SOURCE: "The Kinsey Report," in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979, pp. 210-28.

In the following essay, originally published in 1948, Trilling identifies Kinsey' s work as an enlightening tool to break down cultural repression of humankind's primal and universal sexual consciousness.

By virtue of its intrinsic nature and also because of its dramatic reception, the Kinsey Report,¹ as it has come to be called, is an event of great importance in our culture. It is an event which is significant in two separate ways, as symptom and as therapy. The therapy lies in the large permissive effect the Report is likely to have, the long way it goes toward establishing the community of sexuality. The symptomatic significance lies in the fact that the Report was felt to be needed at all, that the community of sexuality requires now to be established in explicit...