Bullough (1994a) describes pre-Kinsey American sex research on people as taking two forms: “moralistic” research and “fact-finding” research. In the first category he puts proponents as well as opponents of the move-
merits for legal, educational, and public health reform who sought infer- mation about sexual practices (especially socially disapproved practices such as contact with prostitutes or masturbation) to support their political positions. By contrast, Bullough praises the development of quantitative survey studies because they are “increasingly free of the type of moralizing present in the earlier ones” (1994a, p. 318). This is an important element in the preference for so called rigorous methods by sex researchers.
But even virtuous aims couldn’t prevent an aura of disrepute from surrounding sex research. There was a moral pollution associated with public writing about sex that is hard for us at the end of this century to fully appreciate, but that dates from the same ultraprudish period that saw naked piano legs covered up, advised that female physical examinations be conducted underneath a woman’s skirts without exposing her body, or raided and censored stage productions and all kinds of publications with abandon.
Sex research in the United States had very low status throughout most of the 20th century (Comer, 1961). The sting of this disrespect, and its legacy of poor funding, little mainstreaming, and low academic status is felt and bemoaned to the present day (Abramson & Pinkerton, 1995). In consequence, until Kinsey, sex research flourished only in laboratory studies on animals, especially rodents, as well as in fieldwork in anthropology on “primitive” cultures with “exotic” (i. e., different from ours) sexual norms. The distance from the subject matter afforded by difficulties of intercultural and interspecies communication allowed decontamination of the subject matter and contributed the impersonality and universalness of the sexological model.