Liam Neeson will play the title character in the absurd lionization of Alfred Kinsey - the noted "sexologist" that thankfully left the planet in 1956 to never molest children and students again.
Kinsey, for the uninitiated, though lauded by many activist homosexuals and sexual progressives, was later fully and irrevocably exposed as a fraud, and a dangerous fraud at that.
The following essay by Patrick Meehan is comprehensive and telling:
The Kinsey Report: Modeling a Frankenstein Man
Copyright © P. Meehan March, 2002. All rights reserved.
The
report of the nine year study in sexology that treated of the white American male's sexual behavior, mass
marketed in 1948 by adroit press agentry under the rubric, The Kinsey Report,
1 was arguably, in its ultimate effects, the most significant of all the instruments of reform deriving from beliefs of the Progressive Era, an epoch of reformist clamorings, the echos of which continued to sound long after those clamorings were themselves stilled in the catastrophe of the First World War and the consequent collapse of order in czarist Russia and in her imperial dominions. They sounded well into the middle years of the twentieth century, fixating the principal investigator of this sexological study and primary author of its associated report, Dr Alfred C. Kinsey, a professor of zoology at Indiana University seized by a vision of a sexual utopia having at its center the celebration of the homoerotic, and with its prophet, Kinsey himself, acclaimed a scientist ranking with Darwin, to whose wraith, it is to be suspected, he prayed at least thrice daily.
2 The disclosure that Kinsey was a homosexual can scarcely be a surprising one, given the nature of his utopian vision. But he was, as well, a voyeur, an exhibitionist, and a sadomasochist, descending at times in his masochistic moods into outright lunacy, thrusting the bristled end of a toothbrush deep into his urethra and pulling with force on a rope tied around his scrotum; on at least one occasion he noosed his scrotum in this way, looped the free end of the rope across an overhead pipe and wrapped it around one of his hands, and then, gripping the rope tightly, stepped off a chair, suspending himself in midair for a period that seems to have gone unrecorded, and which, incredibly, left him in one piece, albeit hospitalized.
As
for his sadism, in the course of his sexological studies he was an accessory to the torture and sexual violation of infants, toddlers and prepubescent children of tender years. His culpability is on open display in chapter 5 of the Kinsey Report, a chapter that treats of the responses to sexual assault of infants as young as two months of age, as reported to Kinsey by their assailants, who, it should be noted, were subjects of his sexological study; a study presumably directed to the investigation of the sexual behavior of the representative American male. The content of this chapter is for the most part presented in the remote, almost offhanded manner that Kinsey, with studied ostentation, affects throughout the report; but this affected manner abruptly vanishes, and there is evidenced a barely restrained excitement, in his descriptions, redacted from those of pedophile and pederast subjects of his study, of what he styles infantile orgasm, and which, to anyone not patently insane, have in them nothing of the sexual, but are quite plainly graphic depictions of children in agony. They make very difficult reading.
3
In
his attic, acts of sexual congress between members of his research staff and spouses of other staff members were recorded on film and watched live by an audience composed of Kinsey, his staff, their spouses and, sometimes, visiting libertines and sexual deviants who were subjects of the study; homosexual acts of every description were filmed and watched as well; as were acts of a sadomasochistic nature; and as were solo masturbatory performances, including not a few by Kinsey himself. These shows were staged at Kinsey's command on the theory that "the direct observation of biological phenomena is one of the most reliable ways to get [scientific data]."
4 A theory, I daresay, with which few would find themselves at odds. Still, it does not require the special gifts of a Darwin to understand that the naturalist gains precious little insight into the behavior of wildlife by watching circus animals perform, although, as pure spectacle, he may find it entertaining, should his fancies run in that direction.
Save for his perverse private behavior, which was long unknown to the world at large, Kinsey was as characteristic a progressive of the more radical stamp as was Margaret Sanger or Upton Sinclair; he was, among other things, a devotee of the eugenics cult, as much a hallmark of the progressive mentality as was a belief in the professionalization of child rearing, opining at one point that for the preservation of the racial health of the nation one of every ten Americans should be sterilized. The thesis of the Kinsey study, which Kinsey deceitfully and rather brazenly asserted is without one, is constituted in its essentials of (1) a promotion of those articles of faith of the Progressive movement that pertain to human sexuality, with modifications relating to the perverse that were embraced in part or in whole only by the movement's lunatic fringe, and of (2) the assertion of the irrationality, from a progressive perspective, of the laws governing sexual behavior in place at the time of the study. Kinsey's assertions in his report to the effect that he restricts himself in it to the dispassionate presentation of uncolored facts, gathered or observed, is belied by what lies plain in its open text; text that stands, generally, as a model of simplicity, clarity and concision; an exemplar, in the main, in fact, of fine expository writing. There can be no mistaking his thesis.
