SEXIS WRONG

litical and social consequences. Linney is stunning as Clara
McMillen, Kinsey’s freethinking, outspoken, appreciative
(though in many ways long-suffering) wife. And John Lithgow
brings real depth to the character of Kinsey’s Bible-thumping,
antisexual father (“Lust has a thousand avenues—the dance
hall, the ice cream parlor, the tenement salon, the Turkish
bath.... Some speculate that rampant adultery is the cause
of earthquakes.”), who might easily have been reduced to
caricature by a less talented performer.
One of the greatest achievements of Kinsey is the subtlety
with which it examines the emerging sexual subculture of
Kinsey’s associates and researchers—what develops, sexually
and socially, among a group of people whose personal
and professional lives fall decidedly outside of society’s sexual
norms. The film shows Kinsey, McMillen, and most of their
inner circle enthusiastically acting out their belief in sexual
openness between consenting partners, but then having to
deal with the complicated emotional consequences of their
multiple involvements—a task that takes them well outside
the comfortable realm of scientific objectivity. To its credit,
Kinsey depicts their nonmonogamous pathfinding as neither
a lighthearted romp through fields of unlimited sexual pleasure
nor a foolhardy error of sexual excess, offering instead
a sympathetic look at a group of people committed to bringing
the radicalism of their sexual politics into their personal
lives, and struggling—successfully, for the most part—with
the sometimes painful, potentially destructive emotional and
relational issues that their actions call into play.
Kinsey paints an amusing (and horrifying) picture of the predominant
sexual culture of the 1930s, offering
a collage of the sorts of sexual misunderstandings
that spurred one young zoology professor
to undertake a huge sexual survey that would
change the belief system of the nation. Cunnilingus,
it was commonly believed, would result in a woman
becoming infertile. Sexual intercourse was the only form of
sex worth pursuing, once available (in marriage). A boy who
masturbates is likely to be “sexually dead” as an adult. As for
manually stimulating women for arousal, Kinsey offers this
quote from The Ideal Marriage, the leading sexual guide of
the day: “There is but one finger of love to approach the female
genitalia and that is the male penis.”
The film shows that it was Kinsey’s desire to debunk these
sorts of sexually destructive myths that inspired him to undertake
his monumental work. “The lack of information on
what people do sexually leaves most of us feeling anxious or
guilty,” he instructs students in his popular course on human
sexuality (available only to those who were married, engaged,
or could pretend as much). “The gap between what we assume
people do and what they actually do is enormous.”
As Kinsey states in his introduction to Sexual Behavior in the
Human Male, his purpose was to obtain “an accumulation
of scientific fact [about sexual behavior] completely divorced
from questions of moral value and social custom.” This is
Kinsey’s Great Heresy—daring to separate scientific information
about sex from the mediating influences of morality and
social convention. But to Kinsey, issues of morality and convention
only muddy the waters, only act to prevent people
from telling the truth about sex—to themselves as well as to
others. “The only way to study sex with scientific accuracy is
to strip away everything but physiology,” Kinsey says. As for
love: “It’s impossible to measure love, and without measurement
there can be no science. When it comes to love, we’re
all in the dark.”
Condon’s main purpose with this film is clearly to tell the
Kinsey story as history, but he is obviously aware of the allegorical
parallels between what Kinsey faced in 1948 and
what advocates of sexual truth, information, openness, and
diversity face in the US today, and he effectively uses the film
as a forum for the importance of all of the above.
The film is a virtual paean to diversity in all its forms, sexual
and otherwise, a diversity Kinsey discovered while studying
the gall wasp long before he became interested in human
sexual behavior. Kinsey collected and catalogued over one
million (!) gall wasps, intrigued that no two of them were ever
alike. “If every single living thing is different from every other
living thing,” Kinsey exults, “then diversity becomes life’s
one irreducible fact.” As for humans, “Everyone is different,”
he proclaims. “The problem is that everyone wants to be the
“The gap between what we assume
people do and what they actually
do is enormous.”
same. They’re so eager to be part of the group that they’re
willing to betray their inner nature to get there.”
Kinsey is full of references and scenes that, on one hand,
are about the misunderstandings and political backlash that
Kinsey faced in the 1950s, but at a second level speak equally
strongly to the sexual political struggles we face today. “In
a puritan culture, sex remains a dirty secret,” Kinsey says,
for then and for now, adding: “Sexual morality needs to be
reformed, and science will show the way.”
Challenged by a political movement that seeks to discredit and
undermine his work, Kinsey angrily responds, “The forces of
chastity are mobilizing once again to challenge the scientist,
intimidate him, convince him to cease his research.” Again,
words that are as timely today as they were when Kinsey uttered
them fifty years ago.
EVERYBODY’S SIN IS NOBODY’S SIN 59