Taking notes, I’ve come to realize, is a form of collecting. I’ve never been interested in collecting physical things, but when it comes to beautiful literary quotes, I have thousands of notebook entries. Over the past twenty years, I’ve seen nearly a thousand individual notebooks in archives across the US and UK. So, when I saw Kinsey’s notes, I recognized another collector—even though the material we collect is quite different.
Alfred Kinsey fundamentally changed how we think about sex. In the 1940s and 1950s, Kinsey and his team collected histories from over 18,000 Americans to learn what goes on behind closed doors.
I’m still shocked that he was able to gather so much personal information in the ‘40s and ‘50s—a time that definitely isn’t known for progressive views on sex. I’ve always wondered how Kinsey took notes on such a taboo topic. He needed to find a way to ensure secrecy, otherwise he’d struggle to find participants. This problem led to an innovative note-taking approach, which I’ll explore below. But what surprised me even more was how Kinsey came to study human sexuality in the first place. Before he became a pioneer in the field of sexology, Alfred Kinsey studied insects—gall wasps to be specific.
Kinsey’s Insect Notes
Kinsey earned his Ph.D. in entomology (the study of insects) at Harvard and then worked as a Zoology professor at Indiana University. For his research, Kinsey traveled across the United States and Mexico to collect over five million gall wasps—most of them now reside at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Gall wasps get their name from the “galls” on plants that protect their eggs.
Galls come in a remarkable array of shapes and sizes. Here, Kinsey examines his collection of gall wasps, including the “largest known gall”:
Kinsey’s collection of gall wasps grew, and with it, his notes documenting the size of every single part of every insect he collected.
Kinsey’s methods as a sex-researcher were forged with his entomological research. Studying wasps, he learned that the key to biological discovery is in large sample sizes—in collecting as much information as possible, and then charting individual variation. Even Kinsey recognized his scientific practice as a form of collecting:
Most of us like to collect things…Taxonomists aren’t so different from the rest of you who do a little collecting.1
You can learn more about Kinsey’s work with gall wasps and the remarkable collection he amassed in this six-minute video:
As we know, Kinsey didn’t make his name on gall-wasp research. Soon, he would apply his methodical data-collection techniques to human sexuality. After all, Kinsey wondered, why should we know so much more about the mating habits of wasps than we do about our own species.
Kinsey’s “Reproductive Anatomy and Physiology” Notes
Kinsey grew up in a religious home where sex was a taboo subject. When he married Clara, he was embarrassed by how uninformed the two of them were. Eventually, Kinsey began having conversations with his friends and students about their sex lives. He wondered how he could apply his scientific training to human sexuality.
For this reason, he jumped at the chance to inaugurate Indiana University’s course on “Marriage and Family”—for married students and seniors. Kinsey would deliver lectures on “reproductive anatomy and physiology.” In 1938, Kinsey told his students:
Tonight we begin the series of lectures on the biological aspects of marriage…
He notes that conferences between professors and students are “confidential and inaccessible to the administration of the University.” Kinsey encourages students to get in line to discuss the course material (and their own sex lives after class):
May I further urge that you take advantage of the line at the end of the hour to continue the discussions…
The course proved extremely popular. Students declared that Kinsey’s lectures were “very interesting and very necessary.”2 Finally, Kinsey had a captive pool of subjects; he began to assemble a research team.
Kinsey’s Code
Kinsey’s sexology work was based on interviews comprised of hundreds of questions. He published all the items covered in the sex histories in Sexual Behavior of the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953). Many of these questions apply just to women or to men, so Kinsey and his colleagues skipped those that weren’t applicable to the subject. Here are some of them:
To comfort his interview subjects, Kinsey came up with a code to enter data. Here, he borrowed symbols he had used while documenting gall wasps, as well as mathematical signs ( ± , —, X,✓, 0,✓✓).3 Then, Kinsey hired a cryptographer to make his code even more robust.
Here’s how it worked: each square is assigned a question and the interviewer writes the subject’s answer in code. And every question, as Kinsey explains, “has its own system of symbols, its own independent code.”4 If you visited Kinsey’s laboratory, he might have shown you the following sheet, which contains the entire sexual history of a single, 35-year-old woman:
I couldn’t figure out most of these answers. Can you crack Kinsey’s code?
With this form, Kinsey and his colleagues were able to collect around 521 points of information on each subject.5 And here is the man himself, illustrating how he took down histories while maintaining eye-contact. Kinsey knew it was important that subjects never felt judged by the interviewer.
Kinsey and his colleagues collected so many histories, it was nearly impossible to catalogue all the information by hand. Luckily, there were new, cutting edge machines available—this will be the topic of the postscript.
Kinsey’s research was immediately controversial, but it demonstrated that human sexuality is wildly diverse and certainly worthy of academic study. The Kinsey Institute remains very active—even as its funding is called into question. You can learn more about 21st-century sexology here.
Notes on Kinsey’s Notes
Think of your notes as a collection: we can learn a lot about ourselves by examining what kinds of information we decide to collect in our notes. Often, our notes reveal central preoccupations and concerns in our lives.
Gather data: whatever you’re interested in, there’s data for it. Be like Kinsey and gather as much as you possibly can (within reason). There’s a lot to learn from the search.
Borrow symbols from another field: I love how Kinsey was able to take symbols from mathematics to encode Americans’ sexual histories. Do this, and then create your own secret code for your private notes.
Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.
Till Monday,
P.S. Paid subscribers, look out for more on Kinsey later this week!
Kinsey, Alfred Charles. An Introduction to Biology. J.B. Lippincott, 1926.
Jones, James H., Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, p. 342
Kinsey, Alfred C., et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male: Anniversary Edition. Indiana University Press, 2023., p. 73.
Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 72.
Drucker, Donna J. The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, p. 114.
Another cool look at someone's notes! For some reason, this post reminded of something I've long known, that people with ADHD (me! 👋) often leave things in piles because it helps them remember. But, I recently read that some researchers believe that people with ADHD also think in stacks or piles. I happened to be looking through some of my notebooks right after reading that article and I realized I take notes in "piles". I love Noted because it feels like it opens up other people's brains so I can see a little about how they think!
Oh I’m so glad you took a look at Kinsey’s notes. I went to IU to his Institute, decades ago, but with a lot of access and I think the number one thing that hit me was his NOTES, the variety of intensity of his note taking. For some reason they let me touch examine everything — it was a period when they were neglected, the institute. Unforgettable.