Although he neither used the word normal nor cared to hear it used by others, it is clear that Kinsey had a sense of the normal; for him, the normal was the natural. And, for him, the Victorian definition of the natural was a fairy tale that brought in its train serious social dislocations; nor did he believe that in their privy chambers the generality of Americans hewed to this Victorian line of the natural, despite the sense of guilt with which they might afflict themselves by departing from it. His sexological study was undertaken, at least in part, to produce a proof that this latter belief was founded in reality, and to do so by recording precisely what in fact Americans did do in the privacy of their bedchambers. And, in so doing, to reveal the natural to the world, for it was an implicit article of faith with him that what the multitudes actually did had to be natural. He had no doubt of what the natural would turn out to be; he did not approach his subject with an open mind, but with a will to find what he wanted to find, and, unsurprisingly, find it he did. For Kinsey, the natural expression of human sexuality was the expression Alfred C. Kinsey gave to his sexuality.
A clear understanding of what that portended begins of necessity with the thesis of human sexuality to which progressives of the early twentieth century generally subscribed:
The human animal, a term not uncommonly used by these Advanced Thinkers in referring to the prototypical member of the human race, is possessed, they argued, of what they styled a sex drive, a biological pressure cooker of sorts that requires relief from time to time through the operations of what they called a sexual outlet, much as the processes of digestion produce a pressure that is relieved by defecation. What they spoke of as the repression of this sex drive, imposed by Victorian custom and law upon the unwed moieties of the hapless populations of the civilized nations was, they asserted, unnatural and unhealthy, and led to all manner of social evils: to prostitution, with a consequent spread of what were in the early years of the twentieth century still known as loathesome diseases; to the breeding of rapists and child molesters; and to such sicknesses of mind as bestiality, fetishism and voyeurism. And to other such evils, the lot of them responsible for a goodly portion of the human wreckage with which the jails, the hospitals and the insane asylums of the time were infested.
There
is included in the thesis of the progressives nothing of the concept of the procreative act as a communion of two spirits, a coupling of human hearts through a mutual giving of self and a putting aside of defenses. A making of a circle of magic within which two souls linger for a time wholly defenseless and almost wholly one. A concept which, if not quite incomprehensible to progressives generally, despite their public endorsements of palpable imbecilities, is one which to Kinsey would have been as incomprehensible as is the theory of least squares to a cow. His vision of the male half of the human race was one of so many biological mechanisms moving to and fro in want of objects suitable for use in triggering sexual outlets, his sexological study report--in the words of the scandalized (and not unprogressive) anthropologist, Margaret Mead--"suggest[ing] no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep."
5 Interestingly, he speaks of such an object as a source, in relation to a sexual outlet, rather than as a sink, thus turning the scientific notion of source and sink on its head. But the nomenclature that sexologists use to describe their phantasms evidently suits them well enough, and finds favor with their dupes, and, so, receives no further comment here; source, let it be.
As a matter of record, Kinsey carried the notions of the human animal, the sex drive, the sexual outlet and repression to what is clearly a logical conclusion of sorts; albeit, one that can be accepted only by those among the culturally impoverished who consciously or unconsciously apprehend the faculty of reason not as instrumental but as sovereign: from the Kinseyan perspective, if the sex drive of the adult male human animal needs an outlet triggered, there is nothing in logic that rules against the use of: masturbation, a farm animal, another adult male human animal, an adolescent boy, an infant or prepubescent child of either sex, an adolescent girl, or, for that matter, a handy adult female human animal. There may be something in aesthetics that stands against at least four of these choices, and--in the things born in the blood and bone of the ancient race of man--much that stands against all of them save one, but there is certainly nothing in the Kinseyan logic that stands against any of them. In particular, not against the use of an infant or a child, for Kinsey, with the Freudian wing of the Progressive movement, was persuaded that the human animal is a sexual animal from birth. In the Kinseyan metaphysic, as in that of the present day sexologist, it is beneficial to the development of a prepubescent child to serve as the source of sexual outlets for adult or adolescent male human animals, so long as there is no force used and no pain inflicted. Whether in imposing these latter constraints on the pedophile, Kinsey was simply laying a protective smoke screen, is, I think, a question properly answered in the affirmative. His attitude toward the torment of children is imperishably recorded in chapter 5 of the Kinsey Report.
