Alfred Kinsey: The Effects Of Social Norms On Sex

693 Words2 Pages

Before Alfred Kinsey’s research, the social norms on sex were much different than they are today. In the 1940’s and 50’s sex was a topic that was too taboo to talk about. Supposedly, no one engaged in pre-marital sex, oral intercourse, anal intercourse, or any type of homosexual relations. Almost anything sexually related was seen as wrong. Intercourse was only to be used to reproduce. Even then, ‘the stork’ brought the babies or they were grown in ‘cabbage patches’. This thought may have started with Queen Victoria, when asked about her thoughts on pregnancy after having 9 children of her own, stated the she hated the idea of pregnancy. Women were also supposed to stay true to the Cult of True Womenhood and be pure for their husband. Homophobia …show more content…

This brought to Kinsey’s attention that very little prior research had been conducted on sex because of how offensive of a topic it was. He realized, however, that the abnormalities in sex were not known because of the lack of research. This prompted Kinsey to start a class on marriage and to conduct surveys on his students’ sexual histories (“Alfred Charles Kinsey”). At the time, this was very controversial because sex was such a ‘hush-hush’ subject. Still, he collected data from his students and to his surprise he found that things like oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, masturbation, and even positions other than the missionary position were much more common than previously thought. This made Kinsey take his research on a much larger range and he began to survey as many people as he could. He then created a survey that could cross-check to see if people were lying about their sexual history and created a scale, with 0 being exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual, that categorized people based on their histories. He found that what was previously seen as ‘wrong’ were actually sexual norms. Thus, Kinsey was the first modern sex

More about Alfred Kinsey: The Effects Of Social Norms On Sex

Open Document