heterosexuals, not adverse to bragging about private infidelities, resented his exposure of them as a class, but resented more his revelation of the astonishing generality of homosexual practices. Counting masturbation and other alleged "abnormal' acts, he showed 95% of American males classed by some codes as "criminal perverts."

As Kinsey's detractors noted, inverts can and do take comfort in these figures. In his pamphlet, CONCEPTS OF NORMALITY AND ABNORMALITY IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, Kinsey argued that, precisely because law and custom castigate homosexual acts as "unnatural" or "crimes against nature" (rather than as being harmful -normal basis for classing acts as criminal) the biologist has the duty to investigate to determine if such acts are indeed unnatural. The bias, he shows, has no basis in nature. Churches and other judges operating from hidden wellsprings of arcane knowledge, may continue to debate whether such acts can be called right or wrong, but only science can judge if they are "natural." In speeches Kinsey challenged antiquated sex laws as an unnecessary danger. He was much responsible for the American Law Institute's recent recommendation that laws on sodomy be revoked.

Recall the first reactions to the book in 1948. Here was the first thorough, scientific study of sex behavior in which conclusions grew out of research, not preceeding it as with the theories that Freudians offer as causal explanation. Here was a work unmarred by the prissy Victorian reservations that enervated some older studies. After Kinsey, it is less easy for rational men to pay lip service to arbitrary, impractical and unscientific sex norms merely because they are traditional.

His critics have been many and loud and not always entirely honest. LIFE called his work "an assault on the family as a basic unit of society, a negation of moral law, a celebration of licentiousness. Some urged a law against such studies. Barnard College's president felt the reports might have a demoralizing effect on youth. Many authorities attacked his statis-

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