Kinsey Institute strives to make research relevant

More than 70 years ago, Indiana University biology professor Alfred Kinsey approached the school with a most unorthodox proposal: He wanted to teach a course about sex.

Such a thing was unheard of in the late 1930s, but Kinsey, whose research previously focused on wasps, persuaded the university to let him teach the course, with the caveat that only married students and seniors would enroll.

Within a decade, that course morphed into an Indiana University institute named for Kinsey, who produced the first definitive research studies into men’s and women’s sexual behavior and helped inspire numerous researchers to explore the topic. His books were best-sellers, and his name — and by extension that of his institute — became synonymous with the field of what became known as sexology.

Website strives to provide evidence-based guide to women's sexual pleasure

So, after 70 years of research into the topic of sex, and millennia of men and women engaging in it, what’s left to learn?

Turns out, the answer to that question is: a lot.

Under the aegis of a new director who took the Kinsey helm just over a year ago, the Kinsey Institute is reframing itself. Where once research into sex, gender and reproduction formed the backbone of the institute’s work, now love, sexuality and well-being will take center stage, director Sue Carter says. What helps people form positive, intimate relationships? How does the body react to traumatic sexual experiences? How do hormones influence our sexual experiences?

“We’re not dropping sex, gender and reproduction. We’re just trying to make it a little more clear that this is in a context of psychological and emotional functions and health benefits,” said Carter, who has devoted the bulk of her career to studying hormones’ effects on a variety of behaviors, including sex and love.

But in the public eye, the Kinsey Institute is linked to one thing — sex.

A recent website devoted to understanding women’s sexual pleasure that has attracted attention with its frank talk and even more explicit video helped underscore that connection. The founders of OMGYes wanted the Kinsey imprimatur on the final product.

They reached out to Debby Herbenick, director of Indiana University’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion and a Kinsey researcher, for help collecting data. Stories about the website invariably note its connection to Kinsey, even though Kinsey officials say technically the research comes from the Center for Sexual Health Promotion housed at the School of Public Health.

Herbenick, who helps to produce an online advice website called Kinsey Confidential, recognizes the enduring power of the name.

“The Kinsey brand has always been a name that people can trust,” she said.

Moving into the future, Carter says she does not expect Kinsey to produce information along the lines of that found on the OMGYes website.

“We’re not going to be emphasizing the kinds of things that Debby has studied," Carter said. "There’s just so much you can do, and I want to take Kinsey into directions that are unequivocally important.”

Those directions include sexual trauma, the transgender movement and medical interventions that can have an impact on a person’s sexuality and relationships.

It’s not unusual for a new director to reshape the institute. From Kinsey on, each of the institute’s previous six researchers has brought his or her own interests to the job.

“The overall focus really depends on the director,” said Brian Dodge, a Kinsey Institute trustee and associate professor of applied health science in the School of Public Health. “That’s sort of unique about the Kinsey Institute. I don’t think the overall mission but definitely the research agenda ebbs and flows with different directors.”

Kinsey founded the institute in 1947. He turned his biologist’s eye to trying to unravel the question of what was normal sexual behavior by recording and describing in detail reams of people’s description of their own behavior. Not only did he pioneer the field of sex research, he also developed methods for conducting this most intimate research.

After Kinsey died in 1956, institute researchers expanded on his work. In the late '60s, a new generation of researchers turned to sexual behaviors in previously ignored populations, such as the gay community.

When the AIDS epidemic hit in the '80s, the National Institutes of Health started pouring funding into studying the problem. Kinsey researchers responded by embarking on studies of risky sexual behaviors. About this time, under the leadership of psychologist June Reinisch, the Kinsey Institute started promoting its art collection and library to scholars.

After Reinisch stepped down in 1993 after 11 years as director, her successor, John Bancroft, continued these efforts. Bancroft also conducted research into why people exhibit different sexual behaviors and why some are more inclined to engage in risky behaviors.

From 2004 to 2013, psychologist Julia Heiman led the institute and broadened the scope to sexual assault, sexual aggression and what makes for good, long-term relationships.

Although many people might think of Kinsey as providing catch-all information on sex, that is not what the institute is about. Its affiliated researchers tend to ask more narrow questions in the studies they produce, such as how climate change is affecting the reproductive choices of women in Greenland, how sex affects the immune response, and why condom errors occur.

