From these interviews, Kinsey found that 92% of men had masturbated, more than half of married men had had an affair and 37% said they’d had some kind of homosexual experience.
Kinsey published the scale as part of two publications– Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) – and it was based on thousands of interviews with American men and women about their sex lives. But most famously, Kinsey invented The Kinsey Scale, otherwise known as the Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale, which allowed a person’s sexuality to be rated 0 to 6 – 0 meaning exclusively heterosexual, 3 meaning equally heterosexual and homosexual (so bisexual) and 6 meaning exclusively heterosexual, with the numbers between indicating a grey area.
Dr Alfred Kinsey was one of the people to pioneer this idea, and has since been named “the man who invented modern sex”.Īs a sexologist–someone who researches human sexuality–Kinsey was interested in proving that women could experience clitorial pleasure (also a relatively novel idea at the time) and the breadth of sexual practices that couples and individuals really got up to in private. The idea that sexuality could be on a spectrum, or change over time, felt much more new. In 1948 however, there was a different story. We have, for instance, have a lot of words to describe the spaces between or falling outside of heterosexuality and homosexuality, like pansexual, demisexual, or “questioning”, to name a few. Today, the idea that sexuality isn’t black and white might not feel so radical to us. The once-groundbreaking model that suggested sexuality could exist on a spectrum.