WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES:

Alfred Kinsey: Liberator or Pervert? (CALEB CRAIN, 10/03/04, NY Times)

MORE than half a century after the publication of his landmark study, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," Alfred C. Kinsey remains one of the most influential figures in American intellectual history. He's certainly the only entomologist ever to be immortalized in a Cole Porter song. Thanks to him, it's now common knowledge that almost all men masturbate, that women peak sexually in their mid-30's and that homosexuality is not some one-in-a-million anomaly. His studies helped bring sex - all kinds of sex, not just the stork-summoning kind - out of the closet and into the bright light of day.

But not everyone applauds that accomplishment. Though some hail him for liberating the nation from sexual puritanism, others revile him as a fraud whose "junk science" legitimized degeneracy. Even among scholars sympathetic to Kinsey there's disagreement. Both his biographers regard him as a brave pioneer and reformer, but differ sharply about almost everything else. One independent scholar has even accused him of sexual crimes.

All of which makes the decision by the writer and director Bill Condon to place him at the center of a major Hollywood biopic - one loaded up with stars, including Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Peter Sarsgaard - rather striking. Kinsey's admirers are looking forward to a respectful portrayal when "Kinsey" opens on Nov. 12. But judging from the heated debate already swirling around the film, they're not half as excited as Kinsey's detractors, who are eager to take on the man they blame, in part, for the gay movement, Roe v. Wade, sex education, the glamorization of pornography and the loosening of sex-offender laws. Already, there have been calls for a boycott and the beginnings of a counterspin media campaign. "We see this movie," says Robert Knight, Concerned Women for America's designated Kinsey expert, "as really a godsend."

FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Kinsey’s Secret: The Phony Science of the Sexual Revolution (Sue Ellin Browder, May 2004, Crisis)

Alfred C. Kinsey had a secret. The Indiana University zoologist and “father of the sexual revolution” almost single-handedly redefined the sexual mores of everyday Americans. The problem was, he had to lie to do it. The weight of this point must not be underestimated. The science that launched the sexual revolution has been used for the past 50 years to sway court decisions, pass legislation, introduce sex education into our schools, and even push for a redefinition of marriage. Kinseyism was the very foundation of this effort. If his science was flawed—or worse yet, an outright deception—then our culture’s attitudes about sex are not just wrong morally but scientifically as well.

Let’s consider the facts. When Kinsey and his coworkers published Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
in 1953, they turned middle-class values upside down. Many traditionally forbidden sexual practices, Kinsey and his colleagues proclaimed, were surprisingly commonplace; 85 percent of men and 48 percent of women said they’d had premarital sex, and 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women had
been unfaithful after marriage. Incredibly, 71 percent of women claimed their affair hadn’t hurt their marriage, and a few even said it had helped. What’s more, 69 percent of men had been with prostitutes, 10 percent had been homosexual for at least three years, and 17 percent of farm boys had experienced sex with animals. Implicit in Kinsey’s report was the notion that these behaviors were biologically “normal” and hurt no one. Therefore, people should act on their impulses with no inhibition or guilt.

The 1948 report on men came out to rave reviews and sold an astonishing 200,000 copies in two months. Kinsey’s name was everywhere from the titles of pop songs (“Ooh, Dr. Kinsey”) to the pages of Life, Time, Newsweek, and the New Yorker. Kinsey was “presenting facts,” Look magazine proclaimed. He was “revealing not what should be but what is.” Dubbed “Dr. Sex” and applauded for his personal courage, the researcher was compared to Darwin, Galileo, and Freud.

But beneath the popular approbation, many astute scientists were warning that Kinsey’s research was gravely flawed. The list of critics, Kinsey biographer James H. Jones observes, “read like a Who’s Who of American intellectual life.” They included anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman; Karl Menninger, M.D. (founder of the famed Menninger Institute); psychiatrists Eric Fromm and Lawrence Kubie; cultural critic Lionel Trilling of Columbia University, and countless others.

By the time Kinsey’s volume about women was published, many journalists had abandoned the admiring throngs and joined the critics. Magazine articles appeared with titles like “Is the Kinsey Report a Hoax?” and “Love Is Not a Statistic.” Time magazine ran a series of stories exposing Kinsey’s dubious science (one was titled “Sex or Snake Oil?”).

That’s not, of course, to say that the Kinsey reports contain no truth at all. Sexuality is certainly a subject worthy of scientific study. And many people do pay lip service to sexual purity while secretly behaving altogether differently in their private lives.

Nevertheless, Kinsey’s version of the truth was so grossly oversimplified, exaggerated, and mixed with falsehoods, it’s difficult to sort fact from fiction. Distinguished British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer put it well when he called the reports propaganda masquerading as science. Indeed, the flaws in Kinsey’s work stirred up such controversy that the Rockefeller Foundation, which had backed the original research, withdrew its funding of $100,000 a year. A year after the book on female sexuality came out, Kinsey himself complained that almost no scientist outside of a few of his best friends continued to defend him.

