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A STRANGER joining the Kinseys and staff on one of their picnics would never suspect that these nice, comfortable faculty folks were engaged in studies any more stimulating than the use of the comma in Chaucer. Visitors are exposed to the same paradox in Kinsey's plant, which is called the Institute of Sex Research, Inc. The atmosphere is one of surgical asepsis, and each room is as clean and functional as the inside of a clock. Doors are heavy, made of a three-ply, soundproof material, and they have substantial locks. Kinsey carries numerous keys, and his progress from room to room, cabinet to cabinet, or file to file, is slow, because each has to be unlocked carefully. In Kinsey's own office, no single piece of paper is ever in evidence unless he is working on it. But the material he may be inspecting or cataloguing would stand an ordinary layman's hair on end —elaborate, erotic instruments and devices from Japan, wildly obscene picture books, Austrian etchings and plaster models that would make a call girl blush.
Kinsey and his men have taken 16,500 case histories so far. The core of the work is interviewing. The records are preserved on 400,000 punched I.B.M. cards, which are guarded like the gold at Fort Knox. All the recording is done in a code Kinsey invented, which is so abstruse that a professional cryptographer was unable to break it. The code has never been written down and takes about a year to memorize; Kinsey and his three chief associates are the only people alive who know it.
THE conduct of an interview is, understandably, a ticklish business. After years in which he never smoked or drank, Kinsey deliberately took up tobacco and alcohol in a gingerly fashion, because he thought that if he smoked and drank moderately with people whose sexual histories he was exploring, it would produce a better rapport. The system seems to work. Nobody who has given his case history to Kinsey is likely to forget the experience. His own family has contributed; he took his daughter Joan's sex history when she was in high school, and after she married, her husband offered his to his father-in-law. The questioning may take from 1½ to 3½ hours, and penetrates every aspect of the subject's sexual life, including details that seem utterly outlandish even to highly sophisticated people.
Once, in Peoria,. Kinsey was interviewing a 350-lb. Negro prostitute. "Suh," she told him, "you makes me 'member things I never even knew happened to me!"
The reaction to Kinsey's gall-wasp approach to sex has been mixed, to say the least. His statistic-crammed, 804-page book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (TIME, Jan. 5, 1948), was published by a medical publishing house (W. B. Saunders Co.) and cost $6.50, but it shot up on the bestseller list with the aid of free publicity and loud denunciations. The weightiest denunciations came from religious and moral leaders, who pointed out that Kinsey's examination of men's sex life altogether denied the existence of any moral factor whatever in sexual relations: