One can hardly review the latest Kinsey report [Sexual Behavior in the Human Female] unmindful of other summaries and critiques which have appeared in the last several months. Kinsey has been criticized, to list a few of the charges, for poor or inappropriate sampling, lacking a sense of humor, not being a woman, gathering lies as data, showing disrespect for love, and not being conscious of the unconscious. It is also frequently though not unanimously agreed that Kinsey and his associates have been and are carrying on important and perhaps monumental research.

With the publicity that Kinsey, his co-workers, and his books receive, anyone interested in sexual activity set to print has, in some way or another, confronted both volumes. Added interest is to be found in the second volume, with its comparisons of male and female behavior, and in the excellently written Part III, which summarizes recent physiological findings concerning sexual activity and response. However, in this section, Kinsey's notion of "the psychologic factors" is somewhat Victorian or Krafft-Ebingish.

Anyone involved in field research will recognize the great achievement in interviewing for an average of two hours nearly 16,000 men and women across the United States. This feat may not impress armchair philosophers or couch clinicians. For the first time, an attempt has been made to obtain information on sexual behavior from a large nonclinical sample. As the authors modestly say, "The sample is still, at many points, inadequate, but we have been able to secure a greater diversification of subjects than had been available in previous studies." They have collected and tabulated a lot of informative data. For this accomplishment social scientists ought to be grateful, in spite of the occasional and understandable enthusiasm which leads the authors to claim more for their data than can be sustained.

Nonetheless, one may question whether Kinsey knows quite what to do with his data. His sociological and psychological understanding is inadequate. For instance, he categorizes his subjects by age, education, occupation of parent or husband, rural or urban, religious background. These are only common-sense categories. Why, one may ask, are these more relevant than hair color, shoe size, or food habits? Even when one finds a juicy correlation, what does it mean? This question is deeper than, but similar to, some of the questions that have arisen about the sampling procedures. Sexual behavior is more socially controlled than other biological functions because the sex drive does not have to be satisfied to maintain life in the organism. This is not true of food or air, for instance. The social nature of man provides him with choice concerning sexual activity. There are sublimations and substitutes.

The values by which choices are made make sense of the variety of choices, and the social forces and institutions which give rise to the value systems are the relevant sociological variables. There is the question then as to whether sociologists have developed the concepts of social forces and institutions adequately to communicate with fellow scientists, even zoölogists, who are highly motivated to find out about them or whether Kinsey is sufficiently sensitized to sociological concepts to have tried to find them.

Secondly, when Kinsey interprets the meaning of his findings, he again reflects his nineteenth-century view of ethics which modern social science could dispel. Kinsey finds that "the law is an ass" because it is so far from being lived up to—it is not rational. But the law is only a guide and frequently only an ideal; it is more likely to be based on what people think they ought to do than on what they do. Similarly, it is only a minor aspect of legal punishment to consider the culprit and his reclamation. The major function is to reinforce the "oughts" of the value system. A study of the anthropology of law would make Kinsey's zeal for reform more realistic and realizable.

As much as I like to argue with Kinsey and his associates, I am grateful that they are around to argue with. Even now, through the smoke of heated argument, it can be recognized that Kinsey's studies of sexual behavior provide a solid groundwork for fruitful discussion and have opened up new vistas for much-needed further research.