Kinsey

in stepped Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s, the godfather of 20th century sex research.

He was responsible for the sexual revolution, even though he didnt have much of a sex life himself. He started off as a zoologist and married Clara McMillan in 1921. But his extremely large penis meant that problems were apparent right from their honeymoon and he became very frustrated.

Kinsey realised that humans knew less about their own sexual behaviour than they did about that of the wasps he studied so obsessively and that this caused a great deal of suffering.

He applied the same attention to detail to his study of human sexual behaviour. At a time when sex belonged to the bedroom of couples who wished to have children, the students at the University where he taught started to ask him questions about sex. Shocked by their ignorance, he began running marriage guidance classes and realising how little he knew, he began to ask them questions about masturbation and other issues. Because he needed to find out more about sex and there was no scientific data available, he set about compiling his own.

First by persuading prostitutes to let him hide in their rooms and watch them turning tricks. He also got volunteers to masturbate so he could understand more about ejaculation.

His research became the largest study ever conducted about sexual behaviour. Over 15 years, he interviewed more than 18,000 people asking about every detail of their sex lives, recording everything in a single page of coded symbols so that no one could steal or confiscate his work.

One interviewee revealed that after the first hour, he asked if she had had intercourse. If a girl responded with ‘no’, the interview was over. If she confirmed that she had, there was another hour of questioning. The boys would sit outside and if you stayed two hours, they were interested in you – because they didn’t want to deal with a virgin.

He received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and recruited a small staff to help with the interview, who all had to learn the code by heart.