Posted on 11/14/2004 11:16:15 PM PST by kattracks
The unending 50-year war over Alfred Kinsey and his sex research is about to flare up once again, thanks to the new movie Kinsey. The film manages to be fairly faithful to the biographies of Kinsey while sliding by or simply omitting a lot of negative material that might interfere with a heroic view of the man.Kinsey was a highly intelligent, fearless man and an unusually skilled interviewer whose question-and-answer techniques heavily influenced the way polls and surveys are done today. Conservatives seem quaint when they argue that Kinsey’s two reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), should never have been done. Someone was going to do a big sexual survey pointing out the gap between what sex really was in America and what the culture thought it should be. Kinsey got there first, and he deserves credit for it. But he was a very odd, creepy fellow whose findings and methods (often slapdash and chaotic, if not intentionally deceptive) are not really separable from the enormous moral impact he had on the culture.
A biographical note here: Years ago, I covered the world of sex research as part of my social-science beat at Time magazine. I quickly figured out that a lot of people in this world seemed to have entered it because of their unusual sexual tastes, opinions, or problems. I think this was certainly true earlier of Kinsey as well. He was an exhibitionist, a voyeur, and a masochist. (This is handled in the movie by Kinsey’s wife’s discovering he has sliced his foreskin. But Kinsey did more grotesque things to his genitals than you want to read about here.) One biographer, James H. Jones, argues that Kinsey was gay from the beginning and riven with guilt about it, but he married and thought of himself as bisexual. The obvious question here is this: What are the odds that a researcher with this set of orientations and attitudes would be drawn to the conclusion that all sexual behavior is equal and that orgasms (and nothing else) count, certainly not how you achieve them or with whom? I would say the odds are very, very good.
The movie stresses how relentlessly nonjudgmental Kinsey was. But as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, Kinsey’s absence of judgment was itself a form of judgment. Kinsey wrote: “What is right for one individual may be wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a worthwhile part of the next individual’s life.” That certainly defined Kinsey’s own sexual demons out of existence, but it left the field of sexology with a taboo-breaking, anything-goes legacy. It also left one huge open area that has stained sexology ever since: adult-child sex.
Outraged critics of Kinsey often focus on Table 34 of the male book. It lists the sexual responses of children acquired from one of Kinsey’s sources, a pedophile who kept detailed records of his child rapes, including those of a baby of 5 months and a 4-year-old he sexually manipulated for 24 hours. As a nonjudgmental person, Kinsey of course did not bother turning the pedophile over to the law. His critics accuse Kinsey of “Mengele medicine,” meaning that he presided over Nazi-like experiments. Not so. We have no evidence that Kinsey and his team conducted or approved of any child rapes. He just used the records of pedophiles, coldly described in the first Kinsey report as males who “with their adult backgrounds are able to recognize and interpret the boys’ experiences.” Table 34 was a moral horror, and neither Kinsey nor his patron, the Rockefeller Foundation, seemed to think that anything was amiss.
Table 34 set the stage for what has become dogma in the sex world: All humans are sexual from birth, and since children are sexual, they should be expected to behave sexually. Does this mean that children should be able to have sex with adults? Kinsey didn’t say, but he wrote that the psychic damage to children who have sex with adults comes from the horrified reaction of adults, not from the sex itself. That opinion, a very large bone tossed to advocates of adult-child sex, has become a mantra in the sex world. Some who promote the mantra are sincere—a show of horror by parents of an abused child may indeed make matters worse. But many are advocates of adult-child sex hiding behind a pro-child argument. In my Time days, the air was so thick with sex-world arguments in favor of incest and adult-child sex that I threw a lot of them together in a one-page report. The list included a defense of incest by Wardell Pomeroy, a coauthor of the Kinsey reports. Now that people are once again chattering about Kinsey’s legacy, I hope across-the-board nonjudgmentalism and adult-child sex come up for discussion.
"I am SO going to puke."
I understand your reaction, it is also important to understand why Kinsey's language can be used as legitimizing the results. As putrid as it sounds, this is more an issue of advocacy and reception.