So, what were the issues the world’s best scientists had with Kinsey’s work?

The criticism can be condensed into three devastating points.

Problem #1: Humans as Animals

Before he began studying human sexuality, Kinsey was the world’s leading expert on the gall wasp. Trained as a zoologist, he saw sex purely as a physiological “animal” response. Throughout his books, he continually refers to the “human animal.” In fact, in Kinsey’s opinion, there was no moral difference between one sexual outlet and any other. In our secular world of moral relativism, Kinsey was a radical sexual relativist. As even the libertarian anthropologist Margaret Mead accurately observed, in Kinsey’s view there was no moral difference between a man having sex with a woman—or a sheep.

In his volume about women, Kinsey likened the human orgasm to sneezing. Noting that this ludicrous description left out the obvious psychological aspects of human sexuality, Brooklyn College anthropologist George Simpson observed, “This is truly a monkey-theory of orgasm.” Human beings, of course, differ from animals in two very important ways: We can think rationally, and we have free will. But in Kinsey’s worldview, humans differed from animals only when it came to procreation. Animals have sex only to procreate. On the other hand, human procreation got little notice from Kinsey. In his 842-page volume on female sexuality, motherhood wasn’t mentioned once.

Problem #2: Skewed Samples

Kinsey often presented his statistics as if they applied to average moms, dads, sisters, and brothers. In doing so, he claimed 95 percent of American men had violated sex-crime laws that could land them in jail. Thus Americans were told they had to change their sex-offender laws to “fit the facts.” But, in reality, Kinsey’s reports never applied to average people in the general population. In fact, many of the men Kinsey surveyed were actually prison inmates. Wardell B. Pomeroy, Kinsey co-author and an eyewitness to the research, wrote that by 1946 the team had taken sexual histories from about 1,400 imprisoned sex offenders. Kinsey never revealed how many of these criminals were included in his total sample of “about 5,300” white males. But he did admit including “several hundred” male prostitutes. Additionally, at least 317 of Kinsey’s male subjects were not even adults, but sexually abused children.

Piling error on top of error, about 75 percent of Kinsey’s adult male subjects volunteered to give their sexual histories. As Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman observed, volunteers for sex studies are two to four times more sexually active than non-volunteers.

Kinsey’s work didn’t improve in his volume on women. In fact, he interviewed so few average women that he actually had to redefine “married” to include any woman who had lived with a man for more than a year. This change added
prostitutes to his sample of “married” women.

In the December 11, 1949, New York Times, W. Allen Wallis, then chairman of the University of Chicago’s committee on statistics, dismissed “the entire method of collecting and presenting the statistics which underlie Dr. Kinsey’s conclusions.” Wallis noted, “There are six major aspects of any statistical research, and Kinsey fails on four.”

In short, Kinsey’s team researched the most exotic sexual behavior in America—taking hundreds if not thousands of case histories from sexual deviants—and then passed off the behavior as sexually “normal,” “natural,” and “average” (and hence socially and morally acceptable).

Problem #3: Faulty Statistics

Given all this, it’s hardly surprising that Kinsey’s statistics were so seriously flawed that no reputable scientific survey has ever been able to duplicate them.

Kinsey claimed, for instance, that 10 percent of men between the ages of 16 and 55 were homosexual. Yet in one of the most thorough nationwide surveys on male sexual behavior ever conducted, scientists at Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers in Seattle found that men who considered themselves exclusively homosexual accounted for only 1 percent of the population. In 1993, Time magazine reported, “Recent surveys from France, Britain, Canada, Norway and Denmark all point to numbers lower than 10 percent and tend to come out in the 1 to 4 percent range.” The incidence of homosexuality among adults is actually “between 1 and 3 percent,” says University of Delaware sociology and criminal justice professor Joel Best, author of Damned Lies and Statistics. Best observes, however, that gay and lesbian activists prefer to use Kinsey’s long-discredited one-in-ten figure “because it suggests that homosexuals are a substantial minority group, roughly equal in number to African Americans—too large to be ignored.”

Not surprisingly, Kinsey’s numbers showing marital infidelity to be harmless also never held up. In one Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy study of infidelity, 85 percent of marriages were damaged as a result, and 34 percent ended in divorce. Even spouses who stayed together usually described their marriages afterwards as unhappy. Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman, M.D., estimates that among couples who have been married for a long time and then divorce, “over 90 percent of the divorces involve infidelities.”

Speaking at a 1955 conference sponsored by Planned Parenthood, Kinsey pulled
another statistical bombshell out of his hat. He claimed that of all pregnant women, roughly 95 percent of singles and 25 percent of those who were married secretly aborted their babies. A whopping 87 percent of these abortions, he claimed, were performed by bona fide doctors. Thus he gave scientific authority to the notion that abortion was already a common medical procedure—and should thus be legal.

It would be amusing just how fradulent the Kinsey "studies" were if, like the Darwinists' infamous hoaxes, they weren't still so readily swallowed by the credulous and hadn't done so much damage to society with their lies.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 3, 2004 9:12 AM