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.
Take a long look at this, folks. This will be the banner by which pedophiles will seek to legitimize their "alternate lifestyle" 30 years from now. And those of us who reject it will be labelled as "hateful pedophobes."
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.
There is an extensive porn collection in the Kinsey archives at Indiana University. As I understand it, Indiana residents are permitted access (although most may not know this) since they as taxpayers subsidize the storage. I suspect that there are a number of illegal items in the collection.
disgusting.............barf
Here are links to institutional advocacies that stand defiant in the face of the notion of abstinence:
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Check the links/text here (preserved for posterity):
...but this is not the case with All About Sex. On the contrary, the success and popularity of this site since 1997 has been nothing short of phenomenal and we appreciate all the positive sentiment - it should be clear to any sex educator or parent familiar with this site that kids want and need open, honest and non-judgmental answers to their sex and sexuality-related questions, and that if such a forum is provided to them, they will flourish with it and ask questions they wouldn't be comfortable asking anywhere else. Rather than the days when talking about sex was only done in whispers and biology class, today's kids have so many more options for exploring the subject of sex, and, frankly, their own sexual interests. When AAS started, there was only one other site that had anything positive to say to kids about sex, but now there are many, many sites with excellent, open and honest information about sex.However, being so successful has a negative side as well, and keeping up with the popularity of the site and the work involved in maintaining the site and providing regular, fresh content, has become more than we can handle along with our obligations to our own families and employers. Expense has been another factor, although our host, Advances.com, has always worked with us to bring bandwidth expenses down, and this site has never been a profit-making site, and has never even taken donations. So, for a combinations of reasons, we are closing the site and hope everyone will understand. It has been a fantastic 7 years and we have been touched by so many of the fantastic regulars and kids who have poured out their hearts and souls talking about their sexual dilemmas, their happy and exciting first experiences, and their traumas and disappointments. Judging by the comments we frequently get, it seems that we've touched a few people's lives and been a positive force in general, and for that we are thankful.
Below are links to many other excellent resources for parents and for teens.
Very Sincerely, The owners and volunteers of All About Sex.org
RESOURCES FOR TEENS AND PARENTS :
Advocates For Youth - Calls for politicians to "Respect Young People's Right To Be Responsible". Excellent site that has a section focusing on responsible sexual rights of adolescents, with excellent reading material about sex education elsewhere in the world and how it compares to the U.S.
gURL.com - A truly fantastic website created for girls that has an extensive area on sex and sexuality. They give honest, factual answers to girl's questions without pushing any ideology. They also have an excellent set of books for adolescent girls called the "Deal With It" series.
PFLAG Talk - Parents & Friends of Lesbian And Gay Youth - One of the most well-known and solid organizations available to gay, lesbian and bisexual youth - http://www.critpath.org/pflag-talk/
Being Girl.com - A really cool website created by the Tampax Corporation that talks about many sex-related issues (and has a sex-positive attitude), with a focus, of course, on the female body.
SexPedia - From the Discovery Channel's website, in the section focusing on sexual health, comes a 'encyclopedia' of sorts of sexual facts, from A to Z
The Coalition For Positive Sexuality ~ This site was the ONLY other site when we started that promoted a POSITIVE approach to adolescents and sex, and they helped make the AAS website so popular by being the first site to link to us! They have excellent instructions on condoms and other safe sex practices.
Go Ask Alice! - Now one of the most established and well-known resources available to people of all ages dealing with health, in general, and more specifically, sexuality and sexual health. It is run by Columbia University in New York and is very well done.
Like It Is! - The Brits Do Exactly That... They Truly Tell It Like It Really Is! No Political Agenda, No Religious Dogma, Just Honest And Open Conversation About Teen Sexuality, Discussed The Way It SHOULD Be In America (but isn't)
The Joys Of Teen Sex - Obviously, This Website Is Not In America... But It Is No Parody... It Is A Non-Politicized View On Teen Sex In The U.K., Where Adolescent Sexuality Is Considered... NORMAL (gasp!)
