Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), another important sex researcher, was an English citizen who grew up in Victorian society but began to rebel against the secrecy surrounding sexuality. In 1875, when he was 16 years old, he decided to make sexuality his life’s work. In fact, it is reported that Ellis sought a medical degree primarily so he could legitimately and safely study sexuality (V. Bullough, 1994). Upon publication of his famous six — volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1910; Ellis, 1910), Ellis established himself as an objective and nonjudgmental researcher. In his collection of case histories from volunteers, he reported that homosexuality and masturbation were not abnormal and should not be labeled as such (Reiss, 1982). In 1901, The Lancet, a prestigious English medical journal, reviewed his early volumes and wrote:
[Studies in the Psychology of Sex] must not be sold to the public, for the reading and discussion of such topics are dangerous. The young and the weak would not be fortified in their purity by the knowledge that they would gain from these studies, while they certainly might be more open to temptation after the perusal of more than one of the chapters. (Grosskurth, 1980, p. 222)
Unfortunately, Ellis’s book was also fairly dry and boring, and as a result, and much to his dismay, Ellis never found the fame and fortune that Freud did.
All of the aforementioned researchers and their publications helped give credibility to the area of sexual research. Some of the researchers adopted Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, whereas others developed their research without adopting specific theories of sexuality. Though they had introduced scientific principles into the study of sexual behavior, their influence was mostly limited to the field of medicine.
The rise of behaviorism in the 1920s added a new dimension to the research. The idea of studying specific sexual behaviors became more acceptable. The formulation of more sophisticated scientific research techniques provided researchers with more precise methods for sexual research. Many researchers attempted to compile data on sexual behavior, but the results were inconsistent, and the data were poorly organized. This led Alfred Kinsey, an American researcher, to undertake a large-scale study of human sexuality.