What you won't see in the 'Kinsey' movie
By R. Albert Mohler Jr.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--Brace yourselves. The movie, "Kinsey," opened
in theaters Nov. 12, introducing a new generation of Americans to the
infamous "father" of sex research in America. Yet the movie is really
not a true portrait of Alfred Kinsey at all. Instead of portraying the
twisted and tormented mind of this propagandist for the sexual
revolution, the movie presents Kinsey as an angel of light who brought
America out of repression and darkness.
Reviewers greeted the movie with excitement. A.O. Scott, writing in The
New York Times, declared that "Bill Condon's smart, stirring life of
the renowned mid-century sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey has a lot to
say on the subject of sex, which it treats with sobriety, sensitivity
and a welcome measure of humor." Mr. Scott neglects to mention that the
movie treats its "subject" without an adequate measure of truth.
Rather than expressing outrage that a scandalous individual with a
well-documented pattern of sexual perversity is being celebrated, Mr.
Scott sees the movie as a mixture of entertainment and enlightenment.
"The director addresses sexuality with candor and wit, but it is the
act of research as much as its object that imparts to Kinsey its flush
of passion and its rush of romance," Scott celebrated. He went on the
gush: "I can't think of another movie that has dealt with sex so
knowledgeably and, at the same time, made the pursuit of knowledge seem
so sexy. There are some explicit images and provocative scenes, but it
is your intellect that is most likely to be aroused."
The reviewers for Newsweek acknowledged that "Kinsey's methods were far
from perfect," but they nevertheless celebrated both the movie and its
central character. Indeed, they commend Kinsey "who shattered any
vestiges of Victorian modesty, leading curious Americans from bedroom
peephole to upfront view between the sheets." In a sidebar, a Newsweek
writer declared that the movie "is a celebration of diversity; it's
about the solace knowledge can bring." Writing in The Wall Street
Journal, reviewer Joe Morgenstern declared that Kinsey doesn't try to
sell or exploit sex. According to Morgenstern, the movie "does
remarkably well as a cultural history of a vanished time" and "is
intelligent to a fault."
Alfred C. Kinsey is one of the most controversial figures in American
history -- and for good reason. An entomologist by training, Kinsey
turned from his intense fascination with the gall wasp to the study of
human sexuality. He burst upon the American scene with his pioneering
1948 volume, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." Eventually,
Indiana University was to establish the Kinsey Institute for Research
in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and the name "Kinsey" was to be
associated with progressivist sex education, opposition to traditional
sexual morality, and liberation from fixed concepts of "normal" when
dealing with human sexuality. The Kinsey Institute has what many
consider to be the world's largest collection of pornography, sexually
explicit art and various sexual objects. What the institute does not
advertise is its links to data gathered by child molesters and sex
criminals.
By any measure, Alfred Kinsey was a tormented and conflicted figure.
Raised by a puritanical father and a withdrawn mother, Kinsey's
adolescence was marked by sexual turmoil and experimentation. As is now
well-documented, the young Kinsey was involved in sadomasochistic
sexual behaviors and was driven by homosexual desire.
In a groundbreaking biography published in 1997, James H. Jones blew
the cover on the Kinsey myth. According to this popular and pervasive
mythology, Alfred Kinsey was a scientist who brought his rigorous
scientific skills and objective scientific interests to the study of
human sexuality. The real Alfred Kinsey was a man whose own sexual
practices cannot be safely described to the general public and whose
interest in sex was anything but objective or scientific.
From the onset, Jones recognized Kinsey's central role in the sexual
revolution. "More than any other American of the twentieth century,"
Jones acknowledges, "he was the architect of a new sensibility about a
part of life that everyone experiences and no one escapes."
Nevertheless, the real Kinsey was hidden from the public. Jones
describes his project in these words: "As I burrowed into more than a
dozen archives, read tens of thousands of letters, and interviewed
scores of people who knew Kinsey in various capacities, I discovered
that his public image distorted more than it revealed."
As Jones reports, "The man I came to know bore no resemblance to the
canonical Kinsey. Anything but disinterested, he approached his work
with missionary fervor. Kinsey loathed Victorian morality as only a
person who had been badly injured by sexual repression could despise
it. He was determined to use science to strip human sexuality of its
guilt and repression. He wanted to undermine traditional morality, to
soften the rules of restraint, and to help people develop positive
attitudes toward their sexual needs and desires. Kinsey was a
crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change
the sexual morays and sex offender laws of the United States."
There was more to it than that, of course, and Jones marshals an
incredible mountain of documentation to prove this point. In the first
place, the adolescent Alfred Kinsey was deeply involved in masochistic
self-abuse. In Jones' words, "Somewhere along the line, he veered off
the path of normal development and was pulled down a trail that led to
tremendous emotional conflict and self-negating physical abuse."
Driven by wild sexual fantasies and determined to overthrow what he saw
as a repressive sexual morality, Kinsey eventually dropped his study of
insects and turned his study to human sexuality. Tragically, Jones
acknowledges that the world of science "would have been better served
had Kinsey not allowed his lust for data to obscure his judgment."
