male population. So he's not saying 10% of men are homosexual for life, but 10% are exclusively homosexual for about three years. How does that stand up with modern research? Is that

right? It doesn't sound right that you can be gay for a bit and then go, oh, I'm finished now. I don't know the up-to-date statistics. It still depends, like, who you ask and how you ask and things like that. Because he was really measuring behavior more than identity. Oh, I see. So he's more like, when did you have a homosexual encounter as opposed to do you identify? Yes. Ha, ha, ha.

Yes. Okay, I'm with you. So I should back up and say, like, all the data about extramarital affairs, pre-marital affairs, anything like that. It's all measured in orgasm, in the time. How many times have you had an orgasm doing this particular behavior? See, that wouldn't get through an ethical committee today. An orgasm is not a unit of measurement, as much as I wish it was.

That's not a marker. There'll be a whole load of people, especially women, if the only way you've cheated is because if you actually have an orgasm, I mean, our figures are going to be way off, quite frankly. that's what happened when the female volume came out. No women have ever cheated ever, according to Kinsey. All angels, every single one. Okay, so everybody's shocked by his book, but then can't stop reading it. It must have been a proper earthquake moment of like,

because homosexuality is illegal at this point, punishable by jail and awful things. I think in the UK it was chemical castration of people like Alan Turing. And so along comes this book and says, it's completely normal. 10% of white men that we know have engaged in this activity to orgasm at some point. Yeah, that's for the three years. And then he says 37% of the total male population has had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age. And then 50% of the males who remain single until age 35 have had overt homosexual experience to orgasm.

So it's all the time everywhere. How was this book received? I'm choosing my words carefully. Was there outrage about it? Was it celebrated? What was the reaction to it? There is a wide range of responses to it. Someone like Billy Graham, the American evangelist, you know,

thought it was like the worst thing that could have, you know, happened to American democracy. but a lot of people think this is a wonderful example of American democracy because you can do science like this. Is that only in America, not in Russia, only in America could you do science that would reveal this kind of data. Other religious leaders have a minimal mixed view because it actually shows that the more religious you are, the less, you know, sexual experience you have. So if you're very dogmatic about your religious beliefs, you know, keeps people from. Oh, they must have been quite happy with that then. They must have been quite plead. That's a little bit in there for them.

They must have been quite chuffed with that. Yeah, but they just didn't want to be asking the questions of all, I guess. Fair enough. So his name is now, he's world famous, the head of the universe must have been well chuffed. What's the next thing for him? So he's published his book on men, the obvious. thing to do next. It's to publish the book on women. Okay. And again, it's about the same number of women, about 5,000. It's, again, does not include anyone who's not white. I should say as a side

note, this data all still exists in its original forms. So you can access it. If you have permission at the Kinsey Institute, you can look at the original interview sheets. They all still exist. So the women's book comes out in a quite different atmosphere politically and with a lot more expectations placed on it because no one would have guessed that this entomologist at an obscure state university was going to publish this landmark study. Now everybody knows him and we're further into the Cold War and we don't want the Russians knowing all our sexual secrets. We don't want American white womanhood to be smeared in any particular way. And so the female volume comes out after a lot of revision, including by some female academics. He sends it out to lots of different reviewers. And the female volume comes out in August of 1953.

The medical publisher called it K-Day. And there's funny little cartoons of like, you know, like a bomb thread hooked to the book. a little kinsie running away and holding his ears, as if it was going to be a nuclear attack on women's sexuality. And it was it? Oh, it was. Yeah, I mean, I think, but not the kind of he expected, because the male volume was received much more positively.

Of course, the men, everyone's going to do terrible things. They were all expecting to just open up the women's one and just go, oh, no, we're not really interested. Once a week with the lights off with my husband, Thank you very much. Stuff will do me. Right. Right. Right. A couple pumps and turn over and that's that. And then we're done.

I don't even know when it's happening. Honestly, lie back and think of, think of America. Waiting a book to me over. But of course. That wasn't what you found. No. Right. So, of course, you know, women are doing lots of the same things.

Shocker. Yeah. Premarital, extramarital, masturbation. What was the thing that was the most shocking? Well, I'm interested in it is that was the lesbian. be in revelation the most shocked like it was for the men? Or were they shocked at different things this time? I think it was more of the extramarital data that was alarming. And I guess because there wasn't quite as much stigma, at least publicly attached to lesbian sex or sex between women,

there wasn't seen as like against the moral fabric of the society to quite the same degree. as male homosexuality. Still isn't. In the public perception of gay men and lesbian women, I mean, everyone has their struggles, but it's never been quite, I think, I think this is my theory, I don't if Kinsey's interested. I think it's all about penetration. I think that patriarchy gets so upset about men having sex with men because there's an act of penetration and somebody has to, quote, unquote, be the girl. I think it's all about being terrified of femininity. And lesbians don't have a penis and they can't threaten.

the heterosexual bottom, they can't make him submissive. That's my theory. I mean, Kinsey was very much not interested in identity because he saw how identity had been used by police because to prosecute men because he would find when he was interviewing like soldiers and sailors that if like a police officer came across a men engaged in oral sex, the man who was like giving the blow job would be prosecuted, but the man who was receiving it wasn't because that's what men do was get blow jobs and they don't give them, they receive them. So who's being the girl? Basically.

