By: Joseph Kramer Ph.D.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male: A ReviewBy Joseph Kramer, Ph.D.
The budding eleven-year-old sexologist in me found Alfred Kinsey’s 804 page book at the main branch of the St. Louis public library in 1958. Over a three-year period, I made over a dozen trips from my suburban home to the heart of St. Louis to study what Kinsey discovered about male sexual behavior. I was especially interested in his sections on early sexual growth and activity, masturbation, homosexuality, and how religious background influenced sexual outlet. I remember being surprised that an eleven-year-old could read and make sense of this adult, scientific text. I also remember after each pilgrimage, sighing in relief at the diversity of human sexual behavior. Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, I was able to let go of some of my early sexual shame.
When I re-read Kinsey in the twenty-first century, I wrote the following book review.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male is divided into three parts. Part one focuses on the history and method of the study. Part two deals with factors affecting sexual outlets and part three deals with the sexual outlets themselves. The researchers originally planned to interview 100,000 human animals, but the present study actually represents research from only 5300 white males living mostly in northeastern United States. Kinsey wished to "accumulate an objectively determined body of fact about sex which strictly avoids social or moral interpretations of fact." (p. 5). Kinsey, relying on his experience doing insect studies, used taxonomic methods that attempted to gather samples large enough to make generalizations about whole populations. The researchers knew the quality of the study was dependent upon the quality of the interviewing used to gather the data. In order to establish rapport with their subjects, the researcher approached sexual matters in an open and non-judgmental way. They gave assurances of complete confidentiality. The questions were phrased and sequenced to achieve honest results. Questions were often asked in quick succession so that the subject's answers would be more spontaneous.
Those studied were broken down into twelve biological and socio-economic groupings. Each of these groupings was further broken down so that the researchers had homogeneous populations for their statistical analysis. What follows summarizes Kinsey et al.'s findings about the sexual behavior of the human male.
Part II begins with information about early sexual growth. Sex rehearsal play is more common among boys than girls. Types of orgasm among boys and the erotic and non-erotic sources of arousal are listed. Homosexual play is more common for boys than heterosexual play. Kinsey notes the "considerable sexual capacity" (p. 177) of pre-adolescent boys in Table 34. (p. 180) More will be said about this table later. Kinsey marks the onset of adolescence with a boy's first ejaculation. In boys with no sexual outlets, he defines the onset of adolescence as that time when ejaculation is first physiologically possible.
Total sexual outlet for Kinsey et al. is the sum of orgasms derived from six distinct behavioral categories: masturbation, nocturnal emissions, heterosexual petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual relations and intercourse with animals. "There is no other single factor which affects frequency of outlet as much as age." (p 218). Males have the most sexual outlets in their teens. After age 50, the number of sexual outlets a man has falls precipitously.
Kinsey's data found that married men had higher frequencies of sexual contact up to age 40. A most significant finding was that males who reached adolescence earliest had consistently higher frequency of outlets throughout their lives. In other words, the earlier the sexual capacity comes to a man, the more generative it will be throughout his life.
Kinsey found that a subject's social and educational level affected his total sexual outlets. High school-educated males reported the highest number of sexual outlets, whereas college-educated males reported the lowest. A higher incidence of masturbation, petting and nocturnal emissions were found among the college-educated men. Men with less education were more likely to engage in sexual intercourse of all types and engage in homosexual behavior. Better-educated men were more highly aroused by a greater range of behaviors such as nudity, oral sex and touching. Kinsey points out the obvious that members of different social classes have difficulty understanding each other's mores and preferences.
Kinsey ends the second part of the book with a most provocative analysis: that nothing "has had more influence upon present-day patterns of sexual behavior than the religious backgrounds of that culture." (p. 465) Kinsey goes on to point out that "average frequencies of sexual outlet for the human male are distinctly below those which are normal among some other anthropoids and which would probably be normal in the human animal if there were no restrictions upon his sexual activity." (p. 466) The data showed the least sexually active individuals were Orthodox Jews. Devout Catholics and active Protestants were a close second and third. Kinsey showed that religion could be detrimental to your sexual health.
