How effective has the use of machine technology been as a method for understanding human sexuality?

By Natasha Brake, Third Year History Student

In post war America there was an increase in researching human sexuality, especially from different perspectives, such as public health and psychiatry. This was accompanied by the use of machine technology in this research. Alfred Kinsey used punch cards to process large amounts of data, in a move from qualitative to quantitative scientific research. Through his 18,000 interviews he is seen to have led the way in sex research, using advanced technology and a relatively open mindset. In hindsight, his utilisiation of technology is flawed, as while punch cards were a leading technology at the time, the system took a number of days to generate results. Moreover, the interviews Kinsey had to take for the punch cards tried to standardise sexuality, a wholly personal and varied topic. While Kinsey’s two major volumes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) were based on data from punch card technology, Donna Drucker argues this is largely ignored in historiography. Other researchers used machine technology to understand human sexuality in different ways. For example, the use of the penile strain gauge and vaginal photoplethysmograph, and the work of researchers such as Masters, Johnson and Bancroft. There are benefits and limitations of using machine technology to understand the physiology and psychology of human sexuality. Masters and Johnson’s 1966 report Human Sexual Response painstakingly details the human physiological sexual response as a result of a number of “experiments” and a wide use of technology. Overall, in reference to Kinsey’s research, machine technology was a force for good, but always had its own technological capacity and the prejudices of the researchers built into it.

Kinsey fits into the shift amongst researchers towards quantitative analysis to support qualitative evidence in the US, away from the previous case study format. This was conducted by physicians or psychiatrists on their patients, or small-scale research into marginal groups, such as prison populations. This created specific and often extreme examples that were not thought to represent the norm. Other quantitative sex studies were conducted before and during the time of Kinsey’s work, such as the work done by Gilbert V. Hamilton, but Kinsey’s studies are considered the most extensive and public. Winkler argues that through quantitative research, Kinsey’s findings were more justified. For example, showing how widespread homosexuality and pre-marital affairs for women were. Kinsey’s findings would have been harder to defend if it weren’t for the large sample sizes that claimed to speak for “average” America. Kinsey’s work was able to find conclusions that went against social norms and to be justified as the punch card system allowed Kinsey to draw conclusions from mass amounts of data. Despite criticisms of his interview methods and his attempts to standardise sexuality, Machine technology, in this instance, is effective because it allowed Kinsey to analyse lots of data and justify his conclusions as a result of quantitative research.

Machine technology was also advanced for the time; the punch card system, is seen as an early computer. A normal interview took between 90 minutes and 2 hours for Kinsey or a trained interviewer and typically around 300 questions were asked. Drucker argues that the punch card system could be used effectively for “two or three element analysis”. It was easy for Kinsey to collate and compare data. Kinsey stated “I had despaired of ever analysing these formulae by hand techniques. The machine will do it at the rate of 400 cards per minute. This new equipment is a godsend to our particular problem.” Despite this, it remained limited. The shortest time it took to punch a history card was eighty minutes, reached in 1942, this meant that 18,000 histories took 24,000 hours to complete. The was combined with limitations on what data could be analysed. However, these machines were ahead of their time in scientific research as they increased the scale of work. The vaginal photoplethysmograph was used by Masters and Johnson in the 60’s and 70’s and it is still used today, as an important factor in the way scientists measure female sexual response. However, this could be due to a lack of advancement in technologies to study this field.

When using machine technology to further understand human sexuality data reliability must be considered. The interviews were translated through both the interviewee and interviewer, influencing the sources through two pre-existing perspectives. Arguably the questions asked, though open ended, would influence the answers given through the way they were phrased, also known as a leading question. To justify his data, Kinsey used “ultimate groups” to limit the over or underrepresentation of groups in his work. Ultimate groups were non-random and diverse, meaning they could come from an even spread of backgrounds and give a better indication of the whole population. This prevented overrepresentation which would undermine the legitimacy of the data. Smaller, more balanced groups were more representative of the population as a whole. Therefore, making the results, which seek to provide insight into the sexuality of the “average” American, more accurate. This is a purely human element of the studies, based on the background of the interviewees and does not alter the effectiveness of machine technology. Peter Galison argues “machines are not neutral” as the scientists who invented and used these machines included their own biases. Thus, technology also reflects the prejudices of those who built it. Additionally, machines cannot correct problems in data: they are only as effective as the data they receive. Overall, there are imbalances in Kinsey’s data, the effects of which he tried to limit by using ultimate groups. Machine technology could not further or improve this aspect of his research.