"Human sexuality is a very broad topic, and there are many different approaches to it, and one small institute cannot grapple every question in human sexuality,” said Jennifer Bass, now director of communications for the institute who has worked there in various roles for 20 years.

Today, the Kinsey Institute sits on the third floor of an academic building on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington.

Carter, the first biologist since Kinsey to lead the institute, sits in a spare but elegant office that bears few signs of her life as a biologist. Instead of pictures of prairie voles or an actual animal or two, black-and-white photos from the Kinsey Institute collection grace her walls: a Robert Mapplethorpe of two men embracing, a Herb Ritts photo of Olympic diver Greg Louganis.

A limestone sculpture of what Carter describes as a “homunculus” of a man faces the wall. She turns him around to reveal a giant phallus. Carter said she prefers to keep the sculpture’s private parts out of view lest any visitors become offended.

In some ways, Carter is an unlikely person to lead the institute. In fact, her first reaction when a colleague nominated her for the job was not to apply.

Then she thought some more and decided to apply. Besides, she had a clear agenda for what the institute might pursue as it neared its eighth decade.

“I think human sexuality must be viewed in the context of relationships,” she said. “Just working on sexual behavior to me is not sufficient. We need to understand how sex affects sex and how relationships affect sex.”

For most of her life, Carter has studied prairie voles. Unlike most other mammals, these voles pair-bond.

Previously, researchers had shown that a hormone called oxytocin, known to be released during birth and breast-feeding, induced maternal behavior when injected in rats. Oxytocin also was known to be released during sex, though no one knew why. Carter showed that in prairie voles, the release of oxytocin during sex leads to a preference for that mate. This finding has implications not only for the prairie vole but for humans as well.

“This is practical information, because if you release oxytocin when you’re around someone or when you’re with someone, you really should be very careful that this is someone you want to spend time with, because you could in a sense induce a kind of not totally conscious preference,” Carter said. “Attachments are very, very biological. Our work was the first work of its kind to show that adults could attach in a way that they couldn’t describe through some simple learning process but as a deeply biological, physiological change.”

More recently, Carter has turned her attention to the practice of giving women in labor a synthetic form of oxytocin, Pitocin, to speed the delivery.

Carter first became interested in this problem when her own son was born. A doctor threatened her with a cesarean section if she would not accept the drug. Knowing the power of oxytocin, she spent the next 35 years asking what exposure to this powerful hormone can do to an infant.

Working with researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, Carter has a $4.8 million grant to study Pitocin’s effects during labor. Her work in prairie voles could change the way obstetricians around the country employ this drug to hasten a child’s arrival or to induce labor.

As institute head, Carter hopes to focus on some different questions, such as the high rates of sexual trauma in society, especially on college campuses. As many as 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted during their college careers, Carter says. Few report the assault.

"One of the things I want to do here is to help create a scientific approach to this problem, and I think we’re uniquely positioned to do that,” she said. “Trauma, which can be sexual or something else, is a huge component of modern life that we don’t understand. If we get a better understanding of this, we may be able to take away the shroud that causes people to feel so bad.”

Another area of interest focuses on how treating conditions such as prostate cancer and breast cancer and removing body parts such as the prostate, uterus and ovaries in the name of medicine affect a person’s sex life and his or her relationships.

The transgender movement, which has grown dramatically in recent years, also looms large in Carter’s research priorities. Too little is known about the transgender experience, from the trauma it can cause to the many aspects of the effects of the sexual hormones that many opt to take in the quest to switch genders, Carter said.

"I think that’s a very Kinsey problem. … It has theoretical implications for everybody, not just everyone having these experiences. It tells us more about the nature of sex and gender.”

The Kinsey Institute also is heading into its next century with a tool that Kinsey himself likely would have appreciated: social media. New technology allows its research to reach out across the country and even world to potential research subjects through an app. This app could be used, for instance, to ask people to report unwanted sexual behaviors. Eventually, it might allow researchers to track trends in different parts of the country. Other versions could even guide people through sending in saliva samples for other studies.

No matter what direction, the research heads all agree there is an appetite for the knowledge it produces.

Just as in Kinsey’s day, people are still searching for information they can trust about the mysteries of sex and their own bodies.

“We’re still trying to understand sexuality 70 years later,” Herbenick said. “We’re still trying to open doors to conversation.”

Call IndyStar reporter Shari Rudavsky at (317) 444-6354. Follow her on Twitter: @srudavsky.