Medicine: 5,940 Women

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Perhaps the biggest of them is conversational. Despite the tremendous increase of talk about sex after World War I, public and printed discussion was accepted only gradually. As late as the '30s the New York Times refused ads for Ideal Marriage, by a highly respectable Dutch physician, Theodoor H. Van de Velde, who spoke of sex with great candor but also with an almost romantic reverence No single event did more for open discussion of sex than the Kinsey report, which got such matters as homosexuality, masturbation, coitus and orgasm into most papers and family magazines.

Another effect has been on legislation concerning sex offenders. Current laws charges Kinsey, are antiquated and unrealistic, bear no relation to the facts of sexual behavior. Many of their punitive provisions, even if rigorously enforced, could not possibly produce the results expected of them. In this field, change so far has been slow but distinct, e.g., largely on the basis of Kinsey's testimony, California's legislature has dropped a plan for compulsory castration of sex offenders.

When Kinsey's first volume appeared sermons, editorials and dinner conversation warned that it might encourage the practices which it described as widespread, e.g., a husband hesitating on the brink of adultery might be encouraged by hearing that 50% of all U.S. men do commit adultery. How well-grounded this fear may be is still far from clear. So far, there is concrete evidence that the Kinsey book has had any such effect, and studies at colleges have shown post-Kinsey youth to be no different from the pre-Kinsey group. Court records show no increase in sex offenses. Many psychologists doubt that anyone intelligent enough to follow Kinsey's complicated statistical report would be impressionable enough to be. in the phrase of New York's late Mayor Walker, "ruined by a book."

This argument is countered by the fact that the gist of the book became known to millions who never read it. Kinsey's work expresses and strengthens an attitude that can be dangerous: the idea that there is morality in numbers.

What Is Normal? An old pollster has suggested the formula: Freud + Gallup x Kinsey. The formula is correct to the extent that Kinsey combines the 20th century's preoccupation with sex, symbolized by Sigmund Freud, with a weakness for piling up facts & figures, symbolized by George Gallup. In earlier ages of Western civilization, the dominant question about opinion was never how many people held it, but whether it was right or wrong.

Kinsey argues that right and wrong are not his business : he is simply a scientific reporter who is trying to find out what goes on. But he carries to great lengths the syllogism that 1) man is an animal; 2) some animals do all the things that are condemned in modern society as abnormal or perverted; 3) since animals are natural 5 behavior is natural. To Kinsey, anything is "biologically normal" that a lot of people— or animals— do. And Kinsey's tolerance goes to extremes: "The male who reacts sexually . . . upon seeing a streetcar may merely reflect some early experience in which a streetcar was associated with a desirable sexual partner; and his behavior may be no more difficult to explain than the behavior of the male who reacts at the sight of his wife undressing for bed."