RedHanded - ShortHand: Kinky Sex in '50s America - The Kinsey Scale

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

“The Kinsey Reports” – Alfred Kinsey’s 1950s studies into how people like to have sex, and with who – did a lot more than ruffle a few feathers. Even acknowledging that some of us like a bit of light biting or partner-swapping was enough to make headlines. The rest was enough to blow conservative America’s minds…--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / InstagramSources and more available on redhandedpodcast.com

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and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. Hello, hello, and welcome to Sex Town. Population, everybody, all the time. Yes, I mean, you're quite right.

What a way to kickstart January. Dry Jan, not here. Uh-uh. No, it's a wet and wild one. Positively moist, Jan. Sexy, sexy times. This, you know what? I was going to tell you a fact, but I'm going to save it for later.

Tees. For as long as there has been sex, there has been sexuality. From the ancient Greeks to Japan and China, from Mesopotamia to Papua New Guinea, homosexuality and bisexuality spring up across the ancient world. But as the major religion spread, The critics got louder, and love came to be strictly confined to happen between a man and a woman. At the same time, sex itself became more and more taboo, more sinful and shameful and unspoken. Because of that shame, science didn't want to touch sex at all,

and the only ideas that anyone had about sex were those swimming around in their own filthy minds that they didn't tell anyone about. That is, until one former zoologist held up a mirror to a buttoned-up 1940s America and reflected for the first time the whole beautiful prism of human sexuality. He interviewed thousands of normal Americans about their sexual histories

and the results revealed incredible truths about the way people really got jiggy with it. As he put it in 1948's sexual behaviour in the human male, the living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. His findings defined in a scientific, dispassionate way, not just gay, straightened by, but also all the spaces in between for the first time in history.

And he also dared suggest that women like sex too. Pause. He showed exactly what America was up to in between the sheets and with who. And that was just the beginning. His name was Alfred Charles Kinsey. This is the sexy shorthand. In the beginning, there was sex, the original sin. And as such, Christian society spent a lot of mental energy trying not to think about it, lest you be smited.

Until the 1800s, what was known about sex and what was acceptable, was all decided from on high by a very few, very unsexy, religious and legal authorities, many of whom had never had sex themselves. It all focused on copulation within the context of marriage, and it was not for fun. In the mid-19th century, physicians, psychiatrists and criminologists started to dip their toes into sexual research. But even that was mostly just to define sexual disease and deviancy. Homosexuality was classified either as a mental illness or a damnable sin, but this way of thinking couldn't last forever. After the Reformation, writers like Kassanova and the Marquis de Sard charted their newfound sexual freedoms

and then, in the mid-1800s, people wanted to be seen. Carl Heinrich Ulrichs was a high-ranking lawyer and assistant judge from Hanover, Northwest Germany. He was also an openly gay man, thought by some as the first person in history to publicly come out. he released a 12-volume book called Research on the Riddle of Manly Love. Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love. And I had to say that a couple of times because I couldn't help but laugh.

Man-Manly love. Man-Manly. My name is Man-Manly. I live in Manly. And this came out, this 12-volume book series came out between 1864 and 1879. It was the first academic volume to investigate homosexuality. Now, Mr. Carl here swiftly lost his job and was forced to flee his home state for fear of imprisonment.

He wrote that any research up to that point had been, quote, biased, not to mention contemptuous. And, quote, by publishing these findings, I have initiated a scientific discussion based on facts. It was immensely influential and kick-started a load of other things. thinkers and their own research papers, all investigating their own theories on sexuality. It even inspired the world's first gay rights movement in Berlin in the last few years of the 19th century. There was even, from 1919 to 1933, an early private sexology research institute in Berlin called... I'm going to have to get into character. Don't make me run. I'm too full of chocolate.

