Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published six years after the Male Report, in 1953, was an impressive volume, with 179 tables and 155 figures in its 842 pages. It reported that many American girls and women were far more sexually active than previously thought. Nearly half were said to have had sexual intercourse before marriage. More than 1 in 4, twenty-six percent, were said to have had extramarital intercourse. Nearly 4% were reported as having had sex with an animal.

In this Female Report, Kinsey presented himself as a defender of marriage. He argued that his data showed that women who had premarital sex made better adjustments in marriage than those who were abstinent. Women who made the best sexual adjustments in marriage were those who had started exploring their sexuality at an early age. With sober concern, he advised that such trial and error should begin early in life–“such learning is most effective in the early years, when inhibitions have not yet developed and have not yet become too firmly fixed. Kinsey further warned that the more devoutly religious a woman was, the more likely she was to experience difficulties with her sex life, both before and after marriage.

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Chapter 6

Kinsey also sought to downplay the impact of adult-child sex. He reported that sexual contacts between children and adults who were not family members “often involved considerable affection. He suggested that “if a child were not culturally conditioned, it is doubtful if it would be disturbed by sexual approaches of the sort which had usually been involved in these histories.”

The truth is just the reverse. A close look at the Female Report indicates that Kinsey knew this, but reported the opposite. In the Female Report Kinsey explains that he excluded females who had served prison sentences for such offenses as prostitution and illegal drug use because the “higher incidence of (their) pre-adolescent (sexual) contacts with adults…would have seriously distorted the calculations on the total sample.”