SEXIS WRONG

As conservative outrage mounted over his studies, Kinsey
was accused in Congress of being part of the Communist
conspiracy to undermine American morals, and pressure was
brought on his financial benefactor, the Rockefeller Foundation,
to disassociate itself from his work. Fearing political
backlash, the Foundation agreed to back out of “the business
of sex research,” offering the sorry excuse that Kinsey was
now in a position to get funding from other sources. That
proved not to be the case. Attempts to find other sources
of funds—Indiana University, the Huntington Hartford Foundation—all
failed. In 1954, no one wanted to jump into the
sexual fires that Kinsey’s books had ignited.
“[A grant] might be misunderstood as an endorsement of
sex,” Huntington Hartford explains to Kinsey, apologetically,
at the end of a dinner party awash in chic sexual conversation
and innuendo. “I can’t afford that kind of exposure.”
of a film—especially a strong, well-produced, well-received
film—that honors Kinsey for his contribution to moving the US
out of the sexual dark ages infuriates sexual conservatives.
Having failed to pressure Liam Neeson to back away from
starring in the film, conservative Christian groups mounted a
national campaign to discredit both Kinsey the film and Kinsey
the man.
Generation Life, a collegiate anti-abortion group, planned to
picket theaters showing the film nationwide, objecting to
Kinsey’s “pseudo-scientific defense of sexual perversions”
and his responsibility “for my generation being forced to deal
face-to-face with the devastating consequences of sexually
transmitted diseases, pornography, and abortion,” according
to Generation Life spokesperson Brandi Swindell. Morality in
Media president Robert Peters dismissed Kinsey as “an effort
to rehabilitate a father of the hellish sexual revolution.”
Nine additional books that Kinsey hoped to publish never
came into existence. His dream of expanding his 12,000 sex
histories to a larger sample of 100,000 also never came to
pass. Lost in a sea of defeat, Kinsey grew increasingly depressed.
He died of a heart ailment and pneumonia in 1956,
just two years after losing his Rockefeller funding.
Is sex most fundamentally a moral issue or a psychological
one? Does one arrive at a sense of sexual ethics from
a preordained list of proper and improper acts and partners
or by paying respectful attention to the dynamics of intimate
interconnectedness, pursuit of pleasure, and possibilities of
mutual personal discovery? Is sex, most basically, something
to be studied, observed, and explored, or something to be
controlled, limited, and feared?
Having failed to pressure Liam
Neeson to back away from starring
in the film, conservative Christian
groups mounted a national campaign
to discredit both Kinsey the film and
Kinsey the man.
Do we seek to understand sex from the standpoint of rational,
scientific study, or from the perspective of undocumented
myths and rigid moral beliefs? Do we address sex from a
fact-based or from a belief-based point of view?
These issues, the ones that made Kinsey’s work so controversial
in 1948, are very much the subject of intense national
debate today. So it’s not surprising that the release of Kinsey
stirred up yet another storm of antisexual protest. The idea
In the words of Arlen Williams, a conservative Illinois columnist,
“A movie is now being shown that promotes one of the
most evil and destructive figures in the 20th Century”—Alfred
Kinsey, “Darwinist zoologist, sex researcher, sex research
defrauder, sexual anti-moralist, sexual abuse enabler, personally
sexual pervert [sic], and pseudo-scientific high priest of
the Sexual Revolution.” The issue, to Williams, is straightforward
enough—the divide between those who remember
“the harmful practices of sin” and “those who uphold [the
idea that] life may be enjoyed from beginning through end.”
Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, and
spokesperson for Concerned Women for America, similarly
bemoaned Kinsey’s contribution to the changing sex culture
of the last sixty years. “Kinsey’s conclusions paved the way
for condom-based sex education in...schools,” he said, “and
furthered the agenda of pro-abortion groups.... From abortion
to homosexuality to pornography, Kinsey’s research
has been cited as proof [that] science
has done away with societal [sexual] restraints
based on religious beliefs.”
Knight, who says that “Kinsey’s proper place
is with Nazi doctor Josef Mengele,” called Kinsey
“a sexual revolutionary masquerading as
an objective scientist.”
What Knight fails to realize is the sad fact that, in a culture as
irrationally antisexual as ours, just being an objective scientist
who dares to study sex itself makes a person a sexual revolutionary
of the highest order. In a social system based on
sexual ignorance and misinformation, the very idea of sexual
science, sexual knowledge, and sexual understanding is subversive.
60 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG