Aldred Kinsey;s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male published (jan 1, 1948 – jan 1, 1948)

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Underneath their middle-class morality, Americans were less repressed than confused. They struggled to reconcile new freedoms with moral traditions. This was especially true with regard to sex. Two controversial studies by an unassuming Indiana University zoologist named Alfred Kinsey forced questions about sexuality into the open. Kinsey and his research team published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and followed it up in 1953 with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — the latter an 842-page book that sold 270,000 copies in the first month after its publication. Taking a scientific rather than moralistic approach, Kinsey documented the full range of sexual experiences of thousands of Americans. The work of the “sex doctor,” as he became known, broke numerous taboos, discussing such topics as homosexuality and marital infidelity in the detached language of science.

Like the woman on the cover of this lighthearted 1953 book of photographs, many Americans reacted with surprise when Alfred Kinsey revealed the country’s sexual habits. In his 1948 book about men and his 1953 book about women, Kinsey wrote about American sexual practices in the detached language of science. But it still made for salacious reading. Evangelical minister Billy Graham (p. 792) warned: “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorated morals of America.”


The text below the title on the center reads, “Price 1.00 dollar.” The cover displays a photo of a surprised woman in the center. The text on the bottom reads, “A photographic reaction to the Kinsey Report by Lawrence Lariar.”

Both of Kinsey’s studies confirmed that a quiet sexual revolution was already well underway. Kinsey estimated that 85 percent of men had had sex prior to marriage, and more than 25 percent of married women had had sex outside of marriage by the age of forty. These statistics were shocking by the moral standards of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and “hotter than the Kinsey report” became a national figure of speech. Kinsey was criticized by statisticians — because his samples were not randomly selected — and condemned by religious leaders, who charged him with encouraging promiscuity and adultery. But his research changed, or perhaps even started, the national conversation about sex.


Traditional morality prohibited frank public discussion of sex, but significant challenges to that prohibition emerged in popular media in the postwar years. Concerned that excessive crime, violence, and sex in comic books were encouraging juvenile delinquency, the U.S. Senate held nationally televised hearings in 1954. The Senate’s final report, written largely by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, complained of the “scantily clad women” and “penchant for violent death” common in comic books aimed at teenage audiences. Kefauver’s report forced the comics industry to censor itself but did little to repress an increasing frankness about both sex and violence in other media.

A magazine entrepreneur from Chicago named Hugh Hefner became a leading, and controversial, voice in that growing frankness. Hefner founded Playboy magazine in 1953 to advance a countermorality against domesticity: the magazine imagined a world populated by “hip” bachelors and sexually available women. Hefner’s bachelors condemned marriage and lived in sophisticated apartments filled with the latest stereo equipment and other consumer products. While domesticated fathers bought lawn mowers and patio furniture, Playboy encouraged men to spend money on stylish clothing, jazz albums, and on the “scantily clad women” that filled its pages. Hefner and his numerous imitators became powerful arbiters of sex in the media, but were also exceptions that proved the rule. Marriage, not swinging bachelorhood, remained the destination of the majority of men. Millions of American men read Playboy, but few pursued its fantasy lifestyle.

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