In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council required every Christian who had reached the age of discretion to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year. That single administrative decision made detailed sexual self-examination a mass obligation across Latin Christendom — not a monastic discipline, not a specialism, but something a peasant did annually along with everything else.
And because confessors needed to know what to ask, there grew up a literature of manuals. They are astonishing documents. Two centuries before the Lateran decree, Burchard of Worms compiled an interrogatory for confessors that runs through sexual practices with a specificity that would have got a modern researcher hauled before an ethics board: act by act, position by position, with whom, with what, alone or otherwise, and beside each one a tariff in days or years of penance. It is a questionnaire. It is, structurally, a sex survey with punishments attached instead of percentages, and the taxonomic impulse behind it — the need to name every variant so that none escapes the schedule — is recognisably the same impulse that would later fill Krafft-Ebing's index and Kinsey's coding sheet.
The Counter-Reformation intensified it considerably, extending the required examination inward from acts to thoughts, from what was done to what was wanted and half-wanted and resisted. The confessional box itself, the wooden cabinet with the grille, is a sixteenth-century invention, introduced in Milan and adopted widely, and one of the reasons for it was to interpose a physical barrier in an encounter that had become, in its intimacy and its subject matter, dangerous for both parties.
The point a French philosopher would eventually make about all this, in the mid-1970s, is that we have the story upside down. The received account of Western sexual history is one of repression: centuries of silence, imposed by church and bourgeoisie, gradually broken by heroic liberators of whom Kinsey is one. The counter-argument is that the West has not been silent about sex at all. It has been compulsively, institutionally, unstoppably talkative — that it built machinery, century by century, for making people speak about their desires in ever finer detail, and that the effect of all that speaking was not liberation but the installation of the idea that sex is where the truth about a person is kept. Confess, and you will find out who you are. The apparatus does not suppress the discourse. It generates it.
Whatever you make of that as history, it identifies a lineage that runs straight through the middle of everything that follows. Penitent and confessor. Patient and analyst. Respondent and interviewer. And now user and application: the anonymous forum account created at two in the morning for the sole purpose of asking strangers whether what happened last night was normal, and deleted a week later. Each of these is the same transaction. Tell me everything, in order, in detail, without leaving out the part you most want to leave out, and I will tell you where you stand.
from Reading Kinsey in the Twenty-First Century: What the Reports Actually Said, and What We Made of Them (2026)