It's the tuning fork of the German accent. The Institute for Sexen Weissenshoft. Just you guys, the Germans and the French, particularly, you just make it too easy. So, Das Institute for Sexual Fysenchaft was founded by someone called Magnus Hirschfeldt, who'd been campaigning for LGBT rights and tolerance since 1897. The Institute pioneered research into gender and sexuality, as well as offering sex counselling and treatment for STDs. It had a vast library on same-sex love and eroticism, but unfortunately it was going to get a lot worse before it all got better. The sodomy law outlawing homosexuality stayed firm across the German

empire and before long it was used by the Nazis to target gay men. The Institute's entire library was destroyed. In fact, some of the most famous images of Nazi book burnings come from the destruction of that very library. Elsewhere, some sex research did continue, but it was considered way too steamy to mention in any serious academic circles. Until there was Alfred Charles Kinsey. Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1894. And the America that he was born into was not a sexy place. Guilt was the name of the game.

Homosexuality was of course illegal, but so was premarital sex. And in many states, oral sex was a prisonable offence, even between married couples. Kinsey's family were Methodists, and even in the church, his dad was seen as particularly devout. Sundays were for prayer only, and sex and temptation, while they were pure evil. Kinsey's early life was defined by a series of health complications. In a very 1894 vibe of him, he had rickets, rheumatic fever, and even typhoid.

And obviously all of this came mainly from his poor inner-city upbringing and a lack of exposure to, well, sunlight. So when the family moved out of the inner city and the young boy discovered a love for the natural world, all his prayers were answered at once. Despite his curbed spine and weak heart, he set out on long camping and hiking expeditions and his health actually improved. Against his father's wishes,

Kinsey went off to get a degree in biology and psychology, followed by a doctorate in biology from Harvard. Kinsey joined Indiana University in 1920 as an assistant professor of zoology. And then he did what any self-respecting biologists would do. He studied gall wasps for 20 years. Now you, my friend, my learned friend, do not need to know anything about what a gall wasp is.

But Kinsey absolutely fucking loved them. I'm looking at up. It sounds terrifying. Oh, no. Oh, what do they look like? Just not good. What is this big apple situation? Oh wow, okay.

I don't know. Is it pretending to be an apple? Possibly. It just says oak apple gall wasp on the Wildlife Trust. We've learned nothing. It doesn't matter. This is not that episode because this is definitely not sexy. No, but there are two things that we do need to know about gall wasps.

Number one, every single gall wasp is remarkably different. And Kinsey was fascinated by the diversity of animal traits in evolutionary biology. And that interest is very crucial in what happened next. The second thing we need to know is Kinsey, perhaps inspired by his indoorsy childhood, really liked collecting things. He would eventually build up a collection of more than 7.5 million wasp specimens, which he gathered from across the US and parts of Mexico. The collection is still around today at the American Museum of Natural History,

so if you want to bore yourself to death, you can go and look at it. Kinsey was listed as a starred scientist in American Men of Science in 1937 and he gained a very esteemed, if pretty boring, academic reputation. Okay, we've done the wasp bit. The wasps are gone and now we get to talk about the sex bit. Baby. By the end of the 30s, there was a rising nationwide demand from women's societies to introduce a course on marriage studies. These courses were taken the legal, sociological, economic, psychological, religious and biological sides of marriage.

In 1938, the Indiana University Association of Women's Students petitioned the school to introduce one. It was restricted, however, to married or engaged students. Imagine showing off after being married for 10 years, I've been like, oh my God, I've been doing it all wrong. This is so embarrassing. I don't know anything. I also love the idea that it's like, oh my God, what sort of a single person would want to take this marriage studies course? Maybe they want to find out efforts for them, I don't know. And they're just like, no, you're banned.

I just, I say I can't wrap my head around what these people are thinking. I can't wrap my head around what we're thinking in this day and age. So I'm just confused. So Kinsey was popular. That's what you need to know. And he knew his stuff when it came to biology. So he was invited to coordinate the new course. As he would later put it to the Today Show, quote,

They came to me as a biologist because they wanted the answers to allow them to judge their own lives in accordance with facts. Kinsey wanted to bone up on all the world's research on human sexuality so that he could answer his students' questions when they eventually came to his course. But, watch to his surprise, there was nothing out there. The Bell Air Direct app includes crash assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens, and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident?

Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified, conditions apply. The little research that there was on human sexuality was based on very teeny tiny samples, or massively presupposed ideas and values. And it struck Kinsey, as a scientist, a man of the fact. how is it that we know so much about the sexual behaviours of every other animal on the planet? But when it comes to ourselves, we don't know a thing. He saw what he'd refer to as a gap in our knowledge.

And his scientific sexy spidey sense kicked in. Is Kinsey a sexy man? Alfred... I think quite famously not. Kinsey. I mean, he's not... He's not like, there's some pictures where he's not totally ugly. Apparently, Leon Nissen played him.

I can believe that. Yeah, I can see that. Liam Nissen is the Hollywood version of him. Yeah, all right, fine. Cool. Continue. Now that we've got that out of the way. And Kinsey,

Liam Nissen or not, saw a chance to use a morally neutral, detached scientific approach to illuminate people's sexual habits. First, he started quizzing his students about their sex lives, which sounds like someone needed a safeguarding officer. And then he explored the anonymised results in seminars and in lectures. The student responses to the classes, whatever we may think, were overwhelmingly positive. But local citizens, parents and churches, obviously were aghast.

Indiana University was a publicly funded university in a super-conservative state. An article in the Indianapolis Star attempted to stir up a scandal. all the bullshit that you would expect about corroding values and perverting the youth. It's so weird. It's basically a sex cause for married people. Yeah. And they're like, you're perverting everybody. It's not like he's going around, gyrating in people's faces while he reads them pornography. Like the Somerset Kimp.

Like, I don't, I mean, I get it. We can't look back on this time through modern day lenses and be so shocked by what they were doing. But the fact that they did sanitise it to every possible extent, like they didn't even allow non-engage people to come to this course, but still people are outraged. It's wild. Luckily though, something that we don't see very much of these days, the university defended Kinsey, and they gave him a choice. He could either continue teaching his marriage course

or go full-time on his sexual research project, and Alfred Kinsey chose sex. So the first step was to expand the research. He started collecting sex histories, from people across Bloomington, then the whole state, and soon the whole country. Data-loving Kinsey set a goal

to collect data from 100,000 people. He set out to interview everyone from farmhands, secretaries, housewives, prison inmates and sex workers. He even got a fat grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He put together a crack team of research assistants,

psychologists and anthropologists, who he referred to as the inner circle. Don't do that, Kinsey. That's how you're going to get called. Some sort of pervert. Don't do that. I bet that Rockefellas are fucking filthy as well.

Call it the outer circle, if anything. Call it the incredibly transparent circle. The very inclusive orb of lighter knowledge. And Kinsey trained each one of the members of his inner circle on how to conduct his questionnaire. It contained over 300 questions on every aspect of human sexual behaviour. First kiss, first masturbate. age at puberty, etc, etc.

Each one corresponded to a square on the answer sheet and the interviewer would mark down the answer using a code only known to Kinsey and his inner circle. Look, there's immediately flaws here. Look, I know they don't have the magical world of type form that we have today where you can obviously do an anonymized online survey. But obviously immediately the research is like going to be flawed because if you're having a person sit in front of me, be like,

so what age did you first masturbate? And then just with a pen and a clipboard, with their hand hovering over a circle to colour in. Obviously the data is going to be skewed. But I appreciate that he tried at all. Confidentiality was the highest priority of Kinsey and the Inner Circle, and it was the only shot they had to ensure honest answers. Respondents would be recorded only by number

and their names were filed separately. So he tries, it's just not foolproof. All the answer sheets in their question, corresponding names are still filed at the Institute today and the code is passed from director to director. It's thought to include sexual histories by A.H. Orden, Jack Carrowack. I'm surprised he even bothered not be like, this is my name and this is everything I've ever done. Oh wait, he did, it's called on the road.

