How Men Behave

As an expert in classifying insects, burly, Hoboken-born Alfred Charles Kinsey had 150,000 specimens available for studying a single species of wasp. As professor of zoology at Indiana University, he found no similar bank of scientific data to help answer his students' questions about the sexual behavior of human beings; the most detailed study of sex histories covered only 300 individuals. Nine years ago Kinsey, doctor of science (Harvard) and author of half a dozen textbooks (e.g., New Introduction to Biology) set out to even the scientific score.

This week, after months of excited drum-beating by science writers, Kinsey published some findings, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (W. B. Saunders Co.; $6.50).*Kinsey, father of three children, insists that the 804-page work is "a report on what people do, which raises no question of what they should do."

So far Scientist Kinsey and his assistants have gathered 12,214 case histories of U.S. men, women & children. Kinsey himself recorded 7,036 of them. In the 20 more years they expect to spend on the study,/- he and his associates will add 88,000 histories, publish eight other volumes. Their first book is based on interviews with 5,300 white males. Answers were recorded in code to avoid embarrassment, and tabulation by punch cards made the work easier.

Criminals, clergymen, clerks, teachers, students, prison inmates, men of various types and ages were interviewed and urged to tell all. As a result of the tabulated testimony, Kinsey concludes that 85% of the total U.S. male population has premarital intercourse; nearly 70% has relations with prostitutes; between 30% and 45% has extra-marital intercourse; 37% has some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age, with the highest rate among single males 36 to 40.

Class View. Sex behavior, Kinsey reports, seems to have a class angle. There is no "American pattern" of sexual behavior according to his findings; instead, there are differences as great as anthropologists find between the sexual patterns of different racial groups in remote parts of the world. The U.S. differences correspond roughly to educational levels. Many men who have gone to college, he finds, have kissed dozens of girls, had intercourse with none; but among males of lower educational levels, there is more intercourse, less petting.

In general, males of the upper levels feel that lower-level morality lacks "ideals" while the lower level feels that the college-level group is artificial and insincere in its sexual behavior--and what is worse, tries to force its patterns on others. Says Kinsey: "Legends about the immorality of the lower level are matched by legends about the perversions of the upper level."

Legal View. The class conflict in sexual customs becomes acute when the law is involved. Making and maintaining law is largely in the hands of legislators and judges from the better-educated levels; but enforcement is in the hands of police officials who are generally from grade and high-school levels. Kinsey finds that about 98% of males whose education ended with grade school have sexual intercourse be fore marriage; of males of high-school level, 84%, of college level, only 67%. On the same basis, Kinsey holds that while a policeman on the beat may be tolerant of intercourse between an unmarried boy & girl, the judge on the bench may take a harsher view.

Kinsey finds little difference between young males of today and those of ten or 20 years ago. His statistics show that the war made little difference in sexual behavior; male sex habits, he believes, are pretty well fixed by the age of 16 anyway. In a rare try at humor, Kinsey writes: "The high officer who complained that too many mothers thought that the Army had invented sex had considerable justification for his complaint." Men acted about the same way in the armed forces as they would have as civilians; uniforms and the lack of privacy in military life merely made their acts more conspicuous.

Kinsey avoids any prescription for improvement in the sex behavior of the male. But he does think that science should revise its classifications of the "normal" and "abnormal" in sexual conduct: "In no other field of science have scientists been satisfied to accept the biologic notions of ancient jurists and theologians, or the analyses made by the mystics of two or three thousand years ago."

*Kinsey's coauthors: Wardell B. Pomeroy, clinical psychologist, and Clyde E. Martin, statistician, both of Indiana University. /-Supported by Indiana University the National Research Council's Committee for Research on Problems of Sex, the Medical Division of the Rockefeller Foundation.

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