As for Woman, Kinsey considered her to be an undersexed moralist and natural agent of social control, who evidences too meager a sex drive to serve Man as his primary source of sexual outlets, and, so, in the natural order revealed by Kinsey, a man properly uses another man as his primary source of sexual outlets, and a woman uses another woman. Homosexuality stands at the center of the Kinseyan natural order. The Greek vice redivivous, and extended to embrace Woman.
It is not implied here, of course, that, because there is a logic in Kinsey's metaphysic, it was formulated by a process of orderly thought. It is plainly nothing more than the belligerent, malignant, anguished, self-pitying expression of a monomaniacal deviant, obsessed by sexuality and driven by a need to elevate his witless, pathetic sense of the nature of man to exalted estate. The progressives, in their hubris, with their assertive airs of intellectual superiority and enlightenment, in making respectable the notion of assailing as unnatural the laws and customs designed to sanctify the marital state and safeguard childhood's sanctuary of love, obtusely prepared the way for this assassin of grace to reach the public forums, there to imposture as an archetypal middle American, and, feigning to serve as a dispassionate dispenser of facts, to cry down the cultural expression of a People and to cry up the advent of a Frankenstein man.
Kinsey's study, methodologically, is pure nonsense, and its findings are meaningless; the litany of his departures from the canons of sense begins with his sampling technic. He asserted, without foundation, that the technic he used was that of stratified sampling, which, briefly, is one in which the population of interest is partitioned by some prescribed characteristic, or characteristics, into a collection of subpopulations, with a sample drawn from each subpopulation by a randomized process, the ratio of its size to that of the total sample being equal to the ratio of the subpopulation size to that of the population.
Some critics have likened the selection technic that he actually used to that of cluster sampling, a technic in which a homogeneous population is partitioned into groups, or clusters, with a randomized selection process of clusters and with the study sample formed by aggregating the selected clusters. But in fact the technic Kinsey actually used was very much akin to that of quota sampling, which is a technic in which the investigator searches out a sample of a predetermined size and composition, by any means that may prove convenient and in any place within practical reach. Clearly, it does not require the special knowledge of a professor of mathematical statistics to understand that this technic is asinine: only through divine revelation can it be determined whether a sample gathered in this way is representative of the population from which it is drawn.
It
should be noted at this point that the Kinsey study's statistician, Clyde E. Martin, had neither training nor competence in this discipline, nor the capacity, evidently, to acquire it, nor did Kinsey himself betray more than a tenuous grasp of a few of its rudiments. He was in fact rather dismissive of the discipline. When the methodological criticisms of the Kinsey Report began to come in, he complained, in a note to Dr George W. Corner of the Carnegie Institution, that, "A number of [the objections] call for additional work on our part which would turn us into a group doing research on statistics rather than research on sex."
6 Given the nature of the criticisms of which he was complaining, it must be said that the phrase, "research on statistics," in this quote should have read, "classroom work in the remedial study of statistics 101." Kinsey had only a small capacity for coping with abstractions and no liking at all for doing so. He plainly hadn't the vaguest idea, for example, what is meant by random, nor what is meant by that term in the context of probabilistic modeling, which in that context should be taken to mean, pseudo-random, a technical term into which it is needless to go here.
For an insight into Kinsey's grasp of the matter, consider this, from page 93 of the Kinsey Report:
[It is not] feasible to stand on a street corner, tap every tenth individual on the shoulder, and command him to contribute a full and frankly honest sex history.
Making full allowance for the fact that this assertion was meant as hyperbole, it is not the way a thinking scientist, even writing in a jocular, or deliberately light, vein, would make the point Kinsey was trying to make; not, at all events, in the body of a major scientific paper, which is precisely what he considered the Kinsey Report to be. Nothing in Kinsey's hyperbolic event sequence can be said to be of a random character nor is it a description of a pseudo-random process.