For example, it is true that children look to adults particularly when they are small for the appropriate reaction to pain. Think of small children who fall down, and immediately look up at the adult. Their reaction is halted, and does not reach fruition until the adult reacts. In that sense if you smile and say "great fall!", they will not cry....where as if you over react and look horrified, they will howl.
It is this rational, that is being used to prove that if an abused child were to receive positive accolades from an adult, the behavior would not necessarily immediately be received as a negative.
What needs to be repeated and reenforced is that it is the adults responsibility to protect children from both dangerous physical injury and dangerous psychological injury....and not misuse the excuse of moral equivalency in the reaction to the injury.
Ping
Molesting children....trauma based mind control....
all in the unholy name of "Science"
The Nazis in the death camps were not the only ones who could come up with such lofty words and describe their evil as nobel ideals
The sexual immorality of the 60s brought us the arbortion hollocaust of the 70's to our present days...
Hollywood reveals it's intent upon the America of our founders once again...
The hatred of our Christ the hatred of our founders and the hatred of our culture....
And we keep making them rich so they can pump our kids heads with more of their filth...and other lies...
Must have missed that one in Catechism class....
By then we'll be voting on DMA from the rooftops. They're not going to TOUCH my kids.
By then we'll be voting on DMA from the rooftops. They're not going to TOUCH my kids.
bump!
This is simply trying to let this animal Kinsey off the hook. This is what is printed in a related article:
infants as young as five months were timed with a stopwatch for "orgasm" by Kinsey's "technically trained" aides, with one four-year-old tested 24 consecutive hours for an alleged 26 "orgasms." from :
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41407 ^
Given that information Kinsey is a child molester by proxy at the very least! This monster must have told the molesters to use a stopwatch and write down what they were doing. People need to know this before they spend their money for another Hollywood love affair with a child molester!
A couple of points. First, people who pioneer a particular science or area of science aren’t perfect. Sigmund Freud was one of the most unscientific pioneers in a field of study; his conclusions usually lacked any research and were baseless hypothesis. Yet he is still regarded as the founder of modern psychology despite the fact his conclusions are largely ignored. Kinsey pioneered human sexual scientific research. That doesn’t mean that his research, methodology and conclusions are correct. It only means he was the first.
Some contend that attacking Kinsey is the same as attacking the science, which I disagree with. Peer review is a heartless process that crushes bad science. If you want to avoid scrutiny by your peers, you avoid peer review and just publish a book ( a practice still done today ). The science of studying human sexuality is commendable and needed. But making erroneous conclusions is the real crime.
The charges that he was a pedophile seem to confuse the nature of his research with his own sexual actions. Out of all the things I’ve read online, I’ve never seen a documented instance that proved that Kinsey sexually molested children. He did a host of other sexual acts, but molesting children wasn’t one of them. His used records of pedophiles to make poor conclusions. His adherence to medical ethics (using SS “research” )were deplorable. He is guilty of being a poor scientist, but the charges of pedophilia are ungrounded.
Michael Moore is pushing his F911 into every nomination category he is still eligible for (he passed the deadline on Best Documentary, in part so he could try to get a US broadcast, I suspect also so there was not further investigation in that Cuba state television broadcast).
In recent years, we had The Cider House Rules selling the abortion agenda in the pre-RoeV.Wade 1930s also get Oscar nominations.
The Silent Majority needs to tune out Hollywood's award ceremonies and films if this is "the best" propaganda they have to offer us. Nothing good from "other" perspectives.
In this year of the political documentary, how many Best Documentary Feature/Short will be an anti-Bush/Iraq War film???
Screw Hollywood before they screw America.
I've never heard anyone say these studies should not have been done. I have heard (and agree) that Kinsey should have conducted his studies more carefully with less bias. His studies indicate that 10% of the population is homosexual. No other study supports his conclusions in that arena.
I was suprised (and pleased) that the radio crime reporter on KFI (www.kri640.com)
mentioned his apprehension about the current film...
because of Kinsey's questionable investigations into pedophilia.
Well , thats the thing. Doing research on something doesn't mean you approve it. Lots of people are currently doing research on all kinds of horrible things like genocide, that doesn't mean the researcher condones the topic they are studing.
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