And while Kinsey's work has been criticized for including prisoners, homosexuals, prostitutes and anyone else willing to be interviewed, the books also changed the way Americans thought about sex, says Drucker. "People like Freud, Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing would fill books with very long narratives of people's sexual histories, which were fascinating but gave no sense of how many people might feel this way," she says. Drucker, PhD, author of the 2014 book "The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge." "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" followed in 1953, to even more controversy and media coverage.īefore Kinsey, most of the people who conducted sex research were physicians or psychologists who used their patients as research participants, says historian Donna J. In 1948, Kinsey published his groundbreaking - and controversial - "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," which became a surprise bestseller. Originally designed to provide a confidential repository for the interview data from Kinsey's studies, the institute also continued to conduct research. In 1947, he established what was then called the Institute for Sex Research, a nonprofit organization closely affiliated with Indiana University in Bloomington. Kinsey began his career cataloging millions of gall wasps before shifting his taxonomic interest to humans. While there are psychologists who run sex research labs and even loose affiliations of sex researchers based at universities, "I don't think there are really other institutes like this one that have active scientific research programs and also maintain collections of books, art and artifacts for scholarly use," she says. The Kinsey Institute is unique, says Sanders. "The fact that it has been alive all these years and didn't die with Kinsey is testimony to its bringing in of other researchers and having a large mission - to understand human sexuality and well-being and the factors that influence them." From wasps to humans ![]() Sanders, PhD, who joined the institute in 1982 and has twice served as its interim director. "Back in Kinsey's day, the institute started off with descriptive types of studies of sexual behaviors," says psychologist Stephanie A. Another project could help identify sexually aggressive men and inform future interventions. Another researcher offers study participants "condom buffets" so men can find the most comfortable fit, which could improve condom usage and reduce HIV infections. Research on how sexual behavior and the menstrual cycle interact to affect the human immune system, for example, could have implications for how to time vaccinations for maximum efficacy and how to schedule cardiology visits for the most accurate test results. Today, psychologists at what is now called the Kinsey Institute are conducting research that is far different from Kinsey's project of creating a taxonomy of human sexual behavior. In the years that followed, he conducted face-to-face interviews with almost 8,000 people about their sex lives, with his colleagues collecting another 10,000 sexual histories. ![]() In response, Kinsey set out to create his own data. There were few studies, and most were based on small numbers of patients or were judgmental in tone. In preparing for the class, he discovered that the scientific literature on human sexual behavior was sorely lacking. Kinsey, ScD, to coordinate a class on sexuality, reproduction, contraception and similar topics. The university asked zoology professor Alfred C. ![]() They got more than they asked for: They helped launch the field of sexuality research. ![]() In 1938, women students at Indiana University asked for a class for students who were engaged or married.
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