RECENT SEX SURVEY FINDINGS: EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIRS BY WOMEN
Extramarital affairs by women probably have increased slightly since Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. (We have little data to make this same comparison for men.) Several studies have suggested such an increase, with the Redbook survey reporting that 38% of the women between the ages of 35 and 39 revealed at least one extramarital affair. This does seem to indicate a real change, since in the Kinsey survey only 26% of the women respondents reported extramarital sexual relationships by age 40. There is reason to believe, however, that the validity of this finding is more in question than most of the results concerning other sexual behaviors reviewed previously in this chapter. First, Kinsey himself felt that his data was perhaps not entirely accurate with respect to the frequency of extramarital sex. On this issue he felt he was dealing with a real taboo among the American population of the 1940s and 1950s and that admitting to such behavior might have been much more difficult for his respondents than replying honestly to most of the other questions they were asked. Thus, Kinsey strongly suggested that the incidence of extramarital sexual relationships was probably higher than his data indicated. Secondly, it must be remembered that the Red-book sample was restricted to the volunteer self-reports of readers of this magazine and, while a large number of women did reply to this survey, they tended to be younger, better educated, and more affluent that the average American female.
The actual anatomy of the sexual organs and the physiology of the sexual response cycle have been studied by several investigators throughout the world in the last 100 years (Brecher, 1971). Kinsey and his associates had observed sexual responses in a laboratory setting and reported these findings (Kinsey et al., 1953) although they did not go into any detail about how these data had been collected. Aware of the criticism his work was receiving, Kinsey probably was wise in not revealing to his critics the added ammunition of admitting that sexual behavior had actually been observed at Indiana University in the 1940s. However, not until Masters and Johnson published Human Sexual Response in 1966 did we have really good anatomical and physiological data based on long-term and precise measurement in the laboratory.
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