Kinsey Institute’s Reinisch Wants to Renew, Expand Sexual Studies : American Sex Habits Changed Since 1948--but Not That Much

June Machover Reinisch was 5 years old when Alfred C. Kinsey, a crew-cut, bow-tied Indiana University zoologist until then known chiefly for his studies of the gall wasp, became a household word with publication of the first “Kinsey Report.”

It was 1948, and when Kinsey removed the plain brown wrapper from S-E-X, America was both shocked and titillated.

Today, those who once knew better words now use four-letter words. X-rated cassettes are shown in the privacy of one’s home. We’ve seen the sexual revolution. But Reinisch, now 43 and director of the institute that bears Kinsey’s name, is here to ask, “What revolution?”

‘Deep, Dark Secret’

“The sexual revolution had very little effect on the average American,” said Reinisch, who was in Los Angeles to attend a professional conference. For most, she contends, sex is still “a deep, dark secret,” a subject on which they are “abysmally ignorant” and one about which they “have a great deal of difficulty” talking.

Sure, there’s Dr. Ruth (Westheimer), TV’s wildly successful 58-year-old guru of sex whose success surprises Reinisch not at all. “Sex,” Reinisch said, “is still, and probably always will be, the most interesting area for most people, whether they are frightened, curious or angry.”

And what are people most anxious about when it comes to sex? Well, Reinisch said, “Impotence is a big problem.” Then there are sexually transmitted diseases, sexual orientation and worries about orgasm, how to achieve it and whether it’s the right kind.

Real Male Concern

Reinisch, whose staccato delivery is in a voice interviewers are fond of calling Joan Rivers-ese, caught a quick breath and added, “And penis size! Penis size is a real American male concern. People are suicidal about it.”

Strange, she said--when women are asked whether they consider it important, “it’s way low on their list,” far below “caringness and pre-intercourse technique” and of less concern than cleanliness. “Clean hair,” Reinisch noted, “is very high on the list.”

Are women equally obsessed with breast size? “Women don’t as easily get unbalanced” about that, Reinisch said. She attributes this in part to the fact that “in general, women today want to be very thin and muscular . . . watching television in Los Angeles is fascinating. Every second advertisement is about a diet.”

Still, she observed, “The vast majority of men would much rather have a round woman, a much more padded woman,” one with wider thighs, more stomach and real hips and sides. She shrugged--”Everything goes in cycles. In the ‘50s we really believed that all men liked immense breasts. There are many men who prefer small-breasted women.”

Her ongoing research has shown her, Reinisch said, that the current American mania for what she calls “the 15-year-old look” in women is not universal--”Europeans tend to be much more accepting of aging. In Europe, caviar and great champagne is a woman over 40.”

Europeans, in general, are more content with their body images, she has found. The average American, asked how he or she feels about his or her body, Reinisch said, thinks “their nose is OK, or their left hip is OK.”

In “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” compiled from interviews with 12,000 subjects representing a cross-section of middle-class America, Kinsey revealed that the overwhelming majority had masturbated (and this in an era, Reinisch noted, when children were taught “to eat graham crackers instead”), that more than one-third had had a post-pubertal homosexual experience to orgasm, at least 10% were homosexual, between 68% and 90%, depending on social class, had engaged in premarital sex and that half admitted to extramarital sexual affairs.

Shocking Report

Five years later, in “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” based on 8,000 interviews, he revealed that 50% of the women had had premarital sex, 2%-3% of women were exclusively lesbian and 26% admitted to extramarital affairs. The latter “was a real shocker in the ‘50s,” Reinisch said. “Everybody thought women only had sex to make babies.”

Today, with Reinisch at the helm, the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research has been renamed the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, both to reflect Reinisch’s broader interests as a scientist and to take advantage of her talents as a promoter and fund-raiser in a political climate in which dollars for sex research are hard to come by.

She was recalling the hullabaloo surrounding publication of the “Kinsey Reports” and the subsequent investigation of institute funding by a House committee that, Reinisch said, “decided that anybody writing about sexuality in America must be part of a communist plot.” Middle America simply was not ready to accept that people were doing things that polite society then rejected as either promiscuous or perverted.

Remember, Reinisch said, “There was no Playboy then, or Penthouse, and it was illegal to bring ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ into the country.” The House investigation prompted the Rockefeller Foundation in 1954 to withdraw institute funding, and two years later Kinsey died at the age of 62 of cardiac failure. Reinisch thinks he died “probably of a broken heart.”

