An earlier version of this article was published in 2016.
Maybe some reader will remember Kinsey, a 2004 film in which Liam Neeson played this American biologist, Alfred Kinsey, which set out to study sexual behavior, initially of men, through thousands of interviews. Its objective was to expose the lack of knowledge that existed regarding sexual behaviors and, specifically, the enormous difference between sexual attitudes and actual practices.
The movie told a real event. His study was published in two volumes, Male sexual behavior (1947) and Sexual behavior of women (1953), and applied Kinsey’s experience studying wasps to the description of human behavior. The biologist and his collaborators at Indiana University interviewed more than 5,000 men and as many women and asked between 300 and more than 500 questions. They wanted to obtain as much information as possible about their social and economic status, their love life and, if they were married, what their marriage was like, their hetero or homosexual experiences, information about their physical condition …
The idea was to get as much data as possible to have the more complete panoramic of people’s actual sexual behaviors. This, in 1948, exposed Kinsey to enormous controversy and, at the same time, to a great sales success, despite the fact that his studies were written in highly academic language and that he purposely sought only to be understood entirely by scholars in that field. They were not works of dissemination.
Those two studies forced us to rethink the way in which sexuality was being studied (or not being done), full of taboos. His findings included that, for example, half of the men and a quarter of the married women had had extramarital affairs; 69% of the men had hired prostitutes at least once; and that about 46% of the men surveyed had had sex with both women and other men.
That is where the other great finding of the biologist’s study appeared, and for which he has ended up being better known today: the sexuality scale. The sexologist Silvia Catalán explains that this Kinsey scale “was a revolutionary evaluation instrument in its time, since it contemplated a very dynamic sexual orientation and with eight different degrees (three had always been used: homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual). It is a simple scale that divides sexual orientation into seven grades: exclusively heterosexual, predominantly heterosexual, bisexual, predominantly homosexual, primarily homosexual, exclusively homosexual, and asexual. “
Kinsey himself explained the purpose behind this stopover in Sexual behavior of women:
It is a characteristic of the human mind to try to dichotomize the classification of phenomena … Sexual behavior is either normal or abnormal, socially acceptable or unacceptable, heterosexual or homosexual, and many people do not want to believe that there are gradations in these matters from one to another. extreme.
Until then, sexual orientation and behavior were essentially divided into two, straight and homosexual, and what existed was a binary paradigm.
“Traditionally, heterosexuality served as reality, and the rest of identities and behaviors as a detour to it,” explains sexologist Delfina Mieville, adding that, although Kinsey’s work was very important, it also has its limitations: “Behaviors were analyzed, not so much how these people identified themselves. Although it should not be reviled, since it is from here that sexuality begins to be considered as a sexual biography, even today we have a tendency to approach sexuality in a monolithic and binary “.
Sexual orientation today
Current studies on sexuality take more into account the identification of their subjects, and not just their behaviors, and they are working on a new paradigm, which assumes that sexuality is more of a continuum. And that can evolve over time.
A few years ago, the University of Notre Dame published a study on the evolution in their sexual orientation and behaviors of more than 5,000 women and 4,000 men, tracing the changes that they could experience from when they were adolescents until they entered adulthood. One of his most striking conclusions was that women were more likely to be attracted to people of the same sex throughout their lives, to change their sexual orientation, while in men it was rarer for this to happen.
That study exposed one of the tendencies of psychology in the study of human sexuality, which is to describe it as something fluid and subject to change throughout people’s lives. Catalán points out that “there are many theories and hypotheses in this regard, but what is most widely accepted today is that sexual orientation is something relatively fluid and often associated with vital moments.” In other words, it does appear that there is a “predominant sexual orientation”, but there may be certain variations “for various reasons, if the person is open to accepting their motivations”.
Dr. Anne Fausto Sterling is one of the most active in that theory. This is how Mieville points out: “Two approaches coexist, one completely binary and one of opposites, male or female, hetero or homo; and the other sometimes heir to the currents queer, where liquidity and non-binary are discussed. I like a third way, the one proposed by Fausto Sterling where sexuality is studied from a continuum. In this sense, everyone’s sexuality changes throughout life. “
This is where the old debate about innate and learned comes into play and how the influences of our life experiences and our environment are shaping our sexual orientation. Not to be confused with sexual identity, as Mieville rightly points out when stating that “when we speak of sexual identity we speak of meaningful sex, that is, if the person feels identified with the sex assigned to him at birth. Sexual orientation has to do with what kind of people and bodies I guide my desire. A person, both transsexual and cisexual (can have a homo, hetero bisexual orientation “.
Catalán points out, for his part, that “identity is what gender role I feel identified with”. That is, if I feel that I am “woman” or “man” or if I feel that I do not belong to any specific gender (“intergender”). In this way, I can be a woman biologically (XX) but identify with a masculine gender role and, regardless, that I am attracted to women or men. “Now,” Mieville continues, “when we talk about and confuse orientation with practice, we mean that practice does not make identity, although it does construct it. Two men may have had the same number of male and female sexual partners and not because of they will be defined in the same way. “
Much of the conversation revolves around those people of more fluid sexuality, bisexual, orientations that include the Kinsey scale and that are still quite misunderstood. In the words of Mieville, “bisexuality is an orientation in itself, not an intermediate state, it is not a stage of confusion, at best, no more than any other orientation or vital moment. Confusion, or other stereotypes such as promiscuity are not more typical of bisexuality than of other orientations “.
British activist Kate Harrad told VICE that “the problem bisexual people face is that we can be invisible in both straight and gay and lesbian communities. Sometimes that leaves people feeling like they have nowhere to go.” According to Mieville, “there have been more studies on bisexuality and sexual behavior, such as the Klein scale, where finally not only the practice is analyzed, but also the desires, fantasies and affections of the individual”.
All this was possible because, initially, Alfred Kinsey broke the barriers of what was traditionally understood as sexual behavior, but his scale is not a test that measure our sexual orientationbut rather an academic tool to encourage broader studies. Catalán concludes that “in any case, sexual orientation is still a” label “that helps us to classify people, so, in reality, it does not really matter who you sleep with or who you feel sexual attraction to” .