It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. It was first published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and others, and was also prominent in the complementary work Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). "The Kinsey scale attempts to measure sexual orientation, from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). A Kinsey 2 or 4 might be someone who relates more closely to bisexuality and could think of themselves as being “bisexual with a preference.” A Kinsey 3 would be someone closest to the typical conception of bisexuality and would have an equal attraction to men and women.Everyone asks me what the Kinsey (Kinzie) Scale is. Likewise, a Kinsey 5 would be the same, but predominantly homosexual. This type of person might consider themselves straight until they meet the right person. Other numbers indicate varying degrees of bisexuality.Ī Kinsey 1 is a person who’s predominantly heterosexual, but is incidentally homosexual. A person who’s a Kinsey 0, as some users say, would be completely straight according to the instrument, whereas a Kinsey 6 would be completely gay. People can declare that they are a certain value on the scale when they want to be more accurate in describing their sexual identity. However, these numbers are also used as a tool of self-identification. Sexologists often use the term and the numbers from the scale in research studies and as a formal research tool. If anything, the scale acts as an accessible jumping off point for understanding sexuality as a continuum. While some take issue with the scale, some social scientists and individuals alike continue to find it useful while recognizing its limited nature. There have been attempts at devising a new scale, of which over 200 exist. As a result, the framework of the Kinsey Scale seems outdated, since it doesn’t account for emerging sexual orientations or genders. Now, in the new millennium, sexual identities like pansexual and polysexual have been more widely adopted, as have gender identities such as trans and intersex. This coincides with increasing public awareness and acceptance of sexualities (other than heterosexuality), and it was somewhat amplified as celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres were coming out. A score of 0 represents “exclusively heterosexual,” 6 is “exclusively homosexual,” and 3 is “equally heterosexual and homosexual.” Other academics picked it up soon after, and, by 1953, they had begun calling it the Kinsey Scale.īy the 1970s, the term enjoyed wider adoption within academia, and by at least the early to mid-1990s non-academics began to use it too. In these studies, known as The Kinsey Reports, sexologists asked people an inventory of questions about their sexual history and assigned them a number on a scale of 0–6, which corresponded to a description of their sexual behavior. It was also included in a subsequent work, Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, in 1953. The Kinsey Scale, first known as the Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale, was created in part by sexologist Alfred Kinsey and used in a study first published in Sexual Behavior of the Human Male in 1948.