What exactly was Kinsey up to? He and his close band of young male
associates went about collecting an enormous body of data on human
sexuality, first looking at male and later at female populations. In
his research on the sexual behavior of males, Kinsey brought his
ideological and personal passions to the forefront of his supposedly
scientific work. He arbitrarily decided that human beings are to be
located in a continuum of development between heterosexual and
homosexual poles. He developed a six-step chart and argued that men and
boys are arrayed all along this line between absolute heterosexuality
and absolute homosexuality. He would later argue that almost 40 percent
of all males would have some homosexual experience. Of course, hidden
from public view was the fact that Kinsey was doing his very best to
rationalize his own homosexuality -- or bisexuality as later
commentators would explain -- and was not at all the objective
scientist collecting neutral data from a responsible population base.
Among the many problems inherent in Kinsey's research is the fact that
he relied upon reports and sexual studies taken from prison
populations, including sex criminals. Therefore, Kinsey's notion of
"normal" was drawn from a decidedly abnormal population sample.
The most troubling aspect of Kinsey's research is the data he collected
on the sexual response of children -- especially young boys. Chapter
Five of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male considered the sexual
experience of boys, including infants. Kinsey wanted to prove that
children are sexual beings who should be understood to have and to
deserve sexual experiences. In this chapter, Kinsey is largely
dependent upon the data contributed by "Mr. X," a man who had molested
hundreds of boys ranging from infants to adolescents. As Jones
explains: "Viewed from any angle, his relationship with Mr. X was a
cautionary tale. Whatever the putative value as science of Mr. X's
experience, the fact remains that he was a predator pedophile." Over
decades, this man abused hundreds of young boys, tortured infants and,
as Jones explains, "performed a variety of other sexual acts on
preadolescent boys and girls alike."
Kinsey did not condemn this man, but instead eagerly solicited his
"data." As a matter of fact, Kinsey went so far as to attempt to pay
Mr. X for further research and once wrote to him, "I wish I knew how to
give credit to you in the forthcoming volume for your material. It
seems a shame not even to name you."
Those words betray a moral monster of the most horrible depravity and
assured criminality. Alfred Kinsey celebrated the fact that this man
had sexually tortured children and, as Kinsey's own published work
documents, had sexually abused two-month-old infants.
All this was explicit in the data published in Kinsey's 1948 volume,
but he was nonetheless celebrated as a sexual pioneer and as a profit
of sexual enlightenment.
Unbeknownst to the general public, Kinsey also was involved in sex acts
with his staff and in the filming of hundreds of persons involved in
sexual activity -- including footage taken of his own masochistic sex
acts. He and his colleagues paid adolescent boys to perform sex acts on
film and turned the Kinsey house into a studio for pornographic
documentation. In one incredibly weird twist on the story, Mrs. Kinsey,
or "Mac" as she was known, is remembered to have brought refreshments
to the participants at the conclusion of their sex acts and video
sessions. She was herself filmed in various sexual situations and
Kinsey encouraged his associates to engage in sex acts with his wife.
What does the cultural elite now make of all this? The New York Times
review acknowledges that the movie takes a great risk "in attempting to
deal frankly with its hero's own sex life without succumbing to
prurience or easy moralism." In reality, however, the movie doesn't
deal frankly with Kinsey's perversions at all. The reviewer concedes,
"Sometimes his scientific zeal shaded into obsession, and his methods
went from the empirical to the experimental in ways that remain
ethically troubling."
Ethically troubling? Is that all The New York Times can muster in
response to Kinsey's own self-documented and published reports of child
molestation?
In "Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey,"
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy laments the fact that Kinsey is not given the
respect of his fellow scientists that he believed he deserved.
Nevertheless, even Gathorne-Hardy acknowledges, "The recent digging up
of Kinsey's private life, incidentally, is not going to help him" in
this respect.
Gathorne-Hardy wrote his book largely in response to the damage to
Kinsey's reputation inflicted by Jones' biography. Amazingly,
Gathorne-Hardy claims: "Wherever we know something of his sexuality it
is at once apparent that, while it hardly ever, if ever, impaired his
integrity as a scientist, it had a decisive effect on his work. And
where it does once or twice seem to impair that integrity, the effect
is either not very significant -- or else it is obvious. There is a
transparency."
This is moral nonsense. Of course, this author attempts to make
lemonade out of Kinsey's lemons in more than one way. At one point,
Gathorne-Hardy goes so far as to claim that Kinsey's bisexuality was a
great asset for his scientific work. "Kinsey was bisexual,"
Gathorne-Hardy notes, "an almost ideal position, one might think, for
someone who was studying sexual behavior in both sexes." Who might
think this?
We have become a society that celebrates men like Alfred C. Kinsey and
produces movies that present such a man as an agent of enlightenment
rather than as a tortured soul fighting his internal demons while
soliciting data on the sexual molestation of young children -- and
filming any number of persons involved in any number of perverted sex
acts.
In a letter he once wrote to his associate Clarence A. Tripp, Kinsey
conceded, "The whole army of religion is our central enemy." Kinsey
knew what he was up against, and his ambition was not merely to collect
data, but to overthrow the entire structure of Christian morality in
the realm of human sexuality.
Instead of being rightly classified as a criminal along with the likes
of Dr. Joseph Mengele and other Nazi scientists, Alfred C. Kinsey is
now lionized and celebrated in a movie starring Liam Neeson as the
supposedly heroic figure. What does this say about Liam Neeson? What
does this say about us?
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