I had to write this paper for my Human Sexuality class in the spring semester of 09'. It is a reactionary paper to the movie Kinsey starring Liam Neeson, and Laura Linney among many other well known stars including Tim Curry, Chris O' Donnell, Peter Sarsgard, John Lithgow, Oliver Platt and Timothy Hutton to name a few. It was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Bill Condon. The movie is really great and I highly recommend it.
The first time I viewed this movie last year I was blown away by it. I was amazed that Alfred Kinsey took on such a difficult endeavor with such respect and unbiased attention to detail. I am also a lover of the natural world and so I identified with Alfred Kinsey on an almost personal level. I am thankful for the work he did. The public view of sex in the 40’s was quite prudish and interesting. Sex was not something that was discussed in mixed company. People believed, and taught their children; that sex was a good way to get STD’s, masturbation was a cause of blindness and insanity, and any sexual position other than the missionary position between a man and a woman was the work of the devil. I myself cannot imagine living in a society that scorned one of our most natural human behaviors.
Alfred Kinsey was a biologist at heart. The film goes into some detail about his childhood, his love of nature and how he escaped from his overbearing father to the outside world. He was at home there with the animals and enjoyed watching them for hours on end doing what animals do. He received his PhD in biology at Harvard University and became a professor of zoology at Indiana University much to his fathers’ dismay. I believe that his rebellious nature started there at home.
Dr. Kinsey’s curiosity about the science of sexuality began when he finally married his beloved Clara and their wedding night was less than spectacular. I felt awful and embarrassed for them, they must have built it up in their minds and had to be really disappointed when it was painful and not fun at all. Being a scientist he was insistent that this was just another problem that had to have a solution. I cannot imagine being so uneducated about sex! Had it not been for his background in biology and his scientific mind they might have just suffered silently in a sexless marriage for no reason other than they didn’t know any better. It makes me wonder how many countless couples in those days did suffer for no reason.
The seed for his research was planted in his mind when his zoology students at Indiana University began coming to him with questions about sex. Some of the things the students told him he viewed as ludicrous. He wanted to know where they had gotten such crazy ideas about sex. A good example in the film was the newly married couple that said they would never try oral sex because the young mans brother told him that it caused infertility. Dr. Kinsey assured them that this was not true but they insisted that because there was no study proving this wrong that they were going to be safe and not try it. I can just imagine his frustration at not having concrete answers backed up by evidence for the students. After talking to these students he wondered where they were learning such things and found a book about how to have a good moral marriage, he referred to it as “hooey”.
Being a scientist, he decided to try and get a marriage course added to the curriculum at the University so he could teach the students facts about sexuality and not some weird lessons on morality. His class was full to the brim with students trying to learn the truth about sex. I can just imagine the curiosity of young people in those times. In the film you see all the faces of students asking questions about masturbation and whether or not they are normal. Up until Alfred Kinsey’s marriage class sexuality was taught in a type of health/hygiene class that just reinforced the crazy ideas of the times but did little to help students with their marriage problems or answer their questions about their own blossoming sexuality. I have taken for granted my whole life the things people wouldn’t even talk about back then.
His actual sex study began modestly with just his class as his subjects. He soon realized that 100 people was not representative and started coming up with a plan. He made an assistant out of one of his students and made a questionnaire for his class to answer anonymously. I can just imagine his amazement at the answers he got. He of course wanted to go further and came up with ideas on how to get more people to join the study. He changed his method many times and finally came up with the idea for an encrypted form that would be filled out during an interview. He came up with ways to catch people in lies so that the study would be pure. He was very careful to pick clean cut intelligent, college educated men to conduct the interviews and carefully taught them how to make their subjects feel at ease. He was also very firm about them maintaining a fair and non-judgmental attitude at all times. The training of the interviewers was the most important aspect of the study. They were not allowed to react in anyway to any answers or the subjects might end the interview or not give truthful answers.
I was impressed with the way he conducted his study. He used his study of the gall wasps as a model in some respects. He wanted to have more subjects than anyone else. He seemed to be like a machine when asking questions and coming up with the survey. He treated all of his subjects the same. I was amused with the way he kept referring to sex toys as “replicas of man in his natural state”. He kept insisting that he was just a biologist.
At first the research went well. He was able to acquire funding from the Rockefeller foundation and they traveled all over the country gathering sex histories. It seems to me that all involved were having a blast. They were trading wives, experimenting with homosexuality, and Dr. Kinsey was gathering an impressive amount of information from the public. Kinsey never dreamed that the public as well as his staff were going to rebel at this explosion of sexuality. In his mind he was doing the world a great service. He was educating them about their bodies and their minds, not to mention that they were “normal”. Soon after the release of his second book on the female things started to fall apart, the public didn’t want to hear that their daughters and mothers were masturbating and had homosexual thoughts. His staff started arguing and fighting because they were having marital problems due to the sharing of each others partners. He seemed oblivious to the emotional pain he inflicted on his staff he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t just keep their emotions out of it. He was also blind to the fact that he himself was working too hard.
