When I first heard about Kinsey, the guy who pioneered scientific research on human sexuality, I was told that he was a courageous researcher willing to apply objective, scientific standards to a previously taboo area. More recently, from right-wing sources, I have heard that Kinsey was far from objective and scientific, but instead had rather bizarre sexual habits and used his research not to find the truth, but to both justify and feed his own sexuality-- including having sex with his interview subjects, failing to note that certain subjects were prostitutes, and using the diaries of a serial child molester as a primary source on the sexuality of children. I can’t find any info on which is the truth. What’s the straight dope?
I don’t know personally, but this book was probably the source of a lot of the info:
There’s a lot to be said for the old adage consider the source!
I believe Kinsey is still respected as the first and one of the most thorough sex researchers, by the experts in the scientific community.
There is a fair amount of material in his books explaining how the research was done, and what precautions were taken to ensure that personal biases of the researchers did not corrupt the data. Which is certainly more effort to be objective than his critics have made!
Perhaps Earl Snake-Hips Tucker meant “mis-info”.
Sexually abusing the guests of a childrens show is a good reason to lose your job. Judith Reisman lost her job on “Captain Kangaroo”.
See how that works?
Dr. Alfred Kinsey was a pioneer in the study of human sexuality. While there were some flaws in his research method, nothing along the lines mentioned in the OP have ever been credibly sustained. Kinsey’s research is generally well-respected, and often cited by our own Cecil.
Reisman seems to be fairly late to the party. Kinsey’s reputation has been up for reassessment several times already in the last decade or so and the outlines of the “dirt” are already out there.
The major anti-Kinsey account was James H. Jones’ 1997 biography Alfred C. Kinsey. I haven’t read it, but by all accounts it’s a classic example of the official biographer coming to hate their subject. It was several decades in the making, yet nobody can quite see why the project ever engaged Jones. But the main charges against Kinsey are: his statistical sampling was crap, he used child molesters in the studies and his own sex life was pretty “extreme”.
What I have read is Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s 1998 biography Sex: The Measure of All Things (Chatto&Windus), which IMHO makes a fairly good stab at a defence. He was also involved in making the BBC2 “Reputations” documentary about Kinsey. I though that was more severe than the book, though Gathorne-Hardy claims that it was an important opportunity for him to re-interview many of Kinsey’s colleagues at a time when they wanted to refute Jones’ book.
One major influence on Gathorne-Hardy’s book - the piece is duly cited - is Stephen Jay Gould’s sympathetic essay “Of Wasps and WASPs” (it’s in The Flamingo’s Smile). It cleverly set Kinsey’s career as a sex researcher against the background of his earlier research into gall wasps. In particular, Gould gets into his style as a taxonomist. Crudely and self-referentially, taxonomists divide into two classes: “lumpers” and “splitters”. Do they look at two slightly different animals and either say “well, they’re broadly the same” or “nope, they’re different because of that characteristic”. Kinsey was a splitter, dividing American gall wasps up into lots of separate species, many of which other entomologists have lumped back into fewer. This has an influence on his sex research because, arguably, splitters tend to see the world as made up of small diversified groups and individual stories, while lumpers want averages and standard deviations. And Kinsey’s methodology in the sex research reflects the attitude of a splitter.
Some of this carry-over was non-statistical. Part of the rational of the Kinsey Institute has been that if someone out there is producing porn based on a combination of bondage and car exhaust fumes, then they want examples. Not as an example of a broader category of bondage porn; bondage and exhaust fumes, please. And a lot of his early research was just this: let’s collect lots of examples, because all the individual variations are scientifically interesting in their own right.
But people (rightly) criticised him for not being rigorously statistical. To anybody who thinks of humanity as some sort of continuous population of behaviours, the answer’s obvious. Randomly sample that population. Kinsey, however, probably didn’t think of humanity as that single population. So his response to the calls for rigour was the notion of exhaustively sampling relatively small populations. Interview everybody in a ladies sewing circle in Vermont. Or on the D-wing of a prison in Wisconsin. His critics continue to argue (correctly) that such samples are compromised as representative samples of the whole American population. My suspicion is that Kinsey thought they were a great sample of the sub-species of lady seemstresses in Vermont, etc. He might not be comprehensive, but he could at least explore local environments completely. In this way he could build up a picture of the range of human sexuality.
Gathorne-Hardy plausibly argues that, while Kinsey’s statistics gathering was flawed, more recent surveys have been more badly distorted.
Personally, I’d be wary of Kinsey’s numbers as a cite, but his statistical practices don’t seem to have been remarkably primitive for the time.
He did clearly use sex offenders in his sampling. But in line with the argument above, they were part of the range of human sexuality and hence part of what he was interested in. Arguments that people were protected immediately runs into the whole issue of confidentiality. There’s a broad moral argument here, but I suspect attitudes are largely determined by one’s initial prejudices. Does one want to condemn people or understand them? The latter often involves trying to understand people one may disapprove of/disagree with/even despise.
As for his private life, it seems more to have been a case that it developed rather than he used his research to justify his sexuality. Had he not been asked to teach that course on marriage, I see no reason why he not have remained monogamous to Clara and the gall wasps.
Kinsey’s research was done fifty to sixty years ago. Regardless of the quality of his work, there are (or at least there should be) more recent studies done on the things he investigated. Even if there was evidence that Kinsey had faked or done a poor job in his research, all that that would mean is that new research needs to be done to investigate the issues that he was studying. If his critics are claiming, “Kinsey was sloppy in his research and apparently faked some of it,” even if it were true it wouldn’t mean, as they seem to imply, that the opposite conclusions from Kinsey’s should be drawn. It means that the research needs to be done again with better controls, and until then no conclusions can be drawn about the issues he studied.