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 secret; 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. How was Kinsey’s work received in the 1940s