Dr. Kinsey, who became known as the “father of the sexual revolution,” proposed that humans exist on a spectrum between heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Groundbreaking in its day, the Kinsey Scale was the first of its kind to demonstrate that sexuality isn’t binary and can be fluid over time. Known less commonly as the Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale, it was the brainchild of Drs. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, who published it — prompting a nationwide uproar — in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in 1948.
The Kinsey Scale proposed that rather than falling into simple heterosexual and homosexual categories, humans exist somewhere on a seven-point spectrum between the two. What’s more, it suggested that an individual’s position on the spectrum doesn’t necessarily remain the same throughout their lives. It’s safe to say, it was ahead of its time. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and its then outrageous-seeming concepts captured the public imagination, becoming an immediate bestseller and making Dr. Kinsey a celebrity in his own right.
What is the Kinsey Scale?
The seven categories on the Kinsey Scale were:
0 | Exclusively heterosexual
1 | Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2 | Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 | Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 | Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 | Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6 | Exclusively homosexual
X | No socio-sexual contacts or reactions
According to the Kinsey Institute, people in the “0” category report exclusively heterosexual behavior or attraction. Those in category “6” report exclusively homosexual behavior or attraction, and people who report varying levels of attraction or sexual activity with either sex fall between ratings 1-5. The “X” category is reserved for those who experience no sexual contact or feeling.
Is there a Kinsey Scale Test?
Bad news, Buzzfeed: There isn’t actually an official “test” for establishing your place on the Kinsey scale. Though a quick Google might throw up various options for taking a “Kinsey test,” this wasn’t in the original design of the scale. Researchers simply assigned numbers on the scale to people based on their sexual history.
What was the Kinsey Scale based on?
The researchers conducted thousands of interviews with subjects — over 8,000 of which Dr. Kinsey carried out himself. The scale measured both psychosexual responses to stimuli as well as actual sexual experiences so that a person’s degree of real-life participation didn’t skew the results.
Even this explorative approach was seismic in its time. So many of the established beliefs about sexuality were informed by religion and perceived gender roles at that time — not least, the idea that women were not sexual. By framing the study of sex as a scientific endeavor, Kinsey removed the moral baggage that had impeded so much research up until that point. Such was the scope of his findings that originally, the scale featured 30 different categorizations, based on 30 subjects.
What are the limits of the Kinsey scale?
The Kinsey Scale focuses on behaviors rather than attraction — which sidelines asexuality. In his 1953 follow-up to Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Kinsey estimated that between one and four percent of male subjects and between one and 19 percent of female subjects were asexual. Beyond that, Kinsey paid the asexual group little heed — assigning them an “X” grade to denote “no socio-sexual contacts or reactions.”
Dr. Kinsey acknowledged some of the scale’s limits, writing in Sexual Behavior In The Human Female: “It should be recognized that the reality includes individuals of every intermediate type, lying in a continuum between the two extremes and between each and every category on the scale.”
A new era in sexual science
Dr. Kinsey, who became known as the “father of the sexual revolution,” noted in his introduction to the Kinsey Scale that psychologists and psychiatrists had historically been restricted by the belief that heterosexual and homosexual people are “discretely different.” He argued that this approach ignored the huge proportion of people who have — or have had — sexual experience both with members of the opposite sex, as well as with their own. According to Dr. Kinsey’s data, this demographic accounted for nearly half the population.
“It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience,” he wrote.
Dr. Kinsey’s outlandish working method sometimes included encouraging colleagues to experiment sexually with each other, and hiring a professional photographer to record their activities. His belief was that this exploration would enable him and his research staff to better understand their subjects.
