Hurts So Good by Leigh Cowart

Author:Leigh Cowart [Cowart, Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Over and over again we see this trend of inquisitive academics casting light on masochism and human sexuality, followed by the inevitable public backlash. In 1893, the well-starched British Medical Journal said of Psychopathia Sexualis, “We have questioned whether it should have been translated into English at all.” Sacher-Masoch’s literary fame crumbled after being featured in Krafft-Ebing’s opus, despite Herr Doktor’s assertion that “the number of cases of undoubted masochism thus far observed is very large.” But neither figure managed to inspire adoration and outrage quite like an American entomologist in the late 1940s. The world is indeed a curious place, and that a gall wasp researcher from Hoboken would find himself in this chapter is proof of it. The researcher was Alfred Kinsey, and in 1948 he didn’t just upset the applecart, he set the applecart on fire and fucked on top of it while it burned.

At the time, Victorian social mores were being buffeted violently by social changes and new technologies, but the puritanical streak in the United States is as wide and deep as a mighty river. Son of a maniacally devout Methodist father, Kinsey felt this in his bones. He was born in 1894, just one year before Sacher-Masoch died. (I was shocked by this realization. They seemed to be so far apart in time, worlds apart. Sacher-Masoch wore cravats and rode horseback; Kinsey gave interviews on television.) Like Sacher-Masoch, Kinsey was a gifted and hardworking student who refused his father’s career guidance. Instead of pursuing engineering, he followed his heart into the wilds of biology, where he excelled. He brought a methodical rigor to his work that would earn him great respect, first at Bowdoin College and then at Harvard’s Bussey Institute, where he took up his study of gall wasps.

Young Kinsey spent years collecting, measuring, and recording hundreds of thousands of specimens. All by hand, bent over his workstations. Hundreds of thousands. Imagine that. Krafft-Ebing would have been impressed. Both scientists contributed to their fields possibly even more through their methodology than the information they gathered. No self-respecting entomologist could spend that much time with a species and not think, extensively, about its mating practices. Kinsey and some colleagues at Indiana University, where he went on to teach, began to wonder why the same kind of scientific inquiries and methods were not being applied to the human species.

In 1938, Kinsey got his shot at tackling this issue when he was offered the job teaching a class on family and marriage. The class was formed in response to a petition made by the students themselves. The poor kids were drowning in a sea of ignorance about their bodies, sex, sexual health, and procreation. People at the time believed that masturbation caused impotence or, even more fancifully, pregnancy. There was no internet or Planned Parenthood for them to turn to. The curriculum of the day consisted of abstinence education and a book entitled Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, which, needless to say, didn’t offer much advice on having a zesty sex life.

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