Part Three deals with the sexual outlets themselves. Kinsey starts by saying that the "general opinion that all males masturbate at some time in their lives" (p. 499) is simply not true. He goes on to say that some men do not have sufficient sex drive to cause them to touch themselves for the purpose of arousal. But for two thirds of boys, masturbation provides the first ejaculation.
I remember reading when I was eleven that even if a boy begins masturbating at an early age, there is no harm in the outcome. The only harm, according to Kinsey, happens when adults discover the boy masturbating and shame him. Kinsey characterizes the stigmatizing of masturbators as sexual abuse. "Millions of boys have lived in continual mental conflict over this problem. For that matter, many a boy still does. Many boys pass through a periodic succession of attempts to stop the habit, inevitable failures in those attempts, consequent periods of remorse, the making of new resolutions--and a new start on the whole cycle. It is difficult to imagine anything better calculated to do permanent damage to the personality of an individual." (pp. 513-514)
The prohibition against masturbation is stronger in less-educated men. The better-educated individuals with well-developed imaginative capacities are more likely to have developed a variety of creative ways to masturbate. Unfortunately, "most males restrict themselves to a limited series of particular techniques to which they have been erotically conditioned." (p. 510)
Kinsey begins his chapter on nocturnal emissions suggesting that much of our human animal behavior is conditioned by past experiences "and its reactions may come to depend as much upon the previous experience as upon any immediate stimuli." (p. 517) He says this is why most boys do not fantasize during the first year or two of masturbating. (p. 523) The physical stimulation produces enough excitement. He goes on to say that very few conscious males can have sex without being influenced by "moral or social training." But even sexually repressed males cannot stop nocturnal emissions because normal inhibitions are not active when one is asleep. In other words, incidents and frequencies of nocturnal emissions occurred "almost exactly the same among active and inactive members of each religious group." (p. 525)
Kinsey found that younger males experience nocturnal emissions monthly or bimonthly. But the highest number of nocturnal emissions occurred among the more sexually-repressed college students.
This writer's area of expertise is teaching erotic massage. This sexual behavior would fall under Kinsey's "Heterosexual Petting" category. He defines "petting" as any physical contact that "does not involve the union of genitalia but in which there is a deliberate attempt to effect erotic arousal." (p. 531) Kinsey does indicate a significant increase in this behavior from 1918 to 1948. Other types of male sexual activity showed little change in that same time period. (p. 537). Petting is attractive to men who value their virginity. Certainly the most important social skill a man can learn from petting is the significance of tactile stimulation in sexual interactions.
Kinsey spends a significant amount of time in this chapter on social repression and the lack of erotic social skills in American men. Here he makes his most damaging assessment of American sexual prowess. Because of social customs and religious inhibitions that consciously and unconsciously control their performance, "Few males achieve any real freedom in their sexual relations even with their wives." (p. 545).
Kinsey says there is "no form of sexual behavior which has been more often condemned than pre-marital intercourse." (p. 560). One reason for this condemnation was the real possibility of a pregnancy resulting from the sexual relations and yet Kinsey surprises the reader with the information that "At the college level . . . contraceptives are almost universally used." (p. 562)
Kinsey begins his chapter on "marital intercourse" by stating "where sexual adjustments are poor, marriages are maintained with difficulty." (p. 563) Kinsey also found, not surprisingly, that only 85% of sexual outlets for males came form heterosexual intercourse with their wives. He found that "only 45.9% of the total outlet of the total population is derived from marital intercourse." (p. 568)
In this chapter, we learn that 15% of males can have multiple orgasms, that the male's desire determines how often a married couple has intercourse (p. 569), and that there is no part of the surface of the human body that may "not be a source of sexual stimulation" (p. 573).
