Birthday: the scientists who thought up the study of sex

It’s a big birth- and anniversary- day in the field of human sexuality studies, and a chance to salute the work of Jim Burroway and his team at the website Box Turtle Bulletin.

Since 2005 BTB has been rigorously fact-checking the American and overseas antigay industry. With its bare-bones layout and adjectiveless prose, the material provides a useful counterpoint to the shrillness, overstatement and made-up claims of the the self-appointed regulators of the human race.

Today is the birthday of the first scientific researcher in the field of human sexuality, and the anniversary of publication of the second volume of the Kinsey Reports on human sexuality. To this day, research in the field is hampered by the agendas of those who figure if no one knows what other people do, they can’t learn how to do it themselves. This we have the comments of a Catholic priest the other day, who told a conference of antigayists he tells young people consensual sex between two men is like “sticking a piece of a bagel in your ear.”

For Box Turtle Bulletin’s accounts of the life of German researcher Richard Krafft-Ebbing, and the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, click www.henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com. There’s a link to a free copy of the first American edition of Krafft-Ebing’s great work there, along with access to the full collection of Henry Bemis Books’ literary birthday celebrations.

From today’s entry at Box Turtle Bulletin, the tales of two pioneers of science and their work:

Richard von Krafft-Ebing: 1840-1902. The Austro-German psychiatrist’s principal work, Psychopathia Sexualis was more than just the Kinsey Report of 1886; it single-handedly established sexology as a serious field of study. The last edition, his twelfth, included 238 case histories of human sexual behavior, and popularized such terms as sadism, masochism, fetishism, and the newly-coined word, homosexuality (see May 6). It was written specifically for psychiatrists, physicians, and judges in a dense academic style in order to discourage its purchase by lay readers. The most sordid parts, he wrote in Latin to further discourage casual reading. 

A native of Baden, Germany, Krafft-Ebing studied medicine and psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg. He taught at the Universities of Strasbourg, and then at Graz, where he also served as superintendent of the Feldhof mental asylum. When he arrived at the asylum, he found that it was operated more as a dungeon than a treatment facility, and he fought for its reform, a fight which was ultimately unsuccessful. But it led him to publish the Text-Book of Insanity in 1879 to promote therapy rather than imprisonment for the mentally ill. 

In Krafft-Ebing’s study of insanity, he often encountered sexual practices which were routinely characterized as causes of insanity or dismissed as vile criminal practices, but which were otherwise little studied. This deficiency in the scientific literature led to what would turn out to be his life’s work. Psychopathia Sexualis catalogued a wide range of sexual practices, from masturbation, impotence, fetishisms, necrophilia, lust-murder — you name it. The practices were carefully categorized asparadoxia (sexual desire at the wrong time of life), hyperaesthesia(excessive sexual desire), anaesthesia (absence of sexual desire) and, the largest, paraesthesia (which he called the perversion of the sexual instinct). 

 

Krafft-Ebing’s notable achievement with Psychopathia Sexualis is that it allowed psychiatry to claim authority over sexual knowledge, where previously it was seen as a religious or criminal problem. Before Psychopathia Sexualis, sexual behavior that was not directed toward procreation — especially promiscuity and masturbation — was believed to cause insanity. Psychopathia Sexualis flipped that understanding around, and argued that “deviant” sexual behaviors were the result of a more fundamental mental disorder. For homosexuals in particular, he concluded that gay people were suffering from a kind of a biologically-based anomaly, one which occurred sometime during gestation, which resulted in a “sexual inversion” of the brain. 

