Kinsey, notoriously or comfortingly (you decide), is the person who came up with the rubric that "10 Percent," more or less of the adult population in the U.S. identifies as homesexual, based on Kinsey's 1948 and 1953 studies. That was a very long time ago. His research eventually resulted in the "Kinsey Scale," sometimes called the "Kinsey Homosexuality Scale"; neither name is particularly accurate. Essentially, the idea behind the scale is that most people can find themselves somewhere on the scale in terms of their romatic and sexual attraction to the same sex; for some their sexual orientation is exclusively homosexual (6 on the scale), for others it is exclusively heterosexual (0 on the scale); they are attracted to only the opposite sex, and for others, they lie somewhere on the scale between the two poles of exclusivity. Note that the concept behind the scale is that human sexual orientation is a continuum, or a spectrum, not a "rating." Note that the Kinsey scale is often treated as a "gay or straight" binary by the media; it is neither.
Kinsey's scale and the point he was trying to make, have been somewhat muddled in terms of the modern presentation; first, it is a scale, not a test. Second, it is entirely dependent on self-evaluation; no one but you knows your personal emotional, sexual, and romantic responses. Thirdly, his basic assumption is that an individual's responses, and orientation and hence position on the scale will change over time. Notice Kinsey's comments about the scale in his 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female:
"While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history... An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life. . . . A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist" (pp. 639, 656).
Today, the Kinsey Scale is largely seen as simplistic in the extreme, and that current assumptions about sexuality include the basic operating assumption that there is a lot more variation and fluidity throughout life than the scale suggest, especially for women. Dr. Fritz Klein's "Klein Scale" is one attempt to make a more flexible scale, but it two suffers from a certain inherent rigidity. The Klein scale at least openly incorporates the idea of fluid sexuality and change, in that it asks respondents to examine their own personal view of their sexual orientation in three time periods and with respect to seven factors.
The problem with Klein's scale, and his companion book, The Bisexual Option (1973; 2nd ed. 1993) is that both are closely tied with some sweeping assumptions about what it means to self-identify as bisexual, and ultimately, ends up supporting, even espousing some bisexual myths. But there is still some value in both "scales," in that they encourage self-examination, and self-questioning in terms of whether or not what was true in the past about feelings and reactions is still true in the present.
(Originally posted at: http://thatgayblog.com/news/sexual-orientation-and-scales#sthash.TPa25EHj.dpuf)
