Two articles look at Alfred Kinsey and his legacy
January 2005 – Reconsidering Kinsey By Jane Jimenez*
New Hollywood movie portrays him AS heroic pioneer, but reality reveals very dark side of famed sex researcher
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. World War II focused national attention on a global threat. Meanwhile, unobtrusively, in the heartland of America, the seed of a quieter, but equally profound attack on America was taking root.
On the quiet campus of Indiana University, a group of researchers was busy interviewing men and women, collecting data on their intimate sex lives. Alfred Kinsey seemed to be the perfect man to direct this project: married, a father of three children, a zoologist well-respected for his work with gall wasps, and known around campus for his open and comfortable approach to talking about sex.
Kinsey’s move from gall wasps to humans began even before 1938 when popular lore has it that “the Association of Women Students petitioned Indiana University for a course for students who were married or contemplating marriage.” On the side, outside of his regular teaching duties in the zoology department, Kinsey began to collect sexual histories, developing an extensive list of over 350 interview questions which he committed to memory.
When soldiers returned home in 1945, Kinsey was on the home stretch of preparing his findings for the American public. On January 5, 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published. While it had only one week as #1, it spent 43 weeks, just short of one year, on The New York Times bestseller’s list. A second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, followed in 1953.
Kinsey’s authority on sexual behavior went virtually unchallenged for 30 years. Then on July 23, 1981, at the Fifth World Congress of Sexology in Jerusalem, a diminutive American psychologist stepped to the podium to present her research findings to a standing-room only session.
Judity Reisman said, “I was confident my sexology colleagues would be as outraged as was I by these tables [Tables 30-34 from Male] and the child data describing Kinsey’s reliance on pedophiles as his child sex experimenters. Perhaps worst of all for me, as a scholar and a mother, were pages 160 and 161 where Kinsey claimed his data came from ‘interviews.’ How could he say 196 little children – some as young as two months of age – enjoyed ‘fainting,’ ‘screaming,’ ‘weeping,’ and ‘convulsing’? How could he call these children’s responses evidence of their sexual pleasure and ‘climax’? I called it evidence of terror, of pain, as well as criminal. One of us was very, very sexually mixed up.”
Reisman laid out her charges methodically, presenting slides of Tables 30-34 and analyzing the specific entries which calculated the rates and timed the speeds of orgasms in at least 317 infants and children. How, she challenged the audience, did rape and molestation of children ever make the transition from criminal activity to research? And she rested her case.
“The reaction in the room was heavy: it was numbing for some, discomforting for others,” she said. A Kinsey Institute representative present for her presentation predictably “protested that none of this was true.” Yet, Dr. Reisman felt certain her documentation would be a call to action, stimulating an immediate and thorough scientific review of Kinsey’s research.
She recalls what actually happened: “Late that afternoon my young assistant from Haifa University returned from lunch visibly shaken. She had dined at a private table with the international executives of the conference. My paper was hotly contested and largely condemned, since everyone at her table of about 12 men and women wholeheartedly agreed that children could, indeed, have ‘loving’ sex with adults.”
This potential “loving sex” is best described by Kinsey’s coauthor Dr. Paul Gebhard in a letter to Dr. Reisman, in which he explained the source of data on the tables in question. The data, Gebhard explained, “were obtained from parents, teachers and male homosexuals, and … some of Kinsey’s men used ‘manual and oral techniques’ to catalog how many ‘orgasms’ infants and children could produce in a given amount of time.”
Further research by Reisman linked “some of Kinsey’s men” to one man in particular: Mr. Rex King. Biographer James Jones fleshes out the details in an interview for a Yorkshire documentary, Secret History: Kinsey’s Paedophiles: “Kinsey relied upon [King] for the chapter on childhood sexuality in the male volume . … I think that he was in the presence of pathology at large and … Kinsey … elevated to, you know, the realm of scientific information … what should have been dismissed as unreliable, self-serving data provided by a predatory pedophile.”
While trained sexologists easily dismissed this sexual abuse of children as “loving sex with adults,” persistent inquiries from concerned lay people finally prompted The Kinsey Institute to respond to these charges on its website. These statements, drafted by director John Bancroft, are carefully worded denials that proceed to confirm the truth of the charges but explain them in “harmless” terms. In other words, it depends on what the meaning of is is.