In very crude terms, I'm being very reductive. Yes, no, I understand. So if you're in like a submissive position that was associate, homosexuality was associated with this kind of submissiveness. and it got you in a lot of legal trouble. But if you were receiving the blowjob, you wouldn't have been in legal trouble necessarily. I'll be back with Donna and Kinsey after this short break. So he's published his book on Women Have Sex.

Everybody's shocked. Was this a success as well? Did his reputation suffer after this one? It did, but not in the way he would have anticipated. I think he anticipated sort of a very similar reception. Oh, this is great. This is knowledge about, you know, American women, that people can, you know, learn, learn about their neighbors, learn about society, so on.

As one other note, key finding from the female volume is that he stated directly that the vaginal orgasm did not exist. This was not the thing. Oh, I thought you were going to say something else then. Hurrah. Well done. But that clitoral orgasms, you know, were the way physiologically the way that orgasms happened. And but that all gets buried in this. avalanche of bad publicity say basically Kinsey is trying to weaken American society because he's

kind of revealing all our sexual secrets. Wow. And so his funder this whole time, his primary funder has been the Rockefeller Foundation. And they finally decide, okay, this is too hot for us. So we're going to take away your funding. So once that happens, he is really trying to find other funding. He still has plenty of data for the next books, but basically the stress of trying to fundraise and fend off these attacks on his methodology and his aims is so great that he ends up dying of a heart attack. I thought you were going to say he went back to bugs. Oh, wow. Okay, I didn't know. He died. He dies at 62. So he does quite young. Even for the 50s and 60s, that's quite young. Yes.

So as a final question then, and we wouldn't want Kinsey to listen to this because ultimately what he did is huge and it shook things up and it changed things. But if you want to get nitpicky, just because it's fun, there were a few blind spots in there. If you could go back and work with Kinsey, if you were the woman on his team, what might you guide him towards change just so it was, I mean, like the idea, like asking a woman that she had to be able to ask him, that she only cheats if she's had an orgasm, there's a big one. I would have, I'd have said,

no, no, no, no, we need to rephrase that one. What else is in there that you would have just helped him with, just pointed out to him? I think the one thing I would do is encourage him to look more closely at contraception and the role of the possibility of pregnancy in heterosexual encounters and the role of possibility of disease in. in all encounters, because the question of pregnancy and disease as potential consequences really kind of goes, fades away into the background. And the reason is, I think, because those were really the only two ways you could get into talking about sex and a polite science society.

So he kind of backgrounds those two things. But I think they're so important that they have to be integrated. into any study of sexuality if you're engaging in sex that could be you know lead to pregnancy or any kind of sex with a new person you don't know you're not going to sit down and interrogate their disease history in 40s necessarily so I would say pay attention to those things and you should also probably not be filming people having sex which I said that I was going to ask you about and I forgot about it was that useful for him who was he filming why was you filming that yeah this was like fictional interestingly in the, there's a movie about Kinsey that came out in 2004.

It was really to study physiology. Like, it provided some of the background for the work on the physiology and anatomy of orgasm. Like, what actually happened to the body, you know, when you had an orchestra when you, when you didn't. This is kind of the fun side of Kinsey is that he would basically have these, like, for lack of a better word, like sex parties that were filmed by, a filmmaker named Bill Dellenbach. And... She's Bill. Yeah.

And they would... I think it was Pomeroy was kind of the main man in these. But Kinsey would do them too. Oh, so this was his research team? Yeah. He was getting his research team to have sex parties and filming them. Oh, Alfred, really. And his wife would be making snacks in the kitchen downstairs.

No. And she'd bring up everyone. finished, they'd come down and have persimmon pudding. Excellent. Oh, my God. See, the good old days before an ethics board got involved, they'd never let you do that now. Exactly. Donna, you have been fabulous to talk to once again.

And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I have a book on Elfer Kinsie and some other books on contraception and fertility technology. Those are available at any bookstore. I am also on social media on Blue Sky. You've been an absolute treat to talk to. Thank you so much. I hope this is a lot of fun. Thank you for having me again.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Donna for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Don't miss our sex work series coming out all this month. Find it wherever it was that you found us today. This podcast was edited by Nick Thompson and produced by Sophie G,

the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheet to the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.