CAPITOL IDEAS: Kinsey as Pervert
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL Kinsey as Pervert WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE TO MARVEL at a recent column, "The Plot Against Sex in America," by Frank Rich of the New York Times. The man has sex on...
...So much for the plot against sex in America...
...Life's nine-page "Report on Kinsey" was both a publicity triumph and, with hindsight, a monument to his own April 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 CAPITOL IDEA S hypocrisy...
...Paul Gebhard didn't enjoy the homosexual duties and was soon excused...
...Here are a few lines from the end of Jones's book...
...An ambiguous quip from Mrs...
...Kinsey was an omnivorous pervert, predator, voyeur, and bully...
...It is the indispensable book on Kinsey...
...But yes, there was a dark side...
...That white coated scientists could be perversely engaged in the very activities they pretended to be studying was unthinkable to everyone...
...Kinsey might have written the cover story himself...
...Kinsey was careful of his image and reporters were putty in his hands...
...He didn't want to do the female volume, but knew he had to...
...And just as the Soviet Union endured for decades before collapsing from its self-destructive tendencies, killing millions and leaving in its wake a gravely wounded Russia, so we may be sure that the sexual revolution has a while to go yet, millions yet to kill, to contracept or abort...
...Kinsey knits a sock for her husband while they listen to records from their large collection...
...I believe so-his allies will have to fight to keep him on his pedestal...
...Another book, Sex the Measure ofAll Things, was published in 1998 by a Kinsey-worshipping oddball Englishman, Jonathan Gathorne Hardy...
...Terry Eastland, publisher, the weekly standard Visit: www.foundingfathersplay.com...
...The general acceptance of sexual norms (aberrant outside marriage, hardly thinkable between men, let alone women) was something that Kinsey's circle benefited from, even as its members disparaged the "repression" that had created it and the "ignorance" it had yielded...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...At the Institute...
...Kinsey was the Lenin of the sexual revolution...
...He tied a strong tight knot around his scrotum with one end of the rope dangling from the pipe overhead...
...He and Kinsey would "be having sex upstairs and I'd go down and have sex with Mac in the same house...
...It paid off handsomely...
...If we take that as the measure of sexual knowledge, then we have entered (not left behind us) a vale of darkness...
...Kinsey filmed sex acts between his staff and invited guests, because "by observing sex directly, he could address riddles left unsolved by his interviews...
...His figures were undermined when it was revealed that he had disproportionately interviewed homo sexuals and prisoners (many sex offenders...
...Rich called the movie an "intelligent account of a half forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history...
...HI went to the library...
...EW BIOGRAPHIES, particularly a 900-pager by James H. Jones (1997), have breached the conspiracy of silence surrounding Kinsey...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 TOM BETH E L L For years, he had boosted the pain he inflicted on himself with urethral insertions by tying a rope around his scrotum and tugging hard while he masturbated...
...It was not ignorance but religious belief that Kinsey wanted to repeal...
...There is nothing in sight as provocative as a Petty calendar: only ultramodern steel desks, worktables, filing cabinets and posture chairs...
...The wife swapping and different sexual things they did that he encouraged-and almost insisted on-were put to them this way: `If you're truly liberated, how could you not want to do this...
...Why...
...We are beginning to hear about Kinsey's "dark side"-a euphemism, for sure...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 b ouNI)INC, f,mf ff KS is a dramatization of the / C'_otistitutional Cotiventiof1 of 1787...
...A brilliant portrayal...
...Six print-filled pages included not a peep against the great scientist...
...fertility rate, about 3.6 children per woman in the mid-1950s, has declined to almost half that level today...
...Remember the Kinsey sermon: there is no such thing as abnormality, just ceaseless sexual variety...
...Time revisited the Kinsey musical soirees with knitting needles clicking and Clara's sherbet and cake intermission...
...Never was the prestige of science higher...
...Kinsey's male report claimed that 85 percent of American men had sex before marriage, 70 percent had sex with prostitutes, 10 percent were exclusively homosexual...
...He describes the visits to the Institute of Earle Marsh, a gynecologist whose "chief role" was sexual...
...Perhaps that is what dismays the liberationists...
...it would be laughable if its consequences were not so serious...
...In a Los Angeles Times interview Boyle said of Kinsey: "His employees had to kowtow to him...
...their suicide rate double or triple the average...