The samples he collected were taken, a good many of them, from individuals whom he encountered by happenstance or design, socially, professionally, collegially, casually, formally, who yielded to his importunings to make themselves parties to his study; but for the most part they were taken from volunteers belonging to groups marked by special characteristics; groups which he sought out, and to which he contrived to find access, seeking from them participation en bloc. In fine, he sought out groups associated by some organizing principle that was sometimes of interest or import to him; sometimes, as with imprisoned felons or institutionalized mental defectives, a convenient one. Acquiring access to such a group, he used no randomized selection process in appealing to its ranks for volunteers; he appealed to the entire membership; and after recording the sexual histories of those who responded favorably to his appeal, he enlisted them if possible as foot soldiers in extended campaigns of persuasion aimed at moving their reluctant colleagues to volunteer their own histories. He seems seldom to have gotten 100% of any group to volunteer, however persistently pressed.
From this catch-as-catch-can sampling technic he assembled a substantial number of case histories, from which he assertedly selected for the male study some 5300 subjects, a number which is consistent with nothing in the tables and figures appearing in the Kinsey Report; the actual number is probably 4120, as is touched upon in the sequel. But in either case, the number was not large, nor was the makeup of the subjects disclosed. That they were a representative collection of American males is a Kinseyan fiction, a matter of crucial import that is treated in the sequel. These case histories were developed through a series of questions that are still closely held by the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
The Kinsey study on these grounds alone is without scientific meaning; without these questions, it cannot be repeated. This institute still closely holds, as well, the case histories, and since these formed the database of the study, the study is, again, on these grounds alone, without scientific meaning; it cannot be verified. The protocol Kinsey established for the questioning is of interest for what it reveals of the Kinseyan mentality and the worth of his study.
The crucial passages in this protocol are found on pages 53 and 55 of the Kinsey Report:
Placing the burden of denial on the subject. The interviewer should not make it easy for a subject to deny his participation in any form of sexual activity. ... We always assume that everyone has engaged in every type of activity. Consequently we always begin by asking when they first engaged in such activity. ... [Emphasis in original.]
Proving the answer. If it becomes obvious that the subject's first answer is not correct or sufficient, one should ask for additional information, and re-phrase the original question in a way that will make him prove his answer or expose the falsity of his reply. In a rapid fire of additional questions, it is difficult for a dishonest subject to be consistent. With uneducated persons, and particularly with feeble minded individuals, it is sometimes effective to pretend that one has misunderstood the negative replies and ask additional questions, just as though the original answers were affirmatives ... [Emphasis added.]
Forcing a subject. There are some persons who offer to contribute histories in order to satisfy their curiosities ... As soon as one recognizes such a case, he should denounce the subject with considerable severity, and ... should refuse to proceed with the interview.
This charming protocol begins with the presumption that the subject's expression of his sexuality is the Kinseyan definition of the natural; if he denies it, a heavy handed adversarial interrogation follows; if the subject cannot be browbeaten or entrapped into yielding to the interrogator what he wants, he is dismissed. Excluded from the sample. Can there be much doubt about the outlines of the natural that can adduced from the histories completed and filed by Kinsey and his research assistants?
Defending himself in a number of venues over his failure to use random sampling technics, he argued that in studies of sexual behavior it is simply not feasible to sample randomly, since subjects chosen at random frequently refuse to take part in such studies. One can only stand agape before this illuminating announcement of the successor to Darwin. He offers us the notion that a scientific investigator who finds it infeasible to proceed in accordance with a fundamental methodological canon of science, for what is said to be a practical reason, should, in consequence, simply ignore the canon, thus overruling a mandate of reason by shouting up a rainspout the divine edict that the meaningless be meaningful. A notion that it is difficult to believe could seriously be offered or received by anyone sufficiently advanced intellectually to count telephone poles and sound the names of things seen along the roadway from the windows of a moving car.
Reversing the perspective adopted by Kinsey in speaking of a random sampling technic, it is evident that those randomly selected for studies of this sort who actually participate in them, do so only because they choose to--they are in fact volunteers. The distinction between a random selection technic and the selection technic practiced by Kinsey does not turn upon the question of volunteerism, but upon the differing representativities--with respect to the population under study--of the aggregated groups derived by means of these technics. To emphasize this crucial point, given two such aggregated groups, or statistical universes, formed for the purposes of statistical study, one formed through a randomized selection process and the other through a selection process of directed choices, the merit of either statistical universe for the purposes of statistical study is a reflection, directly, of how representative it is of the population of interest. A treatment of volunteerism, which does present a problem in a study of sexual behavior, is deferred here to the sequel.