A further factor to consider is the divergence between the male and female volumes. Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female differs greatly in its structure and focus to Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Following increased interaction with a range of experts after publishing the male volume, the female volume is less interview based. Female data was less uniform than the male data and could not be organised easily. The differences between the male and female data were immediate. In the male data, class and education level were seen as key and recurring factors in determining aspects of sexual experiences. Overall, in regard to this diverge in data, this cannot be a fault of the technology which proved effective allowing Kinsey to analyse data on this scale.

A common theme in the use of machine technology, is increased depersonalisation. This appears in both criticisms and praise of Kinsey’s work. Some scholars argue that punch cards and the machines used to sort them became “symbols of depersonalisation and alienation”. Machines create distance between the scientist and those being studied. However, Galison argues machines are an extension of the inventor and have the prejudices of users ingrained into their functions. Potentially this lack of separation between scientists and their machines means that machine technology in sex research does not increase depersonalisation. Interviewers recording and sorting participant histories before reducing them to anonymous sheets of card was criticised as being impersonal by removing the emotional element of understanding sexuality. Sexuality is subjective and deeply personal and therefore difficult to analyse accurately if rigorous standardisation is applied. Thus, the use of machine technology is detrimental through attempts to standardise and separate aspects of human nature. Alternatively, the depersonalisation afforded by machine technology, particularly in Kinsey’s case, is effective in legitimising research. Creating a distance between researchers and participants produced less subjective data, increasing reliability. However, Galison would argue that machines contain the same prejudices in them that the researchers who created them. For example, Kinsey’s questions and punch card answers contained preconceptions that when processed by the punch card machine to analyse data, remained. Depersonalisation, in regard to other practises of measuring human sexual response, is equally difficult to achieve, but also increases legitimacy. Instead of discussing sexual activity, researchers would observe and record using technology. This use of technology may have made their work seem illegitimate in Cold War era, morality obsessed, conservative America. Given the intimate nature of the research, depersonalisation is difficult to achieve in research of human sexuality.

Through the work of Alfred Kinsey, the use machine technology to understand human sexuality had both successes and detriments. It was possible to generate and analyse more data to validate a quantitative approach, and depersonalisation potentially legitimises results. Despite this, machines may have the same prejudices as their users and the results produced are only as reliable as the data entered. The limitations of machine technology are tied to the limitations of the scientific field and researchers, not on what they can achieve themselves. On balance, Kinsey was able scale up his work to justify his conclusions by producing averages for large sample sizes. Therefore, machine technology is effective as a method to understand human sexuality, but it is not perfect, and a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative data is necessary to get more accurate and widely applicable results.

Bibliography

Primary Readings

Goolker, Paul., ALFRED C. KINSEY, W. B. POMEROY and S.E. MARTIN: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29, (1948), 182-3.

Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardel B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1948).

Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardel B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1953).

Kinsey, Alfred., to Glenn.V. Ramsey, 16 February 1941, folder 1, Ramsey File, Kinsey Correspondence Collection, KIA.

Masters, William H. and Johnson, Virginia E., Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).

Secondary Readings

Allen, Judith A., The Kinsey Institute: The First Seventy Years (Bloomington, IN: Well House Books, 2017).

Bullough, V. L., ‘American Physicians and Sex Research and Expertise, 1900-1990’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 52.2, (1997), 236-257, in <https://academic-oup-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/jhmas/article/52/2/236/899358> [accessed 12 April 2020].

Drucker, Donna J., The Machines of Sex Research: Technology and the Politics of Identity, 1945-1985 (Springer, 2013) in < https://link-springer-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/book/10.1007%2F978-94-007-7064-5> [accessed 22 April 2020].

Drucker, Donna J., The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organisation of Knowledge (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), p.1-13 in <https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bristol/detail.action?docID=2041620> [accessed 30 March 2020].

Drucker, Donna J., ‘Keying Desire: Alfred Kinsey’s Use of Punched-Card Machines for Sex Research’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 22.1 (2013), 105-125, in <https://www.utexaspressjournals.org/doi/10.7560/JHS22105> [accessed 8 April 2020].

Galison Peter., ‘How Experiments End’, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 39.3, (1987), 411-14.

Reumann, Miriam G., American Sexual Character Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2005), p.1-16.

Weber, Brenda R., ‘TALKING SEX, TALKING KINSEY, Discursive Bodies and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female’, Australian Feminist Studies, 25.64, (2010), 189-98, in <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164641003762487?needAccess=true&instName=University+of+Bristol> [accessed 13 April 2020].

Winkler, Karen., ‘Kinsey, Sex Research, and the Body of Knowledge: Let’s Talk About Sex’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 33.3/4, (2005), 285-313, in Gender and Culture in the 1950s <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40004429?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents> [accessed 9 April].

Cover Photo Credit: Marcus Winkler on Unsplash

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