...Find out r ~ how you can help to distrib ute this play throughout the Arab world...
...And the suspicions of child molestation, in which five-year olds were observed and timed with stopwatches as "researchers" played with their genitals, have not been cleared up...
...What about reproduction...
...AIDS...
...Kinsey enjoyed talking to men about sex and he wanted to do as much of it as possible-hang the statisticians...
...PBS aired a 90-minute film on Kinsey in February...
...The charge of ignorance leveled at pre-Kinsey, pre-sex-ed America is a good example of the Big Lie...
...Kinsey died in 1956, his wife Clara in 1982...
...Doing as his inner demons demanded, Kinsey threw a rope over the pipe...
...Then he took his "private sexual exploration into darker territory," but as "his depression deepened his Abnormal sex was what interested him, even as he disparaged the idea ofthe normal...
...Rich prefers to keep things quaint, carefully misrepresenting Kinsey as "an anti-Soviet, antiNew Deal conservative...
...r I r; We are publ ishilxg a special Arabic edition of this exciting new play by American Spectator writer William "iutcker...
...The bad stuff is not going away...
...The result was that Kinsey himself never came under suspicion...
...Kinsey's co-authors and close intimates were Wardell Pomeroy, who died in 2001...
...Is he about to be toppled, like Lenin...
...Boyle's book is well written, but one cannot be sure where fact ends and invention begins...
...Kinsey's apologists say that others, not Kinsey, were doing the dirty work here...
...The "Kinsey Report" consisted of a volume on male sexual behavior published in 1948, followed in 1953 by the female volume...
...The U.S...
...Paul Gebhard said that Kinsey couldn't tolerate an "even slightly religious" secretary...
...But it was long enough for this self-appointed messiah of the sexually despised to experience much pain and suffering, precisely as he had intended...
...Partly funded by Hugh Hefner, it tried to restore Kinsey as the apostle of openness who "shattered the silence about sex," "lectured that sexual ignorance led to real suffering," and that "sexual liberation was the key to a strong marriage and a happy life...
...Clyde Martin and Paul Gebhard, both still living...
...Sure...
...Close to his 60th birthday, he was in his basement office at Indiana University, and he looked up at the exposed pipes below the ceiling...
...Women, Kinsey thought, were "undersexed moralists who served as willing agents of social control...
...But that was it...
...All was prim and proper on the home front...
...But then so did the Virginians lid 1 the story of America...
...Disclosing that heterosexual monogamy was honored more in the pulpit than in practice, the Report was hailed as a "milestone of science...
...Wardell Pomeroy said that Kinsey's mission was to undermine Judeo-Christian morality...
...He had sex with both Kinsey and his wife...
...Alfred Kinsey was the "first [to] let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime," Rich wrote, "that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity...
...Marsh didn't think Kinsey "had sex with Mac [Mrs...
...She had to play along if she wanted to remain Mrs...
...At odd moments, [director Bill] Condon does hint that the decoupling of sex from morality did have a few drawbacks in those early days, but they seem more like glitches needing to be ironed out, presumably by better technique, than anything permanently troubling...
...This happened in every country where the sex-ed obsession took over...
...THE "KINSEY REPORT" WAS FORTUNATE in its tim ing...
...It was a kind of religious cult...
...Kinsey ("I hardly ever see [him] at night any more since he took up sex") brought guffaws from the inner circle...
...Following one phone call from Rich, the TV station reversed its decision...
...The story further recorded: "Everyone who knows the Kinseys report that they are not only happily but ideally married...
...She accepted what went on, you know...
...K] to have sex, but if I was there we'd all have sex...
...He became a pill popper, contracted an infection in his testicles soon after dangling from his scrotum, and died of a massive heart attack at 62...
...Kinsey gave Marsh the blunt explanation...
...I have not seen the Hollywood movie, which was a commercial flop...
...He "slept with Wardell Pomeroy and several of the wives, and then seduced Clyde Martin, nearly 30 years his junior...
...His daughters said he was "aggressively against religion...
...One photograph shows him sitting in the parlor with Clara, the caption reading: "AT HOME: Mrs...
...4 ` ' I'he Circuirmstalnces were similar to toda is Ira a country in chaos-yet the The Shi'~a have problems were thesame enough votes 1101V to give power to the ma'ol it - while l7i otectitl J g to dominate the the rights of Illillorities...
