America's sexual history
By Stu Hutson

The oldest known penis dates to about 100 million years ago.

Found in 2002 by a team from the University of Leicester, the fossilized phallus belonged to an ostracod, the early ancestor of today’s water fleas. It’s just a millimeter long hollow spike, but it was one heck of a jump in primordial nookie efficiency. Before that spike, most critters mated in a messy, grimy bump and grind--hoping that the right bodily fluids fell into the right holes.
But even nature’s good ideas can be taken too far.

Take for example, the beetle. There’s more than 350,000 different beetle species on record. For many of them, the only marked physical difference is their genitals. They have specialized penises-- three pronged doohickies that branch in different ways or have bumps in just the right spot. These act as keys that only fit the right female locks, and only if inserted in the right position.
Gall Wasps are the same way. These stinging wasps have bodies so heavy that their wings can’t carry them. So they trudge, slowly, from one area to the next, each time marking out their own community by changing the shape of the genitals. Tracking the evolution of the wasps is as simple as walking from place to place, and that’s how a zoologist from Indiana University by the name of Alfred Kinsey spent most of his early career. By the early 1930s, he’d catalogued more than 1250 species of gall wasps – and then he finally figured out why he was becoming so bored.

Kinsey realized that humans are not gall wasps. We’re not locked into a specific, rigid sexual norm. For us, it’s not just “tab a” into “slot b.” There is no right way--regardless of what your mother, your church, and even your government might want you to think.

Kinsey isn’t exactly a household name—not like Freud or Einstein—but it should be. And if anyone pays attention to Searchlight Picture’s new movie, Kinsey, it might just become one. The film charts Kinsey’s life, starting with his troubled childhood and following through the establishment of the Kinsey Institute, which is still one of today’s foremost research institutes in sex, gender and reproduction research. The movement of the movie is built around the some 17,000 personal interviews collected by Kinsey’s research team to uncover the truth about...