NEW YORK, January 23: Today it is hard to comprehend the excitement it caused, but it was huge: 50 years ago, on January 31, Alfred Charles Kinsey published the first of his investigative reports on American sexual behaviour.His standard work - sexual behaviour in the human male - already gave some indication that women must be involved. When he published sexual behaviour in the human female six years later public outrage knew no limits.For in an era in which American women's associations still enforced prudery in Hollywood, so that bedroom scenes in films portrayed both partners in pyjamas and twin beds, Kinsey published detailed tables on the sex lives of Americans.These showed, for example, how often Protestant, Catholic or Jewish women of a given age group and education reached orgasm - and how often - during marital or extra-marital sex.And that wasn't all: After interviews with thousands of men and women in which they filled in forms listing hundreds of questions, Kinsey announced how many girls of various religious persuasions discovered masturbation before the age of 15 and how they did it.And he not only compiled information on Americans' widespread extra-marital experiences, but also on their extra-marital desires.Kinsey not only gave his readers the feeling that they were not alone in their sexual preferences, but his research also caused many of the 50 US states - after some delay - to change their legislation. Prior to his sensational, ground-breaking work on humans, Kinsey, a zoology professor born in Hoboken, New York in 1894, had concentrated on researching insects at the University of Indiana in Bloomingdale.Then he received a number of grants to investigate human sexual behaviour, spent 10 years with the help of countless research assistants looking into the matter, and published his book, in which he made observations about humans as if they were animals.Kinsey's statistics showed that sexual behaviour at that time - frowned upon as perverted - was common practice.
