Yerkes sat for Kinsey's interview and never saw the contents of his own sexual-history sheet.
1. Conflicted: A History Podcast frames “The Kinsey Report – Part 2” around Alfred Kinsey’s shift from the Marriage Course to sex research and funding.
2. Zach Cornwell hosts the episode, and Robert M. Yerkes appears as the CRPS chairman whose grant decisions mattered to Kinsey.
3. The episode asks how Kinsey built a method for studying sexual behavior and how he paid for it.
4. In 1932, Kinsey is shown in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains collecting Hymenoptera sinipidae, the gall wasp, with a field kit.
5. The narration says Kinsey spent 19 years, from 1917 to 1936, studying gall wasps after finding them in a Harvard thesis search.
6. His gall wasp work took him from Louisiana and Colorado to West Texas, and by 1936 he had traveled 75,000 miles.
7. The episode emphasizes that Kinsey wanted large sample sizes, because he believed variation, not categories, described nature.
8. The gall wasp section links that collecting habit to sex research by calling it a “collector’s mania.”
9. In 1938, Kinsey started the Marriage Course at Indiana University, which students nicknamed the Sex Course.
10. The class covered reproductive anatomy, health, and social theory, and many students had never heard sex explained in detail before.
11. The episode says Kinsey used anonymous questionnaires and private consultations to gather sexual histories from students.
12. People brought him questions about secret marriages, first cousins, birth control, sterility, premature ejaculation, homosexuality, and marital compatibility.
13. A student complaint about writing things down as “so darn permanent” pushes Kinsey toward face-to-face interviewing.
14. By 1940, faculty members were calling the course a “smut session” and warning about backlash to Indiana University.
15. Thurman B. Rice argues that parents would blame the university if students left campus with sex habits “not to her credit.”
16. Herman B. Wells tells Kinsey he can teach the Marriage Course or pursue research interviews, but not both.
17. Kinsey chooses research, and the episode says his network of contacts was “growing like the branches of a tree.”
18. Robert M. Yerkes hears about Kinsey, visits Bloomington, and sits through a demonstration of the interview method.
19. The tone mixes biography, archival quotation, and dry narration, with long stretches of rapid-fire historical detail.
20. Listeners who like history of science and sexuality will get the most from this.
21. Listeners wanting a short, issue-free classroom story may skip this.