Kinsey also points out "that more males in our culture are psychically aroused by contemplation of the female breast than by the sight of female genitalia." (p. 575) Kinsey also hypothesizes that men's breasts are as sensitive as female's are. We also learn that "most of the interior of the vagina is without nerves" (p. 576) except what is now called the "G-Spot" which Kinsey says is the base of the clitoris. The American couple seems rather uncreative when it comes to sexual positions for intercourse. 70% of the total population has only used one sexual position.
More than fifty years after its publication, Kinsey's study is best known for its statistics on homosexual behavior and for presenting to the world Kinsey's Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale. Kinsey did not speak of homosexuals but of homosexual behavior. He found that 10% of males were predominately homosexual in their behavior between the ages of 16 and 65. He found that 8% of males were exclusively homosexual in their behavior for at least a three-year period between the ages of 16 and 65. And he found that 4% of his population where exclusively homosexual in their outlets.
Kinsey's explains the rational behind his seven point scale: "Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes." (p. 639) This scale has changed the course of human sexuality.
Kinsey does fall into some stereotypical statements about homosexual behavior. He writes "...relationships between two males rarely survive the first disagreements." (p. 633). He offers us no statistics to back up this assertion. But he also conjectures that without social restraints, more men would engage in homosexual behavior. (p. 632)
In this chapter, Kinsey brings up the subject of intersexed humans. He wrongly writes that "hypospadia" has no connection whatsoever to the genetic maleness or femaleness of the individual.
Instead of ending his study with a summary chapter, Kinsey finishes with a chapter on sex with animals. He reports that between 40 and 50 per cent of all farm boys have had some sort of animal contact. In this chapter he is striving for a change in legal punishment of this behavior. "The city-bred judge who hears such a case is likely to be unusually severe in his condemnation and is likely to give the maximum sentence that is possible." (p. 677) This is just one of the many places where Kinsey expresses his hopes that his statistics will help bring about more humane treatment for men whose sexual behavior varies from what is considered normal. He finishes his book by taking an "oath", "As scientists, we have explored and we have performed our function when we have published the record of what we have found the human male doing sexually, as far as we have been able to ascertain that fact." (p. 678)
Comparison
In 1981, conservative apologist Dr. Judith Reisman delivered a paper at the Fifth World Congress on Sexology in Jerusalem condemning portions of the Kinsey's study of male sexual behavior. She requested a thorough evaluation of methods and results. Reisman co-authored Kinsey, Sex and Fraud--The Indoctrination of a People where she laid out her major problems with Kinsey's Table 34: Examples of multiple orgasm in pre-adolescent males.
The data in Table 34 comes supposedly from "the histories of adult males who have had sexual contact with younger boys . . . 9 of our adult male subjects have observed such orgasm. Some of these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which have been put at our disposal; and from them we have secured information on 317 pre-adolescents who were either observed in self masturbation, or who were observed in contacts with other boys or older adults." Reisman called the gathering of this data "unthinkable, illegal and inhumane."
Unfortunately, the only way adults are permitted to discuss children's sexuality today is by speaking about rape or sexual abuse. This rigid paradigm was not yet locked into place in 1948.
John Bancroft in his 1998 introduction to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female reports going back into the Kinsey Institute records and finding that all the information in Table 34 about 317 prepubescent boys and infants came from one man, who obviously participated in pedophilic behavior. Bancroft says, "Clearly, his (Kinsey's) description in the book of the source of this data was misleading, in that he implied that it had come from several men rather than one." Bancroft then suggests that Kinsey was attempting to protect the anonymity of his source. The fact that Kinsey misrepresented the number of men who gave him information about boys' orgasms disturbs me. I am not bothered at all that Kinsey used information from a pedophile, information he deemed significant. But if a researcher distorts the truth in one part of a study, it seems likely that he might deceive the reader in other parts of the study.
