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.
Being non judgmental doesn't make him a pedophile either. It might make him unethical ( which I would certainly agree with) and possibly amoral.
True. So give them condoms.
Hey. Kids are going to smoke anyway, so let's give them free cigs, too.
They "know" that tobacco use in movies influences kids but the sex, disrespect,and foul language are just a f****n' part of life and to not include them would be censorship and besides they don't drive the culture.
Welcome to wackyworld (to quote a 'truth' add).
The sex positive types are okay with adult minor sex, minor minor sex, unmarried sex, adulterous sex, human animal sex, related human sex, same sex encounters, group sex encounters, hey, it's just sex.
Rape is the only thing they oppose (on the grounds there is no consent, rape fantasies are okay and they don't like to acknowledge that there is an age when minors are TOO YOUNG TO GIVE CONSENT).
He certainly laid a foundation for others in institutional settings WHO DO ADVOCATE IT.
I don't believe in anything without some sort of hard evidence. Show me documents that support the notion that Kinsey actively engaged pedophiles to molest children.
Click this link and read what Dr. Judith Reisman has to say:
http://www.drjudithreisman.org/
If anyone promotes pedophilia, and knowingly supports pedophiles, and supports the concept of child abuse and molestation by pedophiles, he's as bad as anyone who actually performs the act.
Why don't you read some non-pro-Kinsey research and articles and quit supporting a debunked "researcher" who knowingly promoted all manner of sexual deviance as well as sex crimes against children?
Ok, first thing: Where on this thread did I say I was supporting Kinsey? In my first post I trashed Kinsey for being a bad scientist , thats not exactly a ringing endorsement of his work. I'm asking for HARD evidence to prove to me that he activley supported pedophiles.
Second, Reisman's web site was a informative (Thanks!).
Here is her link that attempts to link pedophilia and Kinsey...
http://www.drjudithreisman.org/kinseypedos.htm
She's relying on the Tripp interview to provide a smoking gun, but Tripp never actually saw Kinsey with any pedophiles. He speculates as to Kinsey's methodology based on what he knew about Kinsey and how he approached problems. After reading this, I had two thoughts. First - I wanted to take a shower because that read made me feel grimey. Second, Kinsey probably did have contact with some of them if Tripps speculation is correct. But at this point, the evidence is still Hearsay. No one saw anything. We don't know if Kinsey made up his research.
Tripp, on the other hand, took pictures of two boys sodomizing each other and later gave it to Kinsey. While thats technically not pedophilia, it is morally reprehensible.
Reisman has written two books about Kinsey (IIRC), and there are others as well. I haven't read them, although I probably should. I already have trouble sleeping sometimes. :-(
I just can't become completely informed about everything, although I should try harder.
It's kind of like reading more books to find out exactly how evil Hitler was.
It's already being used by pedophiles, along with changing the language, i.e. adult-child sex or intergenerational sex instead of child sexual abuse.
That line made me sit up and take notice. Exactly what is he advocating here?
Reisman writes that the film makers located another Kinsey accomplice in Berlin, Dr. Fritz Von Balluseck, the notorious Nazi pedophile who contributed his child abuse data during the twenty year period of 1936 to 1956 to Kinsey's research data base....
Apparently, Von Balluseck was sending details of his experiences to Kinsey on a regular basis. Letters from Kinsey to Von Ballusek encouraging the Nazi to continue his "research" were found and reviewed by the presiding judge, Dr. Henrich Berger. Berger repeatedly expressed his outrage at Kinsey for not turning Von Ballusek in to the authorities....
The German newspaper, the National Zeitung wrote on May 15, 1957: "Today the court has got four diaries and in these diaries with cynicism and passion, he (Von Balluseck) recorded his crimes against 100 children in the smallest detail. He sent the detail of his experiences regularly to the U.S. sex researcher, Kinsey. The latter was very interested and kept up a regular and lively correspondence with Von Ballusek."
IL MEDIA UNSPUN: Kinsey & Ebert, At the Movies
"People of informed conscience are exposing this film and its subject for what they are. Roger Ebert doesn't like that. . . Read more...
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