TEXT E No one person has done
more to shape modern sexual values in America and therefore the Western world
—than Dr. Alfred Kinsey. The researcher’s ground-breaking 1949 study, "Sexual
Behaviour in the Human Male", which followed by its companion work on females,
tore aside the curtain of silence on sexuality and lifted the taboos on talking
freely about what popular culture would previously only refer to as "makin’
whoopee". Kinsey’s research into what makes us tick in the
bedroom not only laid the groundwork for the 1960s sexual revolution, but also
did the same for much of the theory behind modern-day sex education. After
Sigmund Freud made his career reminding us how repressed we were, Kinsey grabbed
the baton and went on to show us what we could do about it. But now his post-war
glory has faded and conservative critics point to AIDS, drugs and other social
ills as natural products of 1960s counter-culture. Kinsey’s star is on the wane;
indeed, new allegations, some of them partly justified, are not only casting
doubt on his scientific methods, but asking whether the good doctor should have
been thrown in jail as a child abuser. The anti-Kinsey ball
started rolling in the 1980s when a researcher called Judith Reisman published a
book, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, questioning his methods, especially using a large
number of convicts, and unconventional and promiscuous interviewees in his
research, while claiming that his eventual findings on sexual nature were
representative of average, heterosexual citizens. This theme was
taken up late last year by the Family Research Council in Washington, possibly
the United States’ most influential group lobbying for traditional, Christian
family values. Kinsey is a natural target for the organisation, since it
believes that the researcher’s aim was nothing less than the destruction of
traditional moral values and the initiation of a new order of
free-love. The council has just won a small victory. It recently
produced a video and booklet asking serious questions about a section in
Kinsey’s work in which he produced statistics on the rate of sexual climax for
children as young as four months. While it now seems incredible that no one in
1949 bothered to ask how Kinsey could possibly know how young boys were reaching
climax, the council finally did. The video demanded to know what experiments
Kinsey did, whether they involved criminal abuse, and where those victims are
now. Since Kinsey had long gone, it was left to the Kinsey
Institute at Indiana University to speak on his behalf. Its director revealed a
long-standing secrets no, the great man had not laid his hands on any
youngsters, he said, all his information came from one single source: a
paedophile who had had sex with over 300 boys. The admission has cast serious
doubt on the famous doctor’s credentials (the child molester in the study
conveniently died in 1955) and provided ammunition to those who wish to demonise
his entire legacy. Evidence that the anti-Kinsey movement was
gaining ground came in 1994, when President Bill Clinton had to sack his Surgeon
General, Joycelyn Elders, for making the Kinseyesque remark that schoolchildren
should be made aware of masturbation. Now, the father of free love must be
squirming in his grave. According to the information in paragraph 2, Kinsey is ______ today in America.
A.regarded with suspicion B.more popular than ever C.a rising star D.as popular as in the 1950s