A Sequel to the Kinsey Report

• Post by: Bryce J. Christensen
• September 12, 2010

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “There they go again.” Indiana University was the source for the notorious Kinsey Report. The same agenda that characterized the discredited 1953 report seems to permeate a new survey, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, whose findings were released in October by the school’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion. Like the Kinsey researchers, the new study’s authors fixate on bizarre matters most Americans would rather not discuss in polite company: on “more than 40 combinations of sexual acts”; on homosexuality; and on prophylactic use—not surprising given that the survey was funded by the manufacturers of Trojan condoms. The researchers also insist, as in 1953, that because all the behaviors they identify and quantify are “normal,” Americans should not feel embarrassed about any of them, although many are fraught with clear health risks. Like Kinsey, who based his claims on surveys of the prison population, the study appears to overstate the occurrence of homosexual behavior. The new study claims that between 4 percent and 8 percent of American males have experienced sexual encounters with another man in the past twelve months. Those numbers may be more accurate than Kinsey’s claim of 10 percent, yet they remain at variance with the findings of more rigorous studies employing more reliable data sets. Crunching data from the 2002 wave of the National Survey of Family Growth, researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) found that only 2.9 percent of men, ages 15–44, reported engaging in homosexual acts in the previous twelve months, with an even smaller 1.6 percent identifying their intimate acts as exclusively same-sex. Although older, a 1993 report by the Guttmacher Institute suggests an even lower occurrence, finding that only 1 percent of sexually active men, ages 20–39, reported exclusively homosexual encounters in the previous ten years. The NCHS report also fou