1472 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



capacities of the older child, the reinforced 

 sexuality of the adolescent, the slowly di- 

 minishing sexuality of the male, and the 

 discontinuous zest of the premenopausal and 

 postmenopausal female manifest them- 

 selves. It may be expected that detailed 

 studies of the first years of life will reveal 

 the particular mechanisms by which indi- 

 viduals in a given society are prepared for 

 the sexual roles held appropriate by that 

 society and will throw light on the differ- 

 ential efficiency of these various learning 

 sequences. 



VIII. The Study of Sex Behavior in 

 Complex Modern Societies 



There are a number of serious diffi- 

 culties about the study of sex behavior in 

 the United States at the present time. The 

 behavior is diversified by class, ethnic 

 group, region, and various special versions 

 of the culture characteristic of religious 

 groups, occupational groups, areas of cities, 

 etc. A national sample does not necessarily 

 allow for any of these variations in a way 

 which provides enough background for esti- 

 mating the cultural factor in the behavior of 

 any given individual. National samples such 

 as those used by Kinsey, Pomeroy and 

 Martin (1948 L and Kinsey, Pomeroy, Mar- 

 tin and Gebhard (1953) were constructed 

 like Gallup polls, with a very few variables 

 — class, age, sex — although the mere listing 

 of the variables which they took into ac- 

 count is impressive. To take only two of 

 the categories which they list (page o» 

 ''Whites, Negroes, other races," "various 

 degrees of adherence to religious groups, or 

 with no religion," the amount of variety 

 which is subsumed under these phrasings is 

 enormous. Yet, their aim was to build a 

 national picture from these samples, so that 

 the picture of American behavior, called the 

 behavior of the human male and human fe- 

 male, was expected to have representa- 

 tiveness in the end. What we do find is that 

 with the aid of the kind of sample they 

 built they got substantially the same picture 

 obtained by Hohman and Schaffner (1947) 

 from their very much more cursory ques- 

 tioning about sex behavior, based on psy- 

 chiatric screening for the draft in World 

 War II. Their statistics, furthermore, agree 

 verv well with materials collected in North- 



ern Europe (Undeutsch, 1955) . We may well 

 say that their data are reliable, in that an- 

 other sample, constructed the same way, 

 within the same narrow range of time, would 

 give answers of the same general type, e.g., 

 lower class behavior would show the same 

 sort of contrast with middle and lower- 

 class-upward-mobile behavior, the lower 

 class seeking immediate complete satis- 

 faction early, the middle and the lower-up- 

 ward-mobile classes relying more on various 

 substitutive and delaying techniciues rather 

 than full consummation. 



The second complication is the question 

 of historic period. All the available studies 

 of the polling type — and, although Kinsey's 

 interviews were complex and intricate, the 

 assumptions back of them were still of the 

 polling type, i.e., that 100 cases would stand 

 for many thousands — emphasize that the re- 

 sponses change very rapidly in a country 

 like the United States; behavior approved 

 one year may be disapproved the next, and 

 a large part of the adult population shifts 

 its views accordingly. Kinsey's practice of 

 using the memory of a 50-year-old man of 

 what he did at 15, and the replies of a 16- 

 year-old boy of what he did at 15, makes 

 no allowance for the changes in attitudes 

 and values and the differential types of 

 retrospective falsifications which are likely 

 to occur — which makes the lumping of 

 these sets of replies together inadmissible. 

 The inadmissibility cannot be tested by 

 simple statistical means; the results are un- 

 doubtedly reliable and adding 1000 more 

 50-year-old men and questioning them 

 about their adolescent sex activities will not 

 change the picture. They are quite reliable, 

 but they may not, and in all probability do 

 not, give an accurate picture of the past, 

 but rather a picture of how 50-year-old men, 

 living in the period of Kinsey's interviewing, 

 would combine present-day standards and 

 values, the experience of their own younger 

 contemporaries and their children, into a 

 stable and systematic but objectively false 

 image of their own pasts. 



With the tremendously rapid changes 

 that are taking place, data for a national 

 sample should be collected within a few 

 months, and retrospective reports should 

 be treated separately from reports on re- 

 cent experience. There are a number of other 