Before you buy a ticket to the new movie Kinsey, consider this. Papers promote the film with an endorsement from Paul Gebhard, the man who catalogued orgasms of infants and children and used this to demonstrate the benefits of incest. He likes the film. He gives Kinsey a thumbs-up.
What could this film do to offend Mr. Gebhard? He gives a thumbs-up to Kinsey – but consider who is behind the thumb. Endorsing fame and adulation for one of the greatest child abusers of the modern world is child’s play for a man unmoved by the “screaming,” “weeping,” and “convulsing” of innocent children.
Considering seeing Kinsey? Don’t. 
* A former elementary school teacher, Jane Jimenez is now a freelance writer dedicated to issues of importance to women and the family. She writes a regular column titled “From the Home Front.“ Her work has appeared in both Christian and secular publications. Internet: www.fromthehomefront.org
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Legacy of Kinsey 60 years after By Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D.**
School board shuns election’s lessons
Montgomery County, Maryland, is a blue county. Next door to Washington, D.C., the county went 66 to 33 for Senator Kerry in the recent election. So when the Montgomery County School Board rubber stamped a set of committee recommendations expanding sexual education content to include condom demonstrations and left-of-center views on homosexuality, I suspect the members of the board expected little resistance from parents.
Surprise! In fact, after two years of stonewalling efforts from parents to register their views, the school board members may find themselves facing voters in a recall effort.
Rumor is that the school board thinks the whole thing will blow over. However, one glance at their website provides evidence that the parents are serious. Given such strong reaction concerning values, the school board may need to glean some lessons from the last election.
Maryland is hardly a fly over state but there are rural and mainstream folk in this county who are plenty incensed at the kinds of changes envisioned for sex education. For instance, in a newly approved film, Hope is Not a Method, a teen girl is shown skillfully placing a condom over a cucumber. However, this is not an episode of Veggie Tales gone wild. Students are also treated to a discussion of the virtues of fruit flavored condoms. In the new curriculum, students are informed that homosexual experimentation may be normal.
Some parents are not amused. According to articles in both The Washington Post and The Washington Times, the school board meetings have been peppered with protesting parents. According to Jon Ward, writing in The Times, Tim Simpson, pastor and parent of a high school student, said that school officials “have definitely stepped over the line in assuming the majority of parents in this county accept this.”
For their part, school board members seem perplexed and annoyed at such spasms of moral outrage. According to The Washington Times, Patricia O'Neill, board vice president huffed: “There are plenty of opportunities for people who choose to be informed to participate on the committee.” The committee she speaks of is the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Family Life and Human Development. This committee has been meeting periodically during the past two years at the direction of the school board for the purpose of improving the school’s health education. The recommendations at issue are largely the work of this body.
Given the controversy generated by the Citizen’s Advisory Committee, the school board should not be surprised by upset parents now. Throughout its two years of working on the sexuality materials, the committee refused to include any professional resources that promoted abstinence only or presented a balanced view of homosexuality. Parents did go to those meetings and complain. Three members resigned in protest. Letters to the editor were published. For a previous column, I called the school district’s health education coordinator, Russ Henke, and asked him why the committee was excluding peer reviewed research that gave a diversity of views concerning sexual orientation. He said the school board would be able to reverse any recommendations they felt were inappropriate. Apparently, the school board has no interest in doing so.
This is a brewing controversy worth watching. Since the election, Democratic ruminating has included remorse over being perceived as out of touch with mainstream American “values voters.” Many Democrats, including Senator Joe Lieberman, have suggested the party become more moderate on social issues. In this blue county, will there be a shift toward the moral center on this matter of sexuality education?
For the current school board’s part, they seem to be puzzled by the concern of mainstream parents. The parents seem to feel that the board’s actions are another example of cultural erosion in their own backyard.
The school board could just wait this out and hope that the parents go away. Or they could learn some lessons from current events. 
** Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of College Counseling at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. His articles have appeared in over 50 newspapers. His recently released documentary titled I Do Exist deals with the issue of sexual orientation. Internet: www.wthrockmorton.com