William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, Gourvedell and Marlon Brando even. So the interviewer had to memorize the entire questionnaire and sessions with interviewees could last up to six hours. Oh my God. The questionnaire took about six months to learn. Not least, because tone was all important. Anthropologist and member of the inner circle Paul Gebard said, we'd never use the phrase, did you ever? Because we're not playing a college drinking game. We just assume that the person had done everything. So we might ask when was the first time you had sex with any other animal. The funny thing is, we'd pick up more than you would have anticipated, mainly pet dogs and stuff like that.

Lovely. As the interviews went on, two things became very obvious. Firstly, the variation was so wide that any idea of normal was meaningless. And secondly, society as a whole had absolutely no idea about sex at all. It's because they had no sex education. They're all fucking their dogs. That's what they learned. Someone, please, give these people some sex education.

This whole thing, this whole project, it was really. raunchy and dangerous ground to be treading. The Indianapolis star was ramping up its own campaign against Kinsey and increasingly public institutions were crying out for this whole thing to be shut down. It's because they're all getting outed as a bunch of dog fuckers. So maybe with the fate of Magnus Hirshfield's German sex library in the back of his mind, Kinsey grew worried about his work.

So in 1947 he set up the Institute, for sex research. There, he could guarantee absolute confidentiality to respondents and protect the research from outside forces. Kinsey sold his entire library of research materials to the Institute for $1, and a year later, he released his findings to a rather stunned public.

In two months, sexual behavior in the human male sold more than 200,000 copies and became a New York Times bestseller, which, for a weighty, academic, Tome full of data tables and dry scientific analysis, it's pretty fucking good. The closest to sexy sex they've got that they're like quick, buy it. Just imagine some man sat somewhere just touching himself while holding this open. And he's got it inside a copy of the King James Bible.

And he's also holding it the wrong way around like he's looking at a centre page from Playboy. Oh my God. And boring it may have been, but it did make Kinsey a household name. And he earned the nickname Dr. Sex. Nice. Next up on Good Morning America, we've got Dr. Sex to talk to you all about why you shouldn't touch your dogs. And this is where I'm going to tell you my fact. Oh.

I first became aware of the Kinsey Report because of a musical. Oh. So there was a time where musicals would be written around one song. So like anything goes, for example, anything goes. The song is written and then they make a musical around it to promote it, right? The song It's Too Done Hot from Kiss Me Kate is about The Kinsey Report and Kiss Me Kate was built around it. Okay. And basically the theme of the song is that no one has sex when it's too hot.

That also from the Kinsey Report. Yes. According to the Kinsey Report, every average net man you know, much prefer to play his favourite sport when the temperature is low. But when the thermometer goes way up and the weather is sizzling hot, I can't remember next bit, but no one's having sex basically is the theme for a musical in which I performed as a 30. year old, I think. Interesting.

I wonder if the data corresponds to that with the number of births of babies happening, not falling directly 10 months after peak summer seasons. Interesting. Let's find out. What is the lowest birth month? Oh, that's a good one. Lowest birth month. Okay.

A heat map shared online reveals the two months in which most people in the UK are born and also the three months that are the rarest. Would you like to guess, Hannah? I think September, October and November are the most popular. September and July are the most popular. Okay. And would you like to guess the least popular three months? This is strictly UK.

I feel like nobody is born in, I don't know anyone who's May or June. Oh no, I've got loads of Juners. Got loads of Juners. It's November, December, January. Interesting. Yeah, there you go. Which would possibly correspond with the summer? Well, I believe it.

really, but you know, whatever. Anyway, so despite starring in Broadway musicals, Kinsey also spoke at conferences around the world. He appeared on the cover of Time and was consulted by governments on proposed legislation. Singer Martha Ray even released a satirical song called Ooh, Dr Kinsey, which was banned from the radio, which meant it only got more popular. The book itself was a sensation, and it's pretty easy to understand why. and the book made the US public entirely rethink male sexuality.

