Reply #45: Kinsey Scale

[Pacifist Patriot]

Kinsey's original work is rather dated and the methodology flawed in many ways, but some of his general theories are still accepted today. Not bad movie with Liam Neeson as Kinsey. ;)


The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University promotes interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the fields of human sexuality, gender, and reproduction. The Institute was founded in 1947, just before the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. Today the Institute investigates sexual behavior and sexual health, and carries out its mission through:

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Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects, (p 639).

While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history... An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life.... A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist, (pp. 639, 656)
Kinsey, et al. (1948). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.


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Kinsey Scale

0- Exclusively heterosexual with no homosexual
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