Kinsey Confidential

Accuracy in Academia ^ | November 10, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

Although primary source information on legendary sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey has been out for more than a decade, it does not stop academics from heaping admiration upon his legacy that borders on veneration.

“His formative years were spent in a home and in a nation where many middle-class parents enshrouded sex in shame, heaping more than enough guilt on young people to mangle and twist them,” Theodore M. Brown and Elizabeth Fee wrote in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003. “This was particularly true for those like Kinsey who aspired but failed to achieve moral perfection.”

“His great accomplishment was to take his pain and suffering and use it to transform himself into an instrument of social reform, a secular evangelist who proclaimed a new sensibility about human sexuality.” Brown teaches at the University of Rochester.

Fee currently serves as chief of the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine. Additionally, she has long been affiliated with Johns Hopkins.

We contacted these two authors to find out if they still hold to this assessment despite what we now know about Dr. Kinsey’s heavy reliance on the testimonies of incarcerated sex offenders. “Of course,” Dr. Brown wrote. “but I also believe that he saw himself as a secular evangelist.”

Thus far, Dr. Fee has not responded to our inquiry.

Former Accuracy in Academia executive director Dan Flynn shows in his book Intellectual Morons that many of Kinsey’s case studies were far from normal by today’s standards let alone the more restrained times that the good doctor lived and worked in. “Preselecting homosexuals was only part of the equation to bias the results,” Flynn wrote. “Kinsey also stacked the sample group with prison inmates.”

[Slyfox]

The admiration for Kinsey reminds me of those who still insist that Vladimir Lenin’s body, “is so life-like.”

[IronJack]

Sigmund Freud is a virtual laughingstock in psychology today because his research methods were so dubious. Yet Alfred Kinsey, whose methodology centered on that ancient technique called “Making Stuff Up,” and who dabbled in the social sciences when he wasn’t out chasing butterflies, is regarded as a credible source of information on human sexuality?

Uh huh.

[Seruzawa]

Sigmund Freud is a virtual laughingstock in psychology today because his research methods were so dubious. Ironically psychology today is also a big laughingstock for exactly the same reasons.

[boop]

Don’t forget “Mr.X” the guy who had sex with children. Kinsey used him as an example of infant arousability.
1) How did he get in contact with Mr.X?
2) Was Mr.X real, or did Kinsey make him up?
3) Why did Kinsey not call the cops on this molester if what said was true?

[wetgundog]

He was one sick F’er from Indiana. Did a lot of his research first hand in cruising bathhouses and loaned out his wife to his resaerch interns. A few of his researcher’s wives also got into the act.

All for so called science.

[Steely Tom]

Yet Alfred Kinsey, whose methodology centered on that ancient technique called “Making Stuff Up,” and who dabbled in the social sciences when he wasn’t out chasing butterflies, is regarded as a credible source of information on human sexuality?

Telling people what they want to hear, telling them that the things their consciences are bothering them about are actually A-OK, and, in fact even healthy and "scientific," well, that's been a great way to get yourself canonized in the post-WWII western world.

[Slyfox]

I always thought “Mr. X” was Kinsey himself.

[boop]

Interesting! You, knnow that makes sense, because he talked so clinically about giving infant males erections. What a sicko. But we already know that.