Chapter 7 - Dr. Judith Reisman

Bloomington, Indiana. “In fact, in the ones that were not reported, I’m having a hard
time recalling any traumatic effects at all. I certainly can’t recall any from among the
brother-sister participants and I can’t put my finger on any among the parent-child
participants.” The nation was hardly prepared for such talk in the ’50s, but Gebhard is
releasing Kinsey’s startling incest material for incorporation in Warren Farrell’s work-inprogress,
The Last Taboo: The Three Faces of Incest [Emphasis added]. 74
Interestingly, that was presumably the same “incest material” that Gebhard, in his later letter to
this author, claimed entailed “too few cases [so that] we omitted incest, except for one brief mention”
in the Female volume.
WHO CONDUCTED, TIMED, AND FILMED THE EXPERIMENTS?
Kinsey’s experiments were understandably conducted in secrecy. His zoologist’s taxonomic categorization
methods are evident everywhere. Many subsequent schools of “sex science” have adopted his
zoological methods of collecting, organizing, and classifying. In Kinsey’s words:
The techniques of this research have been… born out of the senior author’s long-time
experience with a problem in insect taxonomy. The transfer from insect to human
material is not illogical, for it has been a transfer of a method that may be applied to the
study of any variable populations. 75
Such human sex measurements and categorizing were virtually unknown in the 1940s. According
to Kinsey,
None of the older authors, with the possible exception of Hirschfeld, attempted any
systematic coverage of particular items in each history, and consequently there was
nothing to be added or averaged, even for the populations with which they dealt…. The
present study is designed as a first step in the accumulation of a body of scientific fact that
may provide the basis for sounder generalizations about the sexual behavior of certain
groups and, some day, even of our American population as a whole. 76
Kinsey effected the sexual reform of “our American population as a whole” via zoological quantification,
accumulating copious statistics, tables, charts, measurements and percentages.
Kinsey senior researcher John Gagnon, speaking of himself and his
colleagues, noted that as a teenager:
[A local homosexual] plied us with beer and evidence from the Kinsey
Report showing that although homosexuality might be a crime and a sin, it
was statistically common, phylogenetically normal, and might indeed be
pleasurable and profitable. This was my first experience in the use of sexual
science for practical goals.… Kinsey wished to justify disapproved patterns
of sexual conduct by an appeal to biological origins.… Putting a percentage
in front of the topic made it speakable. 77
If Kinsey was not responsible for any experimentation on children, as maintained
by Kinsey Institute Director John Bancroft and former Director June
Reinisch, 78 who was? In their attempt to minimize the public outcry over Kinsey’s
A young John
Gagnon, sex
researcher for the
Kinsey Institute and
current human
sexuality science
authority.
THE CHILD EXPERIMENTS 161