The reception of the Kinsey reports in Europe

Sexuality and Culture

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 39-48

  Herzog, Dagmar ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646378911     PISSN: 10955143     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s12119-006-1005-5     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. See "K-Day," Time 62(9) (31 August 1953), 52.
2. A powerful analysis of Kinsey's significance for the U.S. context remains Regina Markell Morantz, "The scientist as sex crusader: Alfred C. Kinsey and American culture," American Quarterly 29, 5 (Winter 1977), 563-589.
3. See also the thoughtful and informative assessments in Miriam G. Reumann, American sexual character: Sex, gender, and national identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005);
4. as well as Beth Bailey, "Sexual revolution(s)," in David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From memory to history (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
5. Early overviews of U.S. reception can be found in Erdman Palmore, "Published reactions to the Kinsey report," Social Forces 31(2) (Dec. 1952), 165-172;
6. and Leo Schall, "The reception of the Kinsey report in the periodicals of the United States: 1947-49," in Jerome Himelhoch and Sylvia Fleis Fava, eds., Sexual behavior in American society: An appraisal of the first two Kinsey Reports (New York: Norton, 1955), 364-377.
7. For a sampling of methodological and moral criticisms of Kinsey in Europe, see O. Stöckle, "Missbrauchte Wissenschaft," Orientierung 17 (1953), 211-212;
8. "Die Kinsey-Statistiker," Welt-Stimmen 24 (1955), 198-199;
9. Jacques Ellul (Bordeaux), "Der Kinsey-Bericht und die moralische Situation unserer Zeit," Universitas 5(12) (1950), 1409-1421;
10. and Maurice Edgar Coindreau, "Une Enquête Américaine: Le Rapport Kinsey," La revue de Paris 56(1) (1949), 106-115.
11. See especially "Prudery and pruriency," New Statesman and Nation 29 August 1953, 223-224;
12. th Century 156(929) (July 1954), 55;
13. "'Evil of the sex profiteer': Use made of the Kinsey report criticized," The Times (London), 31 August 1953, 2;
14. and Geoffrey Gorer, "English ideas about sex," Encounter 1 (3) (December 1953), 45-55.
15. For serious Kinsey-inspired research on British attitudes, see L.R. England, "Little Kinsey: An outline of sex attitudes in Britain," Public Opinion Quarterly 13 (1949), 587-600.
16. A wonderful introduction to the French response to Kinsey's reports-intricately entwined as it was with the reception of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex-can be found in Sylvie Chaperon, "Kinsey en France: les sexualités féminine et masculine en débat," Le Mouvement Social 198 (January-March 2002).
17. Important-albeit iconoclastic-introductions to West German responses can be found in Reimut Reiche, "Die Aufnahme der Kinsey-Berichte," Das Argument 7 (1965), 15-34;
18. Reimut Reiche, "Über Kinsey," Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 11(2) (June 1998), 167-173;
19. and Gunter Schmidt, "Kinsey's unspoken truths: On how the Kinsey Reports were received in West Germany," Sexualities 1(1) (1998), 100-103.
20. The complexity of British responses have been discussed in Michael Schofield, "Fifty years after Kinsey," Sexualities 1(1) (1998), 103-104;
21. Liz Stanley, Sex surveyed, 1949-1994: From mass-observation's 'Little Kinsey' to the National Survey and the Hite Reports (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995);
22. and Jonathan Duffy, "Britain's secret sex survey," BBC News Magazine, 30 September 2005, online edition.
23. Jacques Berna, "Das sexuelle Verhalten der Jugendlichen: Zu einem amerikanischen Buch," Psyche 6(12) (March 1953), 169.
24. Only a few European commentators saw similarities between European and American sexual conditions. See, for example, the similarities identified in statistics from the late 1940s and early 1950s from Sweden, Norway, West Germany, and the United States and an East German gynecologist's comparisons of rates of youth heterosexuality in Nazi Germany and Kinsey's United States: Udo Undeutsch, "Comparative incidence of premarital coitus in Scandinavia, Germany, and the United States," in Himelhoch and Fava, Sexual behavior, 360-363;
25. and H. Ruppert, "Sexuelle Erziehung vom Blickpunkt des Gynäkologen," Zeitschrift für ärztliche Fortbildung 50(1-2) (15 January 1956), 65-67.
26. Ha, "Puritanismus und Wirklichkeit: Kinsey's 'Sex Report' und sein Widerhall," Die Weltwoche (Zurich) 16(765) (9 July 1948), 9.
27. "Wie werden Frauen wieder glücklich? Die sensationelle Untersuchung unserer Tage," Neue Illustrierte 8(34) (22 August 1953), 11-12.
28. See Helmut Schelsky, Soziologie der Sexualität: Über die Beziehungen zwischen Geschlecht, Moral und Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), 121-122.
29. Further disdainful marveling over the peculiarities of petting can be found in Knud C. Knudsen, "Der Kinsey-Report," Berliner Hefte für geistiges Leben 3 (1948), 387-389;
30. K.H. Stauder, "Psychotherapeutisches Schrifttum für die Praxis," Medizinische Klinik 47 (1953), 1755;
31. "Der Kinsey-Bericht," Herder-Korrespondenz 8(10) (1954), 476.
32. Interestingly, West German and Swiss male writers often gave authority to their critiques of petting by citing the U.S. anthropologist Margaret Mead's own negative assessment of it (even though her argument was somewhat more complicated than their selective adaptations). See Margaret Mead, Male and female: A study of the sexes in a changing world (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1950).
33. L.M. Lawrence, "Der Kinsey Report," Merkur 3(5) (1949), 498.
34. Albert Béguin, "Nous autres mammifères," Esprit 23(2) (February 1955), 307-308.
35. See especially the letters exchanged between Johannes Hacker and Alfred Kinsey in the file "Kinsey Corr.-Hacker, Johannes," held at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana.
36. See especially the detailed discussions and defenses of Kinsey by Wolfgang Hochheimer, "Die Kinsey-Berichte" (1954) and "Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der Sexualanthropologie: Zur Problematik der Kontroverse Schelsky-Kinsey,"
37. both reprinted in Wolfgang Hochheimer, Tiefenpsychologie und kritische Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1986).
38. Daniel Guérin, "Le message de délivrance de Kinsey," France observateur, 30 August 1956, 14.
39. See also Guérin's book, Kinsey et la Sexualité (Paris: Rene Julliard, 1955).
40. E.g., see Serge Talbot, "In memoriam: Alfred C. Kinsey," Arcadie 35 (1956), 9-11. "Antisexual terrorism" was a term coined by the French sexologist René Guyon.
41. For European criticisms specifically of the idea that what a majority does should also be morally acceptable, see "Eine unnötige Weltsensation," Evangelische Welt (Bethel bei Bielefeld) 7 (1953), 553-554;
42. Werner Rudolf, "Drei gegen Kinsey," Medizinische Klinik 49 (1954), 344-345;
43. Ellul, "Der Kinsey-Bericht," 1416, 1421;
44. and the preface to the French edition of Morris Ernst and David Loth, La Vie sexuelle en Amérique et le Rapport Kinsey, translated from the American by P. Gaillard (Paris: Sfelt, n.d.), 11.
45. See Helmut Schelsky, "Die Moral der Kinsey-Reporte," Wort und Wahrheit 9(6) (1954), 421-435;
46. and Helmut Schelsky, "Verdunkelung oder Gegenaufklärung in der Soziologie der Sexualität," Psyche 10(8) (November 1956), 837-855.
47. Homosexuals, in Schelsky's unapologetically obnoxious view, could not actually be citizens at all, because their level of personhood was simply not high enough. They suffered from a "failure to build up a complete opposite-sex partnership." This "solipsism," this "staying with one's own body," "locks these individuals away from the start from the originary access to sociability." They remained stuck at an "autistic" level, in a "sexuality of only pleasure-seeking." The idea that homophobic prejudice caused difficulties for homosexuals' acceptance in society reversed cause and effect, Schelsky thought. "The abnormals are not condemned to an outsider role only through some arbitrary norm-placement of society. ... Rather, the normative verdict constitutes the assessment of a culture that these groups are not capable of reaching the higher states of being." See Schelsky, Soziologie, 62-83.
48. For a fuller discussion of the persistence of Nazi-era argumentation across the divide of 1945, see Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and morality in twentieth-century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
49. See especially "Falsch gefesselte Sexualität? Das Menschenbild der Kinsey-Reporte," Neue deutsche Hefte: Beiträge zur europäischen Gegenwart 13 (1955), 74-77.
50. Béguin, "Nous autres mammifères," 304, 308, 310.
51. See in this context also the comments on the increasing split between flesh and emotions in conservative commentator Gustave Thibon's La crise moderne de l'amour (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1960), 54-55;
52. as well as the related reflections on the loss of " sensuousness" in Margaret Mead, "An anthropologist looks at the report," Problems of Sexual Behavior (1948), 58-69.
53. See in this context also Lisa Duggan, The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003),
54. and Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the sin: Sexual regulation and the limits of religious tolerance (New York: NYU Press, 2003).