National Review recently had an article on Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was a professor
here at Indiana University, and we still have a sex research institute named after him,
to our shame. For it turns out that despite the facade of scientific objectivity that
Kinsey displayed, of a staid entomologist who had decided to apply boringly rigorous
statistical techniques to an important but taboo subject, Kinsey's research was
laughable in its absence of rigor and he himself was a secret adulterer, homosexual, and
masochist. The lack of rigor was obvious, and commented on, " even at the time.
The opposition to sexual morality has come out only recently. But see how similar,
despite their different spins, are articles in the conservative National Review and the
liberal Nation on Kinsey. First, the National Review.
Perhaps the most offensive aspect of Kinsey's supposedly "scientific" method was his
definitions. He classified prostitutes and cohabiting females as "married" women, and
then claimed that 26 percent of married women committed adultery. Of course, his
deceptive definition of "married" was buried in the details of the lengthy book and
didn't end up in popular versions of the research.
Critics of Kinsey's methodology and findings include fellow sex researchers who are
aware that their work is suspect because of Kinsey's malpractice. One was noted
psychologist Abraham Maslow, whom Kinsey asked to validate the research. After studying
it carefully, Maslow exposed the problems. Kinsey severed all contact with him and ended
both their professional and personal relationships, refusing to acknowledge the
criticism.
SPECIAL AGENDAS: In his personal life, Albert Kinsey was promiscuously bisexual, sado-
masochistic, and a decadent voyeur who enjoyed filming his wife having sex with his
staff. He was hostile to religion and hated taboos of any kind. He often expressed the
opinion that all sex is good. He advocated sexual activity as early, as varied, and as
long as possible, claiming that a child's sexual activity would prepare him for better
sexual adjustment later in life. He sought to validate numerous sexual practices
(homosexuality, adultery, bisexuality, pedophilia, incest, and bestiality) that were not
generally accepted at the time. Many of those sexual activities are more common today --
in part a legacy of Kinsey's influence over American culture.
Kinsey was not an objective scientist but a passionate ideologue particularly interested
in using his research to change laws. In 1958, he won a court case allowing him to
import pornography for his sex studies. This decision struck down postal laws, of
course, and opened the floodgates for international pornography.
...
Where another biographer might have emphasized Kinsey's remarkable capacity for open-
minded exploration, Jones persists in negatively labeling unconventional sexual behavior
as "skating near the edge," as "compulsive" and "addictive" risk-taking.
...
Elsewhere, Jones refers to Kinsey's "fa�ade of objectivity" -- as if value-free social
science has ever existed, or been more than approximated as an ideal. Of course
Kinsey's personal needs and motivations influenced his findings; this is primer
stuff in social science.
In terms of subjects, Kinsey used volunteers -- a practice that scholars decry because
of the selection bias it introduces. Many psychologists say that exhibitionists and
unconventional sexual experimenters are the most likely respondents, thus distorting the
results of the studies. A quarter to nearly half of Kinsey's subjects were prisoners,
hardly reflective of the general population. Plus, over 1,400 of his subjects were sex
offenders. Kinsey's samples were skewed in other ways as well: His subjects were
overwhelmingly single when less than a third of the population was single during the
1950s, and they were also predominantly college educated.
Compare this with the Martin Duberman review
in the Nation (November 3, 1997, pp. 40-43) of the book,
ALFRED C. KINSEY: A Public/Private Life by James H. Jones. Duberman was the
Distinguished Professor of History at CUNY, and the Kinsey Institute has posted this
review on the web as a defence of Kinsey.
Jones presents evidence -- full, incontrovertible and previously known only to a small
circle of insiders -- that Kinsey often had sex and occasionally fell in love with
people of his own gender. Yet Jones also tells us that Kinsey was lovingly married for
thirty-five years to Clara McMillen, and that their relationship was in no sense
perfunctory, certainly not sexually. A decade into their marriage, Alfred and Clara were
"eagerly" exploring various coital positions newly recommended by a friend; and they
maintained a sexual relationship until Kinsey became ill near the end of his life. With
Clara's knowledge, Kinsey also had sex with other women during their marriage -- as did
Clara with other men.
Thus, it seems that even Kinsey's defenders admit that he secretly indulged in
perverted sexual practices (I have not quoted the bits about how he liked to tie ropes
around his private parts) and lacked objectivity. Rather, the modern defence is "So
what?" and "This is a complicated subject, and morality is naive and simplistic."
I should add that Professor Duberman denies that Kinsey's statistics are worthless,
directly contradicting other reports I have read on Kinsey (including the one above from
National Review) and modern sex surveys. Duberman says:
...Paul Gebhard (one of Kinsey's co-authors and his successor as director of the Kinsey
Institute for Sex Research -- he retired in 1982), himself reacting to criticism leveled
against the two volumes, spent years "cleaning" the Kinsey data of its purported
contaminants -- removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in
the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard, with Alan Johnson, published The Kinsey Data, and --
to his own surprise -- found that Kinsey's original estimates held: Instead of Kinsey's
37 percent, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4 percent; the 10 percent figure (with
prison inmates excluded) came to 9.9 percent for white, college-educated males and 12.7
percent for those with less education. And as for the call for a "random sample," a team
of independent statisticians studying Kinsey's procedures had concluded as far back as
1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of
obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey's interviewing technique had been
"extraordinarily skillful."
JSTOR has the Cochran-Mosteller-Tukey report, which must be Duberman's "independent
statisticians". My reading of their report is that it says Kinsey's misuse of statistics
is enormous-- that nobody on his team knew much about statistics or thought to consult
with statisticians, and they made completely unreasonable inferences-- but that they
wanted to be gentle with Kinsey because they liked the fact that someone was now trying
to collect data and they didn't want to discourage novices from at least trying to do
statistical work. I take the same attitude myself when I comment on papers by
untrained law professors trying to use economics or statistics-- the expert should not
flaunt his expertise and tell the novice to go back to doing journalism and not to even
try to use rigorous methods; he should gently correct mistakes and point the novice to
how to do things better. Law professors do the same with me when I write papers that
rely on fine points of the law. But reading between the lines, the CMT report says that
Kinsey's conclusions about the US population in general are entirely worthless. See
" Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report," William G. Cochran; Frederick Mosteller; John W. Tukey Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 48, No. 264. (Dec., 1953), pp. 673-716.
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