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Considering Kinsey: Let's Think About Sex
by Scott Holleran

Alfred Kinsey. Reproduced by permission of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Photograph by William Dellenback.

December 30, 2004
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Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ may have dominated movie headlines this year, but Fox Searchlight's Kinsey is probably the movie most likely to offend fans of both blockbusters—and possibly everyone else. With explicit sexuality, politics and religion, it was predictable that writer and director Bill Condon's biographically-themed picture about bow-tied biology professor Alfred Kinsey, regarded as a pervert by conservatives, would set talk radio tongues wagging with smears and rumors.

But Kinsey also dramatizes the idea that love and sex ought to be integrated, a notion that repudiates left-wing intellectuals' moral acceptance of promiscuity. The picture with the year's most passionate same sex kiss (Kinsey, not Alexander) also features the screen's most enduring romantic love affair—between man and woman as husband and wife.

Liam Neeson in Kinsey

Kinsey is the story of a lone intellectual, played in the movie by Liam Neeson, who sought to understand his own sexuality and enlightened the world with his discoveries, which were based on 18,000 interviews. Among the lasting effects of his work: a reversal of the near-universal condemnation of masturbation, basic recognition that homosexuals exist and new insights into the role of orgasm. While the scope of his work is astonishing, Kinsey's primary achievement may be that his findings challenged the notion that the purpose of sex is procreation. His work was taken as a rebuke of Puritanism.

Kinsey has his critics, then and now, and they are usually religious. In an August 1953 letter to Indiana University President Herman Wells (played by Oliver Platt in the movie), the state's division of the National Council of Catholic Women raised the alarm against Kinsey:

"How representative of Indiana University is the thinking of Dr. Alfred Kinsey? We have not, of course, read his latest book, but we have seen the sensational reports on it in magazines and newspapers, and these are frightening, indeed. Almost without exception, the writers, who have carefully studied Dr. Kinsey's book and have been thoroughly briefed by him, come to the conclusions that the Indiana professor considers our present sexual morals for the most part to be superstitious notions of an unenlightened and uncritical past. How dangerous such a teaching can be should be evident to you, Dr. Wells, as you know from many years of experience how difficult it is for youth to master themselves and learn to accept the demands that society imposes upon them."

Today, Kinsey's critics show up on popular cable news shows that cater to the faith-based, voicing unsubstantiated charges and blaming Kinsey for the spread of promiscuous sex. Religious activists organized campaigns against the movie and, according to Variety, one public broadcasting station in the United States, WNET in New York, rejected a Kinsey promotional spot for fear of a conservative backlash.

For a comprehensive examination of how the late Indiana University professor's research changed America, and how sex studies have fared since his first report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was published in 1948, Box Office Mojo turned to the world's top scholars, who read Kinsey's reports, saw the movie and knew those who conducted the research.

Couples therapist Barry McCarthy, who teaches at American University in Washington, DC, and wrote Rekindling Desire: A Step-By-Step Program to Help Low-Sex and No-Sex Marriages and Coping With Erectile Dysfunction, drove to Philadelphia just to see the movie, which goes into national release on Jan. 7. He liked what he saw.

"It's a very honest portrayal of Kinsey's strengths and weaknesses," McCarthy says. "I like that he was portrayed as a scientist who just really wanted to know about sex, whose research was to understand and accept normal variations. That's one of the finest things about his research. But it also portrayed his weaknesses."

McCarthy, like others interviewed for this article, cautioned against dropping the context of Kinsey's time, when the knowledge about sex and how to conduct research was limited. As McCarthy says: "When you talk about Kinsey's flaws in research, you have to remember [that] he invented the field. You can't take 2004 and apply it to 1943."

Heather Hoffmann, Professor and Chair of Psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., agrees that the movie is both accurate and entertaining. "I liked it," she writes in an e-mail exchange. "There were some Hollywood-ish aspects that I did not care for but overall I would say that it is a good movie." Despite the advertising campaign's tag line, "Let's Talk About Sex," Hoffmann points out that Kinsey is not exclusively about sex: "It is about a life; a romance, a career, a dedication to science and to helping people better understand sexuality."

Hoffmann and McCarthy both peg Kinsey as a pioneer in studying sex. Hoffmann, who was a visiting scholar at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., where Kinsey taught, credits Kinsey with lighting the way.

"My general research centers on how people acquire their erotic taste," she explains. "Such work may help people handle problems in sexual arousal (e.g., pedophilia, recovery from sexual trauma). Working at the Kinsey [Institute] provided me with a support network for my research."

McCarthy is more blunt: "Everyone in the sex field owes to Kinsey," he says. "The first time I read the Kinsey reports, I was a young assistant professor in 1970. There was no text book. There were no formal courses in human sexuality. Kinsey taught the first formal course in undergraduate [studies]."

Richard Crosby, Ph.D., who studies condom use, agrees. "Kinsey made us aware that there is tremendous variation in human sexual behavior and that we should be constantly vigilant about this variation," says Crosby, an associate professor of public health at the University of Kentucky. When asked to name Kinsey's top success, Crosby, McCarthy and Hoffmann agree that his findings on variation in sexual behavior are paramount.

"Kinsey brought sex out of the closet," Crosby says. "Though we have a vocal minority that actively campaigns against sexual language and sexual talk, the large majority has [the attitude that] the more we know, the better off we're going to be."

That also means learning about controversial sexual conduct, such as masturbation, oral-genital contact and homosexuality, subjects Kinsey explores. "His work showed masturbation as a universal phenomenon," clinical psychologist McCarthy says, "and his research said that people who engage in it do better in partner sex. That's something I talk to clients about."

Crosby, who is focused on prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, adds that Kinsey's work shows that there are many different ways to express sexual desire, including petting and mutual masturbation. Such varying outlets for one's sex drive, Crosby suggests, are advantages that are often overlooked by Kinsey's conservative detractors, who blame sex research for a rise in hedonism, evidenced everywhere from Oprah to sensational news reports.

"There's no question that kids have replaced penile-vaginal activities with oral-genital activities," Crosby notes. "Is that good or bad? HIV is much more difficult to transmit by oral-genital activity." McCarthy, a certified marriage and sex therapist who maintains a private practice counseling couples, emphasizes that Kinsey's sex research brought the field into the arena of objective science with a goal to record what happens in reality. McCarthy credits Kinsey with paving the way for prominent research conducted by William Masters and Virginia Johnson and a widely circulated study by the University of Chicago, Sex in America.

Each scholar admits that Kinsey's original reports were no guarantee of future results, let alone infallibility. McCarthy bemoans the trend of celebrity sex pundits and cautions against interpreting Kinsey's achievements as a blank check for every conceivable sexual act. "The trick in this field, and it's a very hard trick, is to find the people who really know the material," he says.

"[Popular sex pundit] Dr. Ruth [Westheimer] is not at all a researcher," McCarthy, whose clinical approach is cognitive-behavioral, points out. "The Hite Report [a bestselling sex book in the 1970s by Shere Hite] is the opposite of the Kinsey reports. In Kinsey's time, there was anti-sex BS. Now, there's just pro-sex BS. There is a lot in the sex field that he would probably applaud and there is a lot he would be disturbed and angry about. He would say we have to be honest about what we know and what we don't know. Kinsey believed that knowledge is power."