Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey

Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey was an important personality in the sex industry and spent his life reaching scientific performances as a biologist, professor of entomology and zoology as well. He lived between June 23^rd of 1894 and August 25^th of 1956 and was the founder of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947. Now, the institute is known worldwide as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. Beside all these professional performances, Dr. Kinsey wrote “Sexual behaviour in the Human male” in 1948, and “Sexual Behaviour in the Human female” in 1953. These two writings became known as the Kinsey Reports or the Kinsey Scale and are very popular even nowadays, being used as references for different researches in the sex industry.

His work had a great impact in the 1940s and 1950s, creating a revolution when it comes to cultural values in the United States and later on worldwide. Dr. Kinsey combined the science of biology with the modern concepts of sexuality specific for the 20^th century and influenced the common knowledge as well as the scientific one, concerning the sex industry and the way human nature understands to appreciate it and apply it in their lives. But more than his researches and scientific work, Dr. Kinsey’s personal life was a great motivator that led him into gathering more information about the sex industry. He was married with Clara Bracken McMillen and had four children. Even if his life seemed to be lined up in a good and positive way, he had to face a lot of personal dramas along the years. One of his children, the first born, Donald, who came into the world in 1922, died before the age of five years old by a severe form of juvenile diabetes, in 1927. The disease had no treatment back then and had a terrible impact on his father. His other children were Anna, born in 1924, Joan, born in 1925 and Bruce, born in 1928. But more than the struggles that life put Kinsey in, he had some inner ones that consumed him along the years. He was bisexual and for that time, this was a hard reality and condition to accept. He used to punish himself during his youth for having such sexual desires and feeling so attracted to both men and women, because his family and society, “raised” him to be heterosexual and not switch teams the way that he was tempted to do. But once he met his wife Clara, they reached the agreement of having, what we call nowadays, an open relationship in which each one of them were allowed to have sex with other people beside their intimate sexual life. This gave Kinsey the freedom to explore his bisexuality and had an affair with one of his students, Clyde Martin. His wife knew about his affairs and accepted them, even more than that she supported him to express his sexuality and understood his unicity in that aspect. A controversial aspect of his sexual reports is the fact that he encouraged his personal and staff to experience different sexual encounters in the name of research as long as they were comfortable doing so. He used to ask them questions and interview them about their unique sexual experiences and use the information in his reports. Dr. Kinsey even recorded sexual acts between his co-workers, in the attic of his house, as part of the research that he was involved in and sometimes he would join them in the process. His curiosities were beyond the sexual intercourse aspects, and became more related to the way different subjects behaved during sexual acts. Such experiences led him to write the two Kinsey Reports that will take his name in the top of the sexual industry.

Dr. Kinsey found his death in 1956 when he was only 62 years old. The cause of his tragic death was supposed to be a heart ailment and a complication of pneumonia that couldn’t be treated successfully at that time. He was an important value for the scientific picture of the time as well as a controversial figure of the 20^th century. Nowadays, Dr. Kinsey is known internationally and students all over the world study his work to have a better understanding of the human nature in relation with its sexual behaviour and abilities.