QI The Book of the Dead

Alfred’s aunt was turned out of the family home for playing the piano on the Sabbath. Suspecting his neighbours of lax moral standards, Alfred’s father used his son as bait to see if shopkeepers would sell cigarettes to a minor. All references to sex were taboo, no adult was ever seen naked in the house, and Alfred was banned from seeing girls.
    Kinsey finally escaped to study biology (against his father’s wishes). For the first twenty years of his scientific career there was nothing to suggest that this polite, shy man was going to unleasha sexual revolution. Instead, he forged a reputation as the world’s foremost expert on North American gall wasps. After earning a doctorate from Harvard, he travelled across the USA collecting 300,000 wasps from thirty-six states and posting them back to Boston. Many of these hatched before he got back, causing chaos in the postal service. Kinsey took twenty-six individual measurements on every single wasp, enabling him to identify seventy new species unknown to science. He always did everything obsessively – he collected irises and planted more than 250 species in his garden; he plaited home-made rugs twice as thick as anyone else’s; even as a Boy Scout he had amassed seven years’ worth of merit badges in just two. His talent for extreme detail and meticulous research stood him in good stead when he began to tire of wasps and take an interest in human beings.
    Kinsey followed up his study of male sexual behaviour with Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953), which was also an immediate best-seller. Having grown up in a family where nudity was anathema and sex never mentioned, Kinsey realised many of his undergraduate students were as ill informed about their sexual needs as he was. He also came to see that repressed sexual urges were psychologically damaging. As in everything else he did, Kinsey’s attention to his subject was all-consuming. He regularly worked sixteen hours a day, which prompted his wife to remark drily: ‘I hardly ever see Alfred at night any more, now that he’s taken up sex.’
    Kinsey’s crusade to rid the world of sexual ignorance started in his own bedroom. His marriage to Clara McMillen – always known as ‘Mac’ – in 1921 wasn’t consummated for several months. This may have had something to do with his unusually large penis and her short stature, but they hardly gave themselvesthe best start. For their honeymoon they went on a gruelling climbing expedition and their first attempts at sex were on a mountainside in the middle of a storm. The gradual release of personal documents by the Kinsey Institute means we now know that the Kinseys’ marriage and sex life was liberated in a way that H. G. Wells could only dream of. They loved nudism and took their clothes off whenever they decently could. They operated a system of interacting open marriages with colleagues at the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, which Kinsey had founded in 1947. He had casual affairs with many of his colleagues, male and female. Lots of his staff had affairs with Clara. During a research trip to Chicago, he was delighted to find an outlet for his homosexual urges, and frequently went cottaging among the gay community there. Kinsey was particularly keen to get the man-on-man taboo out in the open and when one of his assistants confessed that he had no experience of homosexuality, Kinsey said he could personally help him ‘tick that box’.
    He also experimented with masochism, inserting objects into his urethra while masturbating, enjoying the pleasure and the pain equally. As this organ became less sensitive over the years, he started putting larger and larger things up it. By 1949 he was able to insert pencils into his penis and even a toothbrush, bristles first. He also tried self-piercing, which culminated with him successfully circumcising himself with a penknife in the bath. Kinsey was proud to call himself ‘unshockable’. As he was keen to drill into his researchers, the key thing was gathering data: ‘We are the recorders and reporters of facts – not the judges of the behaviours we describe.’ The results were often controversial; he reported that almost half of American men hadhad a homosexual experience, that almost half of married men had committed adultery and that a quarter of married women found their sex life unsatisfactory.
    To Kinsey anything was ‘biologically normal’ provided it was performed by a