Question: What Does the Kinsey Scale Have to Do With Sexual Orientation?
Answer:
The Kinsey Scale refers to a sexual orientation measuring device created by the zoologist Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s.
The scale goes from 0 to 6 and asks people to rank how gay or straight they feel.
Here is the description of each number:
- 0 Exclusively heterosexual
- 1 Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
- 2 Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
- 3 Equally heterosexual and homosexual
- 4 Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
- 5 Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
- 6 Exclusively homosexual
Some people who identify as asexual might choose not to put themselves on the scale at all.
Kinsey believed that many people fell somewhere in the middle of the scale. He thought that it was less common to be totally gay or totally straight than it was to be predominantly one or the other.
You might want to think about what number you would give yourself. But keep in mind, this might change over time!