With only anecdotal evidence to go on, people had a pretty skewed idea of what went on between the nation's sheets. The report showed that 90% of men admitted to having masturbated, 85% to having premarital sex, and 40% had had extramarital affairs. Most scandalous of all, and remember that this is the late 40s, 37% of men interviewed admitted to two. having engaged in a sex act to orgasm with another man.

That is much higher than I would have guessed. But most of those men still considered themselves to be heterosexual. And that finding is still pretty routine in more modern surveys of sexual behaviour. But to the US public back then, it was unthinkable. And more findings that came out was that 10% of men had been more or less exclusively homosexual for the past three years, at least. and 4% had been exclusively homosexual throughout their entire lives. With homosexuality at this point still outlawed in every state in America and still classed in the DSM as a mental health disorder,

it was clear that something had to change. Because with these stats, same-sex activity couldn't be considered as the deviant behaviour of a mentally ill few. And perhaps the most famous and impactful section of all was the heterosexual, homosexual, rating scale, which we now call the Kinsey Scale. For the first time, instead of applying the binary distinction between straight and gay, the book introduced a seven-point scale.

And the scale ranges from zero to six, with zero being exclusively heterosexual and six being exclusively homosexual. And there is a seventh category, X, referring to people with no sociosexual contacts or reactions at all. And although the social outcry was severe, Kinsey could always rely on his scientific. rigor. And when the Today Show asked him, are you trying to change our social evaluations of sexual matters? He had this to say. One's own decision is to what one should do in regards

one's own life, was taken to account of a great deal more than the scientific data that is a fair on the subject. One needs to take into account something of the religious background of not only the country as a whole, but his own religious background. One decision is what one should do in his own behavior or in social policy will take all of these things into account. The scientists supplies only a particular segment of the data on which the decisions may ultimately do this. There were also fair criticisms from academics, with calls to deepen some ideas.

One core finding that men's sexuality results mostly from their class and education level, for example, was challenged. And many said that Kinsey's background as a zoologist only made him so qualified. Gynecologists, obstetricians, marriage counsellors, birth control educators, sociologists, psychologists, artists, writers and journalists all got in touch with alternative evidence. The ball was rolling. A scientific conversation about sexual behaviour was finally taking place. And one particularly common criticism was right there in the title. Where was the discussion of female sexuality?

No one cares. So Kinsey and the team hit the books on the sequel. Sexual behaviour in the human female came out in 1953. It was the height of the Cold War, and much of society absolutely did not believe that female sexuality even existed. It had, as long as anyone could remember, been considered just a response to male sexual instincts. Based on 5,940 interviews, the second Kinsey report said differently. It read that 50% of all women had had sex before marriage.

25% of married women had extramarital sex, more than half of women had masturbated, and 43% had engaged in oral sex, which remember in some places were still illegal. And of course, the majority of women did not orgasm from intercourse alone. Some men still don't know that. The Christians were appalled. The male part had ruffled feathers,

but to suggest that women were sexual creatures too, with their own tastes and habits, well, that was beyond the pale. Once again, premarital intercourse, masturbation and homosexuality were considered without any moral judgment. Critics tried their best to discredit the report, saying that Kinsey must only have interviewed sex workers

or women of ill repute. even though his appendix listed the many varied jobs and social positions of all of his interviews. Kinsey's critics badly wanted to paint him as some sort of societal menace or sexual ingrate. But Kinsey was a man of science. He had no advice or comment. He was just telling it like it was. In public, he kept a super clean-cut image. He showed himself as being a happily married man,

with smart, well-adjusted kids who drank very little and hated smoking and loved gardening and classical music. And as watertight as the report was, that outward persona wasn't quite accurate. On his own scale, Kinsey was about a four. As you might have guessed, his interest in exposure to the extremes of human sexuality

gave him a pretty libertarian approach to his own bedroom. Kinsey and his wife, Clara McMillan, known as Mack, partook in a culture of free love with the rest of the inner circle. I knew that was coming. I was going to say.

