Lionel Trilling
SEX AND SCIENCE: THE KINSEY REPORT
By virtue both of its intrinsic nature and its dramatic re–
ception, the Kinsey Report, as it has come to be called, is an event
of great importance in our culture.
1
As
such an event it is significant
in two separate ways, as symptom and as therapy. The therapy lies in
the large permissive effect the Report is likely to have, the long way
it goes toward establishing the
community
of sexuality. The symp–
tomatic significance lies in the fact that the Report was felt to be
needed at all, that the community of sexuality requires now to be
established in explicit quantitative terms. Nothing shows more clearly
the · extent to which modern society has atomized itself than the
sexual isolation in ignorance which exists among us. We have cen–
sored the folk knowledge of the most primal things and have sys–
tematically dried up the social affections which might naturally
seek to enlighten and release. Many cultures, the most primitive and
the most complex, have entertained sexual fears of an irrational
sort, but probably our culture is unique in strictly isolating the indi–
vidual
in
the fears that society has devised. Now, having become
somewhat aware of what we have perpetrated at great cost and
with little gain, we must assure ourselves by statistical science that
the solitude is imaginary. The Report will surprise one part of the
population with some facts and another part with other facts, but
really all that it says to society as a whole is that there is an almost
universal involvement
in
the sexual life and therefore much variety
of conduct. This was taken for granted in any comedy that Aris–
tophanes put on the stage.
There is a further diagnostic significance to be found in the
fact that our society makes this effort of self-enlightenment through
1
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
By Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B.
Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Saunders. $6.50.
460
