Kinsey fans obsessed with Scouts and stutters
Europeans took a romantic view, while Americans were practical about the whole business. Britons, though, were fixated on the fringe theories of sex.
An analysis of letters to Alfred Kinsey, the pioneering sexologist of the 1940s and 1950s, has found that his British correspondents were often ignorant about his research but eager to share their wisdom on topics such as penis size, the effects of horoscopes on promiscuity, and gay Scouts.
Ruby Ray Daily, of Northwestern University, Illinois, said that compared with Americans and continental Europeans, the British letter writers had a ‘‘very idiosyncratic’’ way of speaking about sexuality.
In a paper published in the journal Twentieth Century British History, she writes: ‘‘The diversity of topics upon which British correspondents single-mindedly dwelled included the menstrual cycle, homosexuality in the Boy Scouts, the incidence of married virgins, the relationship between stuttering and repression, penis circumference, sexual jealousy, and the religious implications of conserving bodily fluids.’’
Kinsey, an entomologist turned sexologist who founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947, was interested in documenting what people got up to sexually, and how often.
He was the focus of press attention and public outrage, and received letters, which are now in the archive of his institute, from around the world.
Daily said that, overall, American correspondents revealed a ‘‘functional’’ understanding of sex that was grounded in biology. Continental Europeans were more interested in the romantic aspect and the role of sex in marriage.
One correspondent from England’s West Midlands, on the other hand, informed Kinsey in 1953 that sexuality was in fact governed by astrological signs. ‘‘There are astrological configurations ... which correspond to frigidity and promiscuity.’’
Among the scores of letters from Britons is one from a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was preoccupied in 1950 with the question of whether ‘‘the educated Englishman’’ who had been ‘‘segregated’’ at public school and university was more likely than American men to be ‘‘initiated by older and more experienced females’’.
Daly said the ‘‘evidence of widespread sexual idiosyncrasy’’ and a fixation on seemingly random aspects of sexuality might appear to corroborate the cliche of Britain as a repressed nation.