Alfred Kinsey was an American biologist and sexologist who founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947. It is now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Alfred Kinsey showed that some long-held taboos like homosexuality, masturbation, and sex before marriage, were actually common.
Between 1938 and his death in 1956, Kinsey and his team of researchers interviewed more than 17,000 people about their sex lives. Their findings were published in two books: “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” in 1948 and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” released five years later. His interview subjects were diverse and included college students, prison inmates and prostitutes.
Kinsey also developed the Kinsey scale, which demonstrated that individuals fall somewhere on a scale between the two extremes of absolute homosexuality and absolute heterosexuality.