The individuals and the groups, in part or in whole, incorporated in Kinsey's case studies in hand included: four groups of conscientious objectors (World War II), large numbers of imprisoned criminals--the categories preferred by Kinsey being sex offenders and psychopaths--the inmates of an institution for the feeble-minded, a group of delinquent male high school students, the members of large, male homosexual communities in Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Indianapolis and St Louis, male prostitutes--those serving homosexuals and those serving women--pimps, pedophiles, pederasts, rapists, dope addicts, alcoholics, thieves, armed robbers, professional gamblers and God knows what other categories of unearthly human flotsam through whose haunts in the half worlds and the underworlds of aberrancy Kinsey was frequently guided, in Chicago, Peoria (Illinois), Indianapolis, New York City and Gary (Indiana). The sizes of the non-participating portions of these groups and categories were not recorded by Kinsey, which of course makes his findings based on the participating portions essentially impossible to evaluate. Kinsey classified the sexual deviants in his samples as representative American males, since in the natural order that was revealed to him, or that he revealed to us, there is no such thing as sexual abnormality. Save for chastity.
How
many aberrants--criminals and sexual deviants--are included in the sample upon which the findings recorded in the Kinsey Report are based is specified neither within the report itself nor by the institute. Judith Reisman, an indefatigable investigator of Kinseyan misdeeds, who has studied in depth the large body of literature associated with the Kinsey study, and, as well, the contradictions, confusions and deceptions associated with the text, tables and graphs in Kinsey's report, piecing together understandings of the realities that underlie them, estimates aberrants to constitute 86% of that sample, and she may well be right.
7 If she is not, she is probably not far off the mark.
That there certainly are criminals in the sample is verified by Paul Gebhard, a research associate under Kinsey and his successor as director of the institute. That there are deviants can scarcely be doubted: the chapter on homosexuality is the longest by far in Part III of the Kinsey Report, a Part that is titled, "Sources of Sexual Outlet". Aberrants were deliberately included in this study, and their inclusion and distributions in the tables and figures undisclosed. It is the case in fact that the constituent subject categories of none of the tables and figures are disclosed. The subject makeup of this study is a mystery. And even among the constituent subject categories themselves, no one can say what, precisely, is meant by the classification, "college level". That it was devised for purposes of deceit can be doubted only by the sort of lost soul who pens letters to Elvis Presley with a scheme to dynamite the walls of the dungeon in which Presley lies chained. It is plainly not possible for the findings of the Kinsey study to be validated. Its qualitative worth is zero.
Nevertheless, we proceed. There are other discordancies in the Kinseyan canticle to the goat god. Kinsey made no attempt to measure the bias introduced by the volunteerism inherent in collecting information of a sexual nature from free populations, despite that he was warned by an early associate, Abraham Maslow, a psychologist of some note, that in a study of sexual behavior this bias is significant. Maslow
in fact went beyond simply informing Kinsey of the significance of the bias. At his suggestion, he and Kinsey collaborated in an investigation of the phenomenon, an investigation that indicated, as Maslow had predicted, that volunteers for studies of this sort tend to have high so called dominance scores, and that those with such scores tend to show high incidences of promiscuity, homosexuality and other behaviors that were at the time generally disapproved.
But such behaviors are precisely the kind that Kinsey wanted to find in the population he was assertedly studying; and, so, as those who have a well developed sense of this truth-seeker's mentality will doubtless find entirely expectable, Kinsey silently cut his ties with Maslow and included in the report of his sexological study the assertion that "the first volunteers [of any group sampled] seemed to be [its] more extrovert[ed] and assured individuals (although how that affects a sexual history is not yet clear)."
8. (Almost any of the sixteen million American males of the time, boys and men, who had served in barracks or field or aloft, or on board a ship of war, could have told Kinsey just how much faith should be placed in the reality of the sexual experiences claimed by a man who voluntarily informs others of them. A matter not addressed by Maslow, and a question that goes to the underlying futility of conducting sex studies.)
A determination of the representativity of the statistical universe, or sample, that Kinsey assembled for his statistical study, should presumably begin with a consideration of the number of case histories of which it was comprised. A number of some importance, it may reasonably be adjudged, and a number the attempted discovery of which, through a reading of the Kinsey Report, is not unlike pitting one's wits against those of the grease-painted impresario of a sideshow shell game. On page 6 of the report, it is noted that:
[A]bout 12,000 persons have contributed histories to this study. ... Of the histories now in hand, about 6300 are male, and about 5300 of these are the white males who have provided the data for the present publication.[Emphasis added.]