Despite Krafft-Ebing’s efforts at objectivity, he was never able to escape the nineteenth-century assumptions that regarded recreational sex as a perversion of the sex drive. But in his later years, Krafft-Ebing’s opinions became more lenient toward gay people. He was among the first to sign Magnus Hirschfeld's petition for the repeal of Germany’s Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual behavior between men. In his last article on homosexuality, published in Hirschfeld’s Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types, Krafft-Ebing described his earlier views of homosexuality as pathological as being one-sided, and advocated instead that gay people should be treated with sympathy and compassion. However condescending that viewpoint was, it was also, at least, an improvement. But in the end Krafft-Ebing’s work had the practical effect of extending Victorian morality for most of the next century by merely replacing religious moralism with a scientific gloss. It would take nearly nine decades after Psychopathia Sexualis’s publication before the American Psychiatric Association would finally cut through that gloss once and for all and remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders (see Dec 15). 

The 1894 English translation of Psychopathia Sexualis, which is credited with introducing the word “homosexuality” into the English language, is available for free at Google Books here.

► “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” Published: 1953. The first half of what is collectively and colloquially known as “The Kinsey Report” appeared in 1948 with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (see Jan 5). That volume revealed that the human male in America was having a hell of a lot of sex: premarital sex, extramarital sex, self sex, oral sex, masochistic sex, sadistic sex, and, most shockingly, gay sex. The book was controversial, but somewhat less so than you might imagine. After all, boys will be boys, even in 1948, and sexual experiences were more or less seen as coming with the territory. Sure, there were criticisms: it wasn’t statistically rigorous, the sample wasn’t representative, he relied too much on questionnaires distributed among prison populations. And while the “how many” and “how often” is what was talked about most, the fact that there was any kind of data on an activity that everyone did but nobody talked about, helps to explain the first volume’s success. Now, all of the sudden everyone was talking about it — as science, not smut, which made all the difference in the world. 

The reception for the second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953 was very different. Kinsey anticipated some of its criticisms based on methodological complaints about the first volume. He purged the inmate and other atypical populations, and he listened more carefully to what statisticians were telling him. But he couldn’t correct all of his shortcomings. Clyde Kluckhohn, a Harvard University anthropology professor, in a review for The New York Times, called the book “a brilliant and arguable contribution for which we are all in their debt.” He thought however that it was “not a definitive treatise…. The honest title would have been: ‘Some Aspects of Sexual Behavior in American Females (Primarily Educated, Protestant, Regionally Localized, Adolescent through Middle-Aged).'” 

Time, August 24, 1953 

But other criticisms of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female went way beyond the statistical, largely because this time, we’re not talking about boys being boys, but the fairer sex and the flowering of female desires. Finding out that more than 90% of women had indulged in sexual petting, 66% dreamed about sex, 62% masturbated, about half had given blow jobs, half had had sex before marriage, a quarter had cheated on their husbands, and a sixth had had sex with another woman at least once in their lives (also: “Homosexual contacts are highly effective in bringing the female to orgasm.”) — all of that was seen as an attack on American Motherhood and her apple pie. 

Kinsey was branded an enemy of religious propriety and American values. Rep. B. Carroll Reece (R-TN) chaired a House committee to investigate alleged ties between Kinsey and the Communist Party. The Rockefeller Foundation, which had provided funding for Kinsey’s studies, cut him off. Kinsey spent the next two years trying to find another benefactor, and the stress took its toll. He died in 1956 at 62 following years of declining health. The fallout from the two volumes would have a chilling effect on large scale statistical studies of human sexuality for the next 40 years. When AIDS appeared on the landscape in 1981, the Kinsey reports, flawed as they were, were still the only significant source of information on human sexual behavior on which to base a response. 

Reactions to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female weren’t universally negative. A few found the volume’s titillation entertaining, and it certainly cut a wide swath through popular culture. But most importantly, many women found comfort in discovering that they weren’t sexual freaks, that many other women also enjoyed sex in all of its various forms. And despite their many methodological shortcomings, the Kinsey reports opened an entire field of study that was ripe for exploration. Pioneers often get things wrong; Columbus died believing he found a western route to the East Indies. But pioneers do one thing very well: they point the way for other explorers to carry on the work of discovery.