Their Kinsey numbers usually differed by the second interview, sometimes radically. In Sexual Fluidity by Lisa Diamond, she explores the studies that asked 50 different bisexual men and women in San Francisco about their orientation in the 1980s - twice, five years apart. To him, a number didn't stick for life: it was a temporary measure of your current feelings, designed to clarify things.Īs we've begun to understand more about the possible fluidity of sexual identity, we've uncovered more evidence that a number doesn't define you permanently. Kinsey was entirely on board with the idea that your position on the scale could shift it was an integral part of his thesis that your "number" could change as your sexuality developed, and that you could move up and down the board like a checker piece over your life. There Are Other, More Complex Sexuality Scales And are feelings of sexual attraction to a particular person necessary to determine an identity? If a gay person never meets a person of the same gender to lust over, are they still gay? (This is the "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody on the Kinsey Scale hears it" argument.) And asexuality? On Kinsey's scale it simply doesn't exist, which is definitely problematic. It's also, as Patrick Richards Fink pointed out in the Huffington Post, a bit alienating: It depicts bisexuality as half-and-half, not a discrete identity on its own. This is a problem for some people, particularly some sexual theorists who say that the "technical definition" of bisexuality on the Kinsey Scale - a 3, equally attracted both ways - doesn't encompass the complexity of bisexual experience and invalidates people who feel more like 2s or 5s but still identify as bi. The Kinsey Scale is, fundamentally, based on how many times in your life you feel or act in a sexual way towards one gender or another. The Scale's Treatment Of Bisexuality And Asexuality Has Come Under Fire How do you define "predominantly," "incidentally," and "more than incidentally"? Importantly, Kinsey took into account both behavior and feelings of attraction to determine your "Kinsey number," so being attracted to members of the same sex still counted, even if you were in a monogamous straight relationship and never acted on the flirtation. Note that there's a lot of wiggle room here. Here are the categories of Kinsey's scale, in the official terminology:Ġ- Exclusively heterosexual with no homosexualġ- Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexualĢ- Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexualĤ- Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexualĥ- Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
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The Kinsey Institute, which aims to continue Kinsey's research into human sexuality, has the entire spectrum in full on its website. So if nothing else, consider this an important history lesson. But it's been one of the basics of queer identity since the '50s. You aren't meant to come away from this guide thinking that the Kinsey is the only option for self-definition if anything, questioning it is a pretty valid way of determining how you feel about sexual identity, fluidity, attraction, and experience. But many of us still do - and the Kinsey is a neat way to outline it simply. But the main thrust of it is that humans don't really fit into categories like "straight" or "gay" - which you wouldn't think we'd need to have explained at this point. Rather, Kinsey positioned people on the seven-point scale - where a rating of 0 meant that you were "exclusively heterosexual" and a rating of 6 meant that you were "exclusively homosexual" - based on hours of interviews. Not shabby for something you can sketch out on the back of a bar napkin.įirst things first: The Kinsey Scale is not an actual test. You could even call it one of the most significant ideas in the history of human sexuality. The Kinsey Scale - an early method of describing the spectrum of human sexuality, created by pioneering sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey - may not be the most accurate tool we have to define our sexuality, but it's certainly been one of the most historically influential. If the mention caught you off-guard (and led you to sneakily google it when you thought your opponent wasn't looking), consider this your guide. If you've ever gotten into an argument with someone about sexual orientation, chances are that one of you eventually brought up the Kinsey Scale.
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