And their partners. But you understand why that can't come out. Like immediately it's going to be like, wait, what? The philosophy of the inner circle seemed to settle on a pretty good bottom line. Whatever you want to do, as long as there is mutual consent, is A-OK. Around five years into his research for the two reports, Kinsey also decided that he was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. the physiology of sex.

So, under extreme secrecy, volunteers would be led up to his attic. To get freaky in front of a camera for later evaluation, I'd kill myself. I can't think of anything worse. Also, it's just like, this is when you're starting to get like, okay, it's just, you're deviating now. Like, do we need to film people having sex?

It just feels like that's a slippery slope down the road of exploitation. That way beckons. Yeah. At the time, this was all quite successfully kept behind closed doors, but still, the public pushback against the Kinsey report was building to a roar. A congressional inquiry was mounted into the tax-exempt status of the foundation. That they'll always get you with the taxes. Senator Joseph McCarthy, yes, as in that McCarthy, had a very on-brand opinion that sex research was a communist tool for undermining the American family. and eventually the Rockefeller Foundation was forced to suspend their funding in 1954.

The Institute suffered massive cutbacks and several planned projects came to a complete halt, including plans for studies into homosexuality, prison inmates and prostitution. Alfred Kinsey died unexpectedly on the 25th of August 1956 of heart problems and pneumonia. He was just 62. He interviewed his last two subjects that same year. For the two Kinsey reports, the team had collected 18,000 surveys, and Kinsey personally conducted almost 8,000 interviews himself. The records, like we said, are still housed in the Institute,

still the largest collection in the world, which would have made Alfred Kinsey very happy indeed. Together, the two Kinsey reports on female and male sexuality sold nearly a million copies and were translated into 13 languages. they undoubtedly change the public perception of sexuality and are considered among the most influential scientific books of the 20th century. Kinsey has been described as the, quote, architect of the sexual revolution,

ushering in a new age of acceptance and sexual freedom. Today, of course, studies of sexual behaviour have moved on somewhat. The Kinsey scale has been replaced with more nuanced descriptions of sexuality. Kinsey's method does have some weaknesses, like the fact that it directly conflates sexual behaviour, with attraction, which in practice may not always be the case. For example, a man can be attracted to both sexes, but only engage in sexual behaviour with women.

The Kinsey Scale also puts homosexuality and heterosexuality as opposites, the more homo, the less hetero and vice versa. But more recent studies show that they are experienced entirely separately and are not contrary impulses. The Kinsey Scale also doesn't account for a person's sexuality changing over time, as well as sexual attraction based on emotional connection. Nowadays, there are over 200 scales that measure sexual orientation. The Klein sexual orientation grid includes seven variables,

including behaviour, attraction and fantasies. The storm's sexuality axis plots sexuality on an X and Y axis, allowing for a much wider range of descriptions. Still, we wouldn't have started having these conversations if it weren't for the probing questions of Alfred Kinsey. The Kinsey Institute is still going. It recently conducted studies on how the pandemic affected people's romantic and sexual lives. It ran a string of important seminars and conferences on AIDS during the 1980s crisis.

It's debating the role of legislation in sex education and aims to define what constitutes healthy and unhealthy sexual practices. Sexuality is still largely a mystery. Even the leaders of today's Kinsey Institute say that we still know basically next to nothing about it. So Kinsey's mission, what he called bringing light into darkness, carries on. There you go. Go forth and fuck each other, is my advice to you. Yeah, I think, you know, following the inner circle's own philosophy. Yeah.

If there's consent there and you feel like everyone in that situation is a-okay and able to give consent, go fucking nuts. It's none of my bloody business. And that's it. Have fun. Bye. Bye. Thank you.