Moral Right Takes Us Back to Dark Ages of Sexuality
Hypocritical puritans hounded a leading US sex researcher to the grave. Now, they're after his movie.
By John Patterson
Bill Condon's biopic Kinsey would be an
important movie at any time, but right
now, with the "moral values" crowd in
the ascendant and thirsty for the blood
of heretics in the aftermath of George
Bush's re-election, it's an absolutely
essential movie.
Dr Alfred Kinsey, played by Liam
Neeson, was the Harvard-trained
entomologist who pioneered research
into the sexual habits of Americans.
After interviewing tens of thousands of
men and women, he collected his
findings in two books that changed the
way Americans comprehended sex.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
published in 1948, and its female
counterpart (1953), revealed the
bedroom (and locker room and barnyard)
habits of Americans in a way that blew
the lid off puritanism forever. "God,
what a gap between social front and
reality!" was the conclusion he came
to. Kinsey's been dead for nearly half
a century and now, thanks to the movie,
the religious right want to dig him up
and kill him all over again.
Working at the University of Indiana -
about as "red" as you could hope to
find nowadays, and sponsored by that
well-known fifth-column, the
Rockefeller Foundation - Kinsey and his
team developed as precise an interview
formula as was possible in a country
still mired in sexual ignorance and
fear.
He interviewed single and married
straights, gays, lesbians, incarcerated
rapists and sex criminals, even those
who had sought congress with beasts of
the field and farmyard, all without
surrendering scientific objectivity or
passing moral judgments.
Before he published his work, Americans
assumed that sex occurred only after
marriage, that homosexuals and lesbians
were demonic inverts, and that
masturbation led to godless communism,
hairy-handedness and imbecilized high-
school quarterbacks drooling on college
jackets.
Kinsey's two books were bestsellers,
but he became entangled in the neuroses
of his time. The Rockefeller folk were
hounded into dropping their support,
and J. Edgar Hoover demanded - but
didn't receive - Kinsey's assistance in
witch-hunting gays at the US State
Department. That Hoover was a cross-
dressing, closeted homosexual who lived
with his overpromoted pretty-boy
assistant, FBI director Clyde Tolson,
speaks volumes about the grotesque
hypocrisy of public figures in those
days. Kinsey's detractors lined up
around the block to get their licks in,
then as now, and it's possible that
their efforts helped speed his early
demise in 1956 aged 62.
Condon's movie does a splendid job of
recreating the quasi-Victorian sexual
politics of a time when people scarcely
knew what to do or feel about their
ungovernable sex drives. The film shows
interview subjects startled to learn
that babies do not emerge from the
female bellybutton or that there's more
than one position for coitus.
Kinsey is one of the inventors of our
modern sex lives. He stands with
Margaret Sanger, who agitated for birth
control and backed research that gave
us the pill by 1960 - which in turn
gave us the unzipped sexual revolution
and the bra-burning women's movement -
and with Hugh Hefner, who 'fessed up
and said flat out that, yup, he was
hornier than a dog with two dicks and
didn't care who knew it. If you've ever
had a guilt-and-fear-free orgasm, you
owe them all big time.
And because of that, the religious
right still fear and despise Kinsey and
his works. Check out some of the
responses to the movie. "Kinsey's
proper place is with the Nazi doctor
Josef Mengele," says Robert Knight of
Concerned Women for America,
inadvertently showing us what he thinks
of the Holocaust. Robert Peters of
Morality in Media: "That's part of
Kinsey's legacy: AIDS, abortion, the
high divorce rate, pornography."
Focus on the Family's film critic, Tom
Neven, calls the movie "rank propaganda
for the sexual revolution and the
homosexual agenda". And Judith Reisman,
who has waged a long war against
Kinsey's memory, refers to "a legacy of
massive venereal disease, broken hearts
and broken souls". These people are of
a piece with new Republican congressmen
who have sex on the brain, such as Tom
Coburn of Oklahoma, who thinks there is
an epidemic of lesbianism in Oklahoma
schools, and South Carolina's Jim
DeMint who wants gays and pregnant
single mothers barred from teaching
decent, God-fearing folk.
At the dawn of a digitized, globalized
millennium, these creeps want the
clocks turned back to when the church
held sway over our sexuality. They
prefer us ignorant and terrified, alone
in the dark, the better for them to
control us through fear and guilt. Too
bad for them that we live in the
bright, vivid light of our incandescent
dirty dreams.
