Concept

Kinsey scale

Résumé
The Kinsey scale, also called the Heterosexual–Homosexual Rating Scale, is used in research to describe a person's sexual orientation based on one's experience or response at a given time. The scale typically ranges from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual, to a 6, meaning exclusively homosexual. In both the male and female volumes of the Kinsey Reports, an additional grade, listed as "X", indicated "no socio-sexual contacts or reactions" (asexuality). The reports were first published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and others, and were also prominent in the complementary work Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Alfred Kinsey, the creator of the Kinsey scale, is known as "the father of the sexual revolution." The Kinsey scale was created in order to demonstrate that sexuality does not fit into two strict categories: homosexual and heterosexual. Instead, Kinsey believed that sexuality is fluid and subject to change over time. Rather than using sociocultural labels, Kinsey primarily used assessments of behavior in order to rate individuals on the scale. Kinsey's first rating scale had thirty categories that represented thirty different case studies, but his final scale has only seven categories. Over 8,000 interviews were conducted throughout his research. Introducing the scale, Kinsey wrote: 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. 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. [...
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