I think the research that Kinsey did is invaluable. I don’t believe going back to a more innocent time is the answer at all. If we learned one thing from Alfred Kinsey it was that people have been doing the same things in private that they have always done. He made it possible for people to regard their sexuality as a natural part of who we are and not something that we should be ashamed of, feel guilty about, or persecute others for.
Alfred Kinsey was a biologist at heart. The film goes into some detail about his childhood, his love of nature and how he escaped from his overbearing father to the outside world. He was at home there with the animals and enjoyed watching them for hours on end doing what animals do. He received his PhD in biology at Harvard University and became a professor of zoology at Indiana University much to his fathers’ dismay. I believe that his rebellious nature started there at home.
Dr. Kinsey’s curiosity about the science of sexuality began when he finally married his beloved Clara and their wedding night was less than spectacular. I felt awful and embarrassed for them, they must have built it up in their minds and had to be really disappointed when it was painful and not fun at all. Being a scientist he was insistent that this was just another problem that had to have a solution. I cannot imagine being so uneducated about sex! Had it not been for his background in biology and his scientific mind they might have just suffered silently in a sexless marriage for no reason other than they didn’t know any better. It makes me wonder how many countless couples in those days did suffer for no reason.
The seed for his research was planted in his mind when his zoology students at Indiana University began coming to him with questions about sex. Some of the things the students told him he viewed as ludicrous. He wanted to know where they had gotten such crazy ideas about sex. A good example in the film was the newly married couple that said they would never try oral sex because the young mans brother told him that it caused infertility. Dr. Kinsey assured them that this was not true but they insisted that because there was no study proving this wrong that they were going to be safe and not try it. I can just imagine his frustration at not having concrete answers backed up by evidence for the students. After talking to these students he wondered where they were learning such things and found a book about how to have a good moral marriage, he referred to it as “hooey”.
Being a scientist, he decided to try and get a marriage course added to the curriculum at the University so he could teach the students facts about sexuality and not some weird lessons on morality. His class was full to the brim with students trying to learn the truth about sex. I can just imagine the curiosity of young people in those times. In the film you see all the faces of students asking questions about masturbation and whether or not they are normal. Up until Alfred Kinsey’s marriage class sexuality was taught in a type of health/hygiene class that just reinforced the crazy ideas of the times but did little to help students with their marriage problems or answer their questions about their own blossoming sexuality. I have taken for granted my whole life the things people wouldn’t even talk about back then.
His actual sex study began modestly with just his class as his subjects. He soon realized that 100 people was not representative and started coming up with a plan. He made an assistant out of one of his students and made a questionnaire for his class to answer anonymously. I can just imagine his amazement at the answers he got. He of course wanted to go further and came up with ideas on how to get more people to join the study. He changed his method many times and finally came up with the idea for an encrypted form that would be filled out during an interview. He came up with ways to catch people in lies so that the study would be pure. He was very careful to pick clean cut intelligent, college educated men to conduct the interviews and carefully taught them how to make their subjects feel at ease. He was also very firm about them maintaining a fair and non-judgmental attitude at all times. The training of the interviewers was the most important aspect of the study. They were not allowed to react in anyway to any answers or the subjects might end the interview or not give truthful answers.
I was impressed with the way he conducted his study. He used his study of the gall wasps as a model in some respects. He wanted to have more subjects than anyone else. He seemed to be like a machine when asking questions and coming up with the survey. He treated all of his subjects the same. I was amused with the way he kept referring to sex toys as “replicas of man in his natural state”. He kept insisting that he was just a biologist.
At first the research went well. He was able to acquire funding from the Rockefeller foundation and they traveled all over the country gathering sex histories. It seems to me that all involved were having a blast. They were trading wives, experimenting with homosexuality, and Dr. Kinsey was gathering an impressive amount of information from the public. Kinsey never dreamed that the public as well as his staff were going to rebel at this explosion of sexuality. In his mind he was doing the world a great service. He was educating them about their bodies and their minds, not to mention that they were “normal”. Soon after the release of his second book on the female things started to fall apart, the public didn’t want to hear that their daughters and mothers were masturbating and had homosexual thoughts. His staff started arguing and fighting because they were having marital problems due to the sharing of each others partners. He seemed oblivious to the emotional pain he inflicted on his staff he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t just keep their emotions out of it. He was also blind to the fact that he himself was working too hard.
I think the research that Kinsey did is invaluable. I don’t believe going back to a more innocent time is the answer at all. If we learned one thing from Alfred Kinsey it was that people have been doing the same things in private that they have always done. He made it possible for people to regard their sexuality as a natural part of who we are and not something that we should be ashamed of, feel guilty about, or persecute others for.
The real Dr. Alfred Kinsey
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