Commentary
Most of the science in Kinsey et al's study was based solely upon the counting men's ejaculations. Margaret Mead, wryly criticized the study saying, "The book suggests no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep."
My major disappointment with Kinsey's study was the limited population he studied. This is a study of 5300 white males who lived mostly in the northeast of the United States. Kinsey had completed interviewing 1000 non-white males but he chose not to use this data saying they didn't represent the diversity that the white males did after he applied his "twelve way breakdown." (pp. 75-81)
My sense is that Kinsey made a brilliant political decision by not including the 1000 black men he had already interviewed. If 20% of the men interviewed for this study would have been black, I am sure that the startling data Kinsey found about homosexual behavior and the high incidents of sex with animals among rural males would have been attributed to the often-stigmatized black males. Further evidence that Kinsey wished to dispel the idea that sex was a lower class phenomenon can be seen in his "Six Most Active Males" chart where five out of top six ejaculators in his study were professionals with advanced college degrees. (p. 216) Certainly, Kinsey's political decision not to include blacks was not good science. The book would better be titled, Sexual Behavior in the White American Male.
Out of the 5300 white males for whom data was available, only 134 were 55 years of age or older (this writer's age today). And only 44 of Kinsey's subjects were 65 years old or older. Of those 44, Kinsey found 25% were impotent! (pp. 235-236) This study of sex in the human male doesn't include much data on or for those of us who are 55 or older. The study would probably better be titled Sexual Behavior in the Young and Middle-aged, White American Male.
Kinsey's division of sexual outlets into masturbation, nocturnal emissions, heterosexual petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual relations and intercourse with animals seems worthy of comment and, perhaps, criticism. Was the division of sexual outlets into these categories the best scientific decision?
Kinsey admits that he didn't gather data from the men in this study about their sexual contacts as pre-adolescents with older women and/or older men. (p. 167.) Certainly today, most incidences of this type of sexual outlet would be called "sexual abuse." The fact that Kinsey and his team did not think to gather this information is unfortunate. This is one area where Kinsey's focus on ejaculation has not served his study. But this omission in the most significant study of male sexuality in the twentieth century gives us a reference point. Today, all sex therapists routinely question clients about their childhood sexual experiences with older persons. We have grown in our knowledge of how sexual patterns and scripts are formed and how they influence our adult life.
Kinsey knew that most early sexual behaviors were continued as the boy grew up. He records that 17% of boys who had any homosexual play reported their outlets included anal intercourse. (p. 171) And yet, he didn't ask questions about heterosexual anal sex in this study. He justifies this omission with these words: "However, anal activity in the heterosexual is not frequent enough to make it possible to determine the incidence of individuals who are specifically responsive to such stimulation." (p. 579) To me this seems a serious omission even in a 1948 study.
We also see the absence of questions about erotic power dynamics in Kinsey's sexual outlets. Did no men get off through sadomasochistic behaviors? Or perhaps S/M was seen as merely a context within which sexual outlets happened. We find this in Kinsey's discussion of masturbation fantasies: "There are the occasional sadistic or masochistic fantasies." (p. 510) In the chapter on nocturnal emissions, he writes: "There are occasional sadistic or masochistic dreams..." (p. 526) It is unfortunate that sadism and masochism are treated by Kinsey as incidental to the sexual outlet.
I like that Kinsey refers to humans as the "human animal". Wilhelm Reich--also a biologist by training--used this powerful phrase in his writings. This certainly riled many religious folk who believed that the world was created in six days and felt that human sexuality should not he studied as if one were studying animal sexuality. But Kinsey consciously used this term, the correct scientific term. He was clear this study was not a moral tract nor a religious document but a scientific study of the human animal.
Sexual Behavior of the Human Male reports on the astonishing diversity in male sexual expression in the first half of the twentieth century. This is the same life-changing lesson I learned from this same study when I was eleven years old.
Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948. 804 pp.