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Condoms!! - A Fantastic Resource From The People At CONDOMANIA!
SIECUS - The Sexuality Information Education Council of the United States - A resource geared toward sex educators and parents.
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SOME ADDITIONAL FACTORS...
To be perfectly honest, there are other factors in our decision to shut down, and although those factors are a little embarrassing to admit, they are important enough that others need to know about them. Speaking now just for myself as the creator of this site and primary owner, I have had other things to consider in keeping AAS open the last year or so including the fact that I now have a wife to consider and a family of my own to start, and negative opinions about this site (even though we rarely hear any) no longer affect me alone. Also, sadly, the political climate in America has changed so dramatically since the Bush Administration and the Tom Delay Congress came to power that people no longer feel that they can speak out freely on controversial issues - especially if one is daring to disagree with the current political forces.
[snip]
Only a few weeks after No New Money went live last August, 24 House Republicans, led by Joseph Pitts, R-Pa., jotted off a letter to HHS Secretary Thompson asking that both SIECUS and Advocates for Youth (which was listed on the site along with more than a hundred other 'supporting organizations') be investigated."
And that is just one small example of what the political climate has become... SIECUS is now under further vicious attack by Republicans in Congress and a score of Religious Right groups. Keep in mind that SIECUS has been writing the sex education curricula for public and private schools in America since 1964 and is hardly a "controversial" group. To get a better idea of exactly what is going on, you can read the complete last article posted on the AAS site in December 2003. You can also visit the SIECUS website for the latest news.
[snip]
Despite all of the talk about condoms in schools promoting an end to STDs and pregnancies, I believe that they are merely there to advance the argument for underage sex. Kids are still getting pregnant only now we are of the opinion that "it's going to happen anyway". If you dig deeper into their writings you will find that they believe abstinence to be wrong (not that it doesn't work). They believe that it is unhealthy to supress any sexual desires.
A few years ago the American Physchological Association put out a similar report which they retracted very quickly after a public outcry.
His studies included the 'orgasms' of infants... now how do you think they managed to make an infant 'orgasmic' if they didn't 'do something' to them?
Probably won't be but another decade before the APA removes pedophilia from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That was the first step they took to legitimize homosexuality.
"He" didn't do it. He relied on child molestors to report back to them what they observed AND didn't turn them in to the police.
I said 'his studies' ... I left that a bit in the gray area.
Its a good thing the APA has very little real influence
Among Liberals, the APA's pronouncements are treated like gospel. They become talking points for all manner of abominations. Where do you think this Cult of Victimology sprang from? That's right...the APA.
And it wasn't until the Leftists took over the APA and banished homosexuality from the DSM-II that the homosexual agenda began to blossom in the United States.
But liberals react that way when 3 people get together and form an organization. They form dozens of 'organizations' that are merely a few people that send out press releases. I found one address in St. Louis (I think) where about 17 'organizations' of the left shared an address and phone number.
All of their (or his/her) press releases are probably treated like gospel by the left too. Its because liberals are followers, they are sheep, they are 'easy to command'.
Liberals have some kind of mental disorder I am nearly convinced. Some day, if I become wealthy (**insert laugh**) or get a federal grant -haha- I will study it and possibly find a cure for liberalism. =o)
I'm going to stop reading any articles about two people--Kinsey and Arafat. Everytime I read something, I feel like I need to boil my eyeballs.
Alfred Kinsey - one of the pillars of junk science. Now a hagiography from the degenerates of Hollywood. Wow, what a surprise!
Warning, the pedophile movement wanted this film, they got it. It is up to us to work AGAINST their agenda.
Take a long look at this, folks. This will be the banner by which pedophiles will seek to legitimize their "alternate lifestyle" 30 years from now. And those of us who reject it will be labelled as "hateful pedophobes."
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.
This marks the first time I have ever been at odds with John Leo, one of my favorite commentators. While he doesn't embrace Kinsey by any means, he softpedals Table 34, distancing Kinsey from "research" by child rapists. I don't buy for one second that Kinsey didn't direct or preside over those "experiments" any less than he did others.
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