...Meanwhile the unedifying truth continues to dribble out...
...What set him off was the refusal by a PBS station to accept an ad for the movie Kinsey...
...Kinsey filmed his wife masturbating and having sex with other men...
...The door is marked `Institute for Sex Research-Walk In...
...On weekends they often give concerts for guests...
...She knows that when I make up my mind to do something I do it...
...experiments became more intense...
...By 1954, Kinsey was unhappy about the Rockefeller funding...
...Kinsey told Clarence Tripp, the late author of a shameful book imputing homosexuality to Lincoln, that "the whole army of religion is our central enemy...
...But this fancied oppression is hardly reflected in Time's 1953 cover story on Kinsey...
...At parties [they] usually behave as though they had just met and are trying to impress each other, and unless the general conversation is pretty stimulating Kinsey is apt to devote his whole attention to his wife...
...The man has sex on the brainnot a safe place to have it...
...In exchange for access, he demanded to see copy before publication...
...Hugh Hefner braved the rigors of McCarthyism by publishing the first issue of Playboy that same year...
...largely uninterested in sex, morally pure and [worst of all] devoted to reforming men...
...For what length of time he stayed aloft, caught between heaven and earth, remains unclear...
...betrayal and heartache...
...What may be gnawing at Kinsey's apologists is the consideration that, although the sexual revolution came to pass, as Kinsey had hoped, the results have not added to the sum of human happiness...
...It's a line worthy of Satan...
...When he rejected proper sampling procedures, his Rockefeller Foundation funding was cut off...
...Even today the depth of Kinsey's hypocrisy, depravity, and mendacity seems amazing, although the idea that science can be used as a convenient mask for humbug no longer seems so far-fetched...
...On the occasion of Marsh's Bloomington visit in 1948, Kinsey was complaining about the time he was spending with Life magazine...
...He wanted to do volumes on homosexuals, and especially on the sex offenders who had contributed so disproportionately to his work...
...But I have no difficulty believing James Bowman's review in these pages: "As played by Liam Neeson, Professor Kinsey is clearly a hero of science and, only slightly less clearly, a hero of the moral and cultural revolution as well...
...Deserves to be read by freedom-loving audiences worldwide...
...Who is to say that earlier generations respected the sexual conventions only because they were cowed by religious authority and had had no chance to taste the fruits of liberation...
...A summer visitor is met by a wave of chilled air and the whole atmosphere is one of scientific frigor [sic...
...CAPITOL IDEA S TOM BETH E L L Kinsey as Pervert J WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE TO MARVEL at a recent column, "The Plot Against Sex in America," by Frank Rich of the New York Times...
...promiscuity and lies...
...Too strong to be resisted, the compulsion could only be obeyed...
...government AI...
...According to Kinsey, the purpose of sex was orgasm...
...Since then much unflattering material about the Kinsey circle has emerged...
...Not so quaint, actually...
...Then he climbed up on a chair and jumped off, suspending himself in midair...
...Kinsey's "volunteer bias" and other statistical errors were briefly cited...
...They totally accepted what the other one did...
...Maybe, just maybe, they knew it was not the path to happiness after all...
...T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel The Inner Circle appeared in 2004, with Kinsey and his wife appearing with names unchanged but the "inner circle" disguised...
...OW WAS THE "KINSEY REPORT" initially received...
...Frank Rich says that although the first volume "was received with a certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americans in 1948," the atmosphere "had changed radically by the time Kinsey published his follow up volume...
...the homosexual armies obliterating their minds with drugs and drink...
...The other end he wrapped around his hand...
...Abnormal sex was what interested him, even as he disparaged the idea of the normal...
...Jones characterizes Kinsey as a misogynist, among other things...
...By then, "Joe McCarthy was in full throttle...
...Kinsey was always presented as a good family man, photographed in a white shirt with bow tie...
...Judith Reisman, the independent researcher who disclosed Kinsey's data on child-molestation that had somehow escaped everyone's attention although it had been published 33 years earlier, tells me that Jones's expose, 25 years in the making, has put him on the sexologists' enemies list...
...They had to subscribe fully...
...Beginning with childhood, Kinsey had lived with two shameful secrets: he was both a homosexual and masochist," Jones tells us, elaborating with many details...
...On this occasion, his anxiety must have been worse...
Vol. 38 • April 2005 • No. 3
