Sex makes the world go around. It is a fact of which you need not try to convince me. And for that reason alone, the work done by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey and his colleagues at Indiana University from the late 1930s until his death in 1956 merits praise. He was not the first sex researcher, but nobody before had done it so systematically. Kinsey had the courage to shine a light on a subject that was long cloaked in silence, embarrassment and ignorance. A reformer if ever there was one, Kinsey determined to clear up a lot of misinformation. The science-minded professor did not refer to men and women but males and females, emphasizing that we are merely one part of the animal family. He refused to employ vague euphemisms and called things by their actual names—sex acts, body parts and so forth. He wrote extensively and unashamedly about orgasms.
His two main books on the topic, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were landmark publications. He graced the cover of the August 24, 1953 issue of Time magazine, with birds and bees hovering about his head. The article stated rather hyperbolically that Kinsey had done for sex what Columbus did for geography. In a more recent story, he was called "the man who discovered sex." Please.
American conservatives bashed him for hastening the sexual revolution, but that was going to happen anyway; maybe he sped up the process somewhat. There are many, and better, reasons for criticizing Kinsey. While he and his team collected nearly 18,000 sex histories (based on 300-item questionnaires), they were not done by random sampling and were thus of dubious scientific value. Kinsey started interviewing IU students and then expanded into other groups—almost certainly with too much weight given to gay people and other so-called sexual minorities.
Tolerance is a fine thing, but I dare say he was too tolerant. Kinsey was fully accepting of just about every form of sexual behavior. Sex with animals, rape, sado-masochism and other such mind-bending acts—nothing threw him. One of his interviewees had engaged in sex with hundreds of boys and girls, and Kinsey never called the guy an abuser or alerted the police; in Kinsey’s view, he was merely gathering data. The same can also be said for his team filming sex acts in the attic of his house in Bloomington. He would surely have denied that he was making pornography, insisting instead that he only wanted to deepen his understanding of this vital subject.
Six decades after its publication, the Kinsey Report (as his two books are often called), is widely cited in the academic community. Still, one of Kinsey's biggest mistakes was the contention that sex is merely a biological act, bereft of feeling and affection. The word "love," which defies easy scientific quantification, had no place in his lexicon.
Married and the father of three children, Kinsey was nonetheless bisexual and trending toward homosexual. He also conducted quite a bit of his research while trolling in the gay bars of Chicago, New York and other big cities. All well and good, but he had intimate relations with many of his colleagues and the very people he interviewed. This, he rationalized, made him more empathetic. He had been dead for 25 years before the details of his private life first emerged. Apart from the aforementioned issues, Kinsey began to explore the nexus of pleasure and pain during his childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey. The man had serious demons with which to wrestle. I am no prude, but I simply cannot relate to some of the things in which he indulged. Auto-erotic asphyxiation? Al, get that kinky stuff out of here!
He certainly has his defenders even today, and there seems to be a consensus that Kinsey’s scientific findings remain, for the most part, valid. He loved to assert that human sexuality should be seen in terms of a broad spectrum and that people can move along it, free of moral or societal pressures. Kinsey resisted “either-or” classifications, and so I will adhere to that policy now. Was he a liberator or a pervert? Neither—he was both.
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