Associate Paul Gebhard, who took over as director, steered the institute on a low-profile course for more than two decades. Then, in 1982, along came Reinisch, a young scientist with impeccable credentials (including seven years of teaching at Rutgers University) and a flair for self-promotion.

She isn’t your ordinary psychologist-researcher. Consider that Reinisch, a fireman’s daughter from Manhattan, walked into a career in science through the back door, having decided to get a master’s at Columbia University to ensure her rise to the executive suite in the record industry.

Informal Surveys

In miniskirt and silver boots, she once sang professionally with a group called the Seagulls and has managed a Greenwich Village nightclub as well as the rock group Sly and the Family Stone. Along the way to her doctorate in psychology at Columbia, she trained dolphins in Florida for the movie “Flipper” and became a skydiver and licensed pilot.

It seems logical that, when the Kinsey Institute made the decision to once again, as Reinisch puts it, “come out of the closet,” they chose June Reinisch as director.

Reinisch knows what makes good copy and she enjoys myth-exploding. One myth: that those erotic videotapes at the neighborhood rental store go home only with lonely perverts. She has done some informal surveys across America--including conservative Bloomington, Ind., home of the Kinsey Institute--and found that one-third of those films are checked out by married couples, “the average, good, voting American couple.”

She thinks that’s perfectly healthy, that “all the evidence we do have suggests sex education does not make people more promiscuous, that the couples with the most information have the best marriages.”

But aren’t those sexually explicit films also available to teen-age customers? “Children have always gotten hold of erotic materials,” she said--pre-Kinsey, Mom and Dad brought Henry Miller books back from Europe and “I don’t see that it really affected anybody of our generation.”

There is no way of knowing what effect such things have on children, she added, because “we (researchers) are not allowed in this culture to ask children questions. We don’t know the etiology of homosexuality because we can’t ask young children. I believe you can’t really protect your child (from sexual abuse) unless you can talk to him about what it is you’re trying to protect him from.”

And when she talks about talking to children about sex, Reinisch said firmly, she means “in plain language,” using those words “so they know what you mean. You can’t use euphemisms.”

She smiled and said, “Americans have some idea if you tell children about it they’ll do it,” but she is convinced that “if you want less teen-age pregnancy, you better have sex education. Too often children are given the values, ethics and morals without the data.”

Adolescent Eye-Opener

An eye-opener for her was a conference at the institute two years ago, when 18 white middle-class adolescents from across the country came to talk about things such as life styles and sexual behavior. All agreed, Reinisch said, that “sex for sex’s sake is a junior high school activity. By high school, it was the relationship that was important.”

Now, if people of the same age and social class were asked today the same questions Kinsey asked 40 years ago, does Reinisch think the answers would be much different? “Most of the things he found are still relatively true today,” she said.

The figures would be higher, she said, for women who are not virgins when they marry, and higher for both sexes on the question of extramarital sex, but her educated guess is that “the difference is not as large as you would think. Today, the average woman only has two sexual partners in her lifetime, in many cases including her husband. With the male, it’s something like six. The average person is not promiscuous at all.”

She would guess that an equal number of men and women would acknowledge having had extramarital affairs, between 30% and 50%, “particularly in the middle class. The middle class is much more flexible than the lower class, and that’s true even as to how many clothes they take off when they make love.”

But she can only speculate, she said, because there are no comprehensive studies. “It’s very hard to get money to study anything sexual,” Reinisch said, “yet it’s what’s on everybody’s minds.” Now, if only there were funds, she said, there could be studies on how AIDS is affecting people’s sex lives. . . .

(The institute, a private nonprofit corporation that gets both private and public funding, takes no political stand; it is neither for nor against abortion, for example.)

Currently, the institute is writing a grant proposal for re-interviewing 1,800 of the original “Kinsey Report” subjects. About 8,000 are still alive, she said, and “their average age would be between 65 and 75.”

(A number of them were from the Los Angeles area and Reinisch would like to hear from them. The address is the Kinsey Institute, Morrison Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., 47405, and the data needed are name, address, telephone, birthdate, year of original interview, affiliation at the time--club, organization, etc.--and city where interviewed. “We’ll get right back to them,” Reinisch promised.)

“We have an increasingly older population,” she said, “yet we have a paucity of information on the sex lives of older people” and these interviews would provide the only data base of its kind.

Another value of re-interviewing the subjects, she said, will be “to find out how their earlier behavior affected later behavior. If they were promiscuous when they were young, were they very conservative when they were older, or vice versa? Did the conservative ones do a life-style turnabout and have seven husbands, for example?”

