Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist and professor at Indiana University who founded the Institute for Research in sex, gender, and reproduction. As a zoologist, he studied and collected hundreds of thousands of butterflies for almost 20 years. After doing research in this field for many years, he noticed that not many people were interested in the subject. He wanted to do something that will change the way society thinks and acts. So with the influences of both his students and his wife he decided to pursue a passion in the study of sex.

As a sexologist, he had to ask questions that no one has ever heard before. What was private to one person became publicized to the rest of the world. Kinsey was always interested in human behavior, especially how they behaved sexually. He wanted to know exactly how people had sex and every other little aspect that people couldn’t know about until marriage. With his research he began a new era for what is now very common in today’s world.

Kinsey’s research was based on a national sample of eleven thousand non-representative interviews. His research subjects were all educated, middle class white people. During his interviews, he would ask his subjects very personal questions about their sexual history and would want to know every possible thing about how they did it and the position in which they did it in. In some cases he would also take photos or videos of his subjects while they were having sex in order to get a better understanding of the different behaviors that occurred during the process.

The more his research progressed, the more popular it became. Because of the people’s interest in the subject, people from all over the country came to his classes to educate themselves of a subject in which they were long deprived of. So as his research gained popularity, it needed the money to back up the studies that took place. In order to receive funding, both the Rockefeller foundation and Indiana University supported Kinsey’s research in order to keep his studies going.

Through his lectures at Indiana University and his interviews with his subjects, Kinsey discovered that most of his interviewers knew nothing about sex and they were completely in the dark about the different ways to have sex. They didn’t know that there were different ways of expressing their feelings and they were also surprised by the vast acceptance of sex through the country. His research also showed that homosexuality was increasing as the subject became more accepted throughout society.

Kinsey rapidly gained fame with his book about the sexual behaviors of males. He was widely known throughout the country because it was a way to discuss a subject that was relatively new to be publicly discussed. With this book, his classes became more and more crowded. However, when Kinsey published his second book, on the sexual behaviors of women, he rapidly lost readers mainly because at the time people thought that it was highly inappropriate for women to be talked about in a sexually explicit way. At this point, the public turned against Kinsey and Rockefeller pulled away its funding in the middle of Kinsey’s research of his second book, relating to the sexual behaviors of pedophiles.

Even though the majority of people didn’t approve of his research, others became more comfortable with their sexual identity. For example, in our visual tool, it portrayed how a woman was scared to show that she was in love with someone of the same sex. So her husband left her and she was desperately lonely, but as his research proved to be more accepted in society she became openly gay and was able to express her true feelings, saving her life.

In my opinion, I think that his research was necessary for the purpose of broadening people’s minds and letting them think that they can have options as to who they can have sex with. It showed how people were suppressed from sex and how inexperienced they were when they got married. His research taught people that what people believed was a myth was completely different from what was proven. His studies showed how sex really is and how sexual activity wasn’t as dangerous as people had claimed. As for the movie I strongly disliked the images it had because I think that it over dramatized on the subject and it wasn’t necessary for them to actually have examples of sexual images and activities. Although his research brought some controversial arguments into play, it has changed American society and how we express ourselves to each other in various situations each day.