Then, Reinisch said, “There’s the whole issue of memory. We’re going to be able to ask people what they think they told Kinsey” and make definitive statements about “what kinds of personal data they’re more apt to distort,” if and how they might have exaggerated their sex lives the first time around. This information, she said, will both be of value to doctors who rely on patients’ medical histories and will “help people see themselves more accurately.”

In addition, she said, “We’ll get now-and-then medical records” and will be able to determine, for example, how blood pressure and arthritis medications “have idiosyncratic effects on sexuality,” perhaps creating impotency or diminished desire. “People don’t talk about this to their doctors because it’s embarrassing.”

Effect of Sex on Longevity

Finally, Reinisch said, researchers will be able to tell whether sexual activity is linked to depression in older people and, “How does sex life affect longevity? It’s certainly possible that satisfaction with one’s sex life is related to longevity.”

As director of the Kinsey Institute, Reinisch heads the research begun by Alfred C. Kinsey in 1938 when the university’s Assn. of Women Students petitioned the university to inaugurate a course for students who were married or planning marriage; Kinsey was asked to coordinate the course and, appalled at how little data was available, began interviewing his students and colleagues. Soon, his 5-million-specimen gall wasp collection became second fiddle.

Reinisch, as director, is also keeper of the world’s largest collection of materials related to sex, some dating from 3200 BC. These include a 63,000-volume library, trinkets of the fun-shop variety, phallic statues from Africa, ancient Chinese scrolls, a 19th-Century chastity belt from Europe and diaries donated with the stipulation that they are to be kept sealed until 50 years after the deaths of the donors’ children.

Where Kinsey studied acquired behaviors, Reinisch as a psychobiologist is intrigued with the role played by nature in development of gender and personality. The research focus at the institute has shifted to biomedical topics--reproduction, menopause, fertility. For 16 years Reinisch has been doing animal research on whether drugs and hormones taken by women during pregnancy have long-term effects, both psychological and physical, on their children.

She has concluded that leader ship traits and predisposition to homosexuality may be shaped by hormones to which the unborn is exposed. Another finding is that prednisone, a hormone commonly prescribed for relieving allergies and arthritis, reduces birth weight in some babies, that consumption of progestins by the mother is sometimes linked to more aggressive than normal behavior in male children.

Reinisch contends that males are more susceptible to alterations in the pre-birth environment as a result of drugs or hormones and that these alterations may influence handedness and immune problems. Her research has shown that barbiturates (sedatives taken by more than 20 million mothers between 1950 and 1975) might cause learning disabilities, decreased I.Q. and increased psychosocial maladjustment in their children.

“Even small changes in the prenatal environment can have significant impact on the whole rest of the individual’s life,” she maintains. “We are flavored by our prenatal chemical development. A woman, and her husband, have to be very, very, very careful as to what they take into their bodies. Women say, ‘Well, I drank and my kid is fine.’ I say, ‘You may have lost an Einstein, a Paul McCartney.’ ”

(Reinisch, who is divorced and planning to marry a colleague, psychologist Leonard Rosenblum, does not have a biological child but legally adopted Karen, now 24, when Karen was 21 and chose to live with Reinisch instead of with her parents.)

Study of Reproductive Cycles

Also under way at the institute is a research project on reproductive cycles, one aspect of which is the examination of social and physiological aspects of “menstrual synchrony,” the observation that, among women who spend a great deal of time together, menstrual periods of some shift so that the periods of all begin to coincide.

This is, Reinisch said, “very common” and there is evidence that a pheromone, a natural chemical released in perspiration and transmitted in the air, may be responsible. When the essence of this chemical was applied to the skin of a study group of women, she said, within four months all began cycling within three days of one another.

The questions raised, she said, include, “Who are the leaders? Who are the followers? Is ovulation affected by this?” What are the factors that determine an individual woman’s propensity to set the menstrual pattern or, conversely, to follow another woman’s pattern?

How does menstrual synchrony affect an individual woman’s fertility?

Reinisch wants to learn more, too, about pheromones released by males and why, as the research has shown, sleeping in the same bed with a man (without sexual activity) makes a woman more apt to ovulate. And why does essence of the male chemical, applied under the noses of female subjects with irregular menstrual periods, regularize the periods of the majority?

And what does it all mean? Reinisch’s mind was racing ahead to better living through chemistry--natural chemistry. Maybe these pheromones will be the basis “for new contraceptives, new fertility drugs,” she said. “You don’t take pills, you sniff things. It would be less intrusive, much more the way nature intended. . . . “