There
is included an acknowledgement on page vii "to the 5300 males who have provided the data on which the present volume is based." In a table displayed on page 29, which lists the published (American) studies in sexology that are said by Kinsey to be of a taxonomic character, the number 6200 is entered under a heading signifying that it is in fact the sample size of this (Kinsey) study. On page 10, the number of case histories in hand is said to be 12,214. However, Reisman asserts that the number of cases in hand was in fact 21,350.
9 This number is derived from a map of the United States found on page 5 of the Kinsey Report upon which there appear dots, geographically distributed, each dot representing 50 case histories. Reisman asserts that there are exactly 427 such dots on this map. A glance at the map and its mass of dots disinclines me to undertake a verification of her count. But I give my affidavit that there are a great many of them, and that their distribution reflects a definite bias in favor of the northeastern quadrant of the country running east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line, which rules out any claim that the sample is representative of the population of the United States, a claim that is found in a good many tables in the Kinsey Report. (See, for example, Table 138, a rather crucial one in terms of the homosexual question.) But in the context of Kinsey's egregious violations of the canons and norms of scientific investigation and logical inquiry, this problem seems one of small moment. The study is essentially, and for all practical purposes, a mirthless farce.
To attempt to relate any information of a statistical nature found in the report to any one of the several numbers referred to above, is an exercise in futility; nor does a close examination of the report's statistical information illuminate matters, but darkens them: it is difficult in examining any of the data presented in tabular form to find anything relating to the number of case histories upon which that data is based, and where something is in fact found, it introduces confusion. Table 41, for example, displayed on page 208, shows distributions of the study sample by educational level, by occupational class, by religion and by age at the onset of puberty; but summing each of these distributions produces sample sizes, respectively, of 4102, 4940, 4120 and 4069. There is, as well, a distribution by age, but this seems to have been constructed by means of the so called cumulative incidence technic; assuming this to be so, and decomposing the elements of the distribution into the values that went into its construction and summing them, yields a sample size of 4072; summing the elements of the undecomposed distribution yields a sample size of 11,587, which clearly is bogus.
The cumulative incidence technic was heavily used by Kinsey to artificially inflate the number of subjects in his sample showing a history of any behavior that should by definition be widespread in the natural order that he meant to discover.
The process is straightforward: Consider a behavior of interest, say coitus with a prostitute, and an ordered enumeration of the states into which some subject-characterizing category breaks down; say, the category, marital-state, with the Kinseyan enumeration of states
{single, married, post-marital}
where a state in this ordered enumeration is said to be less than every state that stands anywhere to its right in the enumeration. Then, for this behavior--coitus with a prostitute--given a subject distribution by marital-state, if a subject in the distribution has exhibited this behavior and there is at least one state that is less than his, then for each such state there is introduced into the study a fictitious subject who has exhibited this behavior.
Given
for example a subject who has exhibited this behavior, and whose marital-state is post-marital, then another subject exhibiting this behavior is added to the distribution under each of the marital-state enumerants:
{single, married}
Thus, from the one subject exhibiting this behavior, there are, following this sleight of hand, three who do so.
And the sample has two more subjects, neither of whom need be accounted for, since there is in the Kinsey Report no accounting for subjects. Almost nothing can be collated or traced, nor patterns discerned, numbers reconciled. On the assumption that this distribution is by age as well as by marital-state, three fictitious subjects are added to the distribution for each age bracket less than that for which the reported behavior occurred, resulting, possibly, in a dozen or more fictitious subjects, each marked as a trafficker with prostitutes.
Finally, in this hypothetic, but by no means artifical example, an incremental nudge has been given to a finding that married American men are of a squalid, dishonorable nature and that young, unmarried American men are of a squalid, hedonistic nature; that is to say, a finding that they are Kinseyans. With a judicious use of this sort of legerdemaine a thing can even be proven to be so, and not to be so, from the same fund of data, as was pointed out in 1948 by the noted sociologist, author and academician, Dr Albert H. Hobbs, in his disgusted dismissal of the Kinsey study as pernicious and worthless.
10
And it was by judicious use of this legerdemaine that Kinsey fabricated the data demonstrating that 37% of white American males have at least some overt homosexual experiences, to the point of orgasm, during their lifetimes.
11 An invention so fantastic that I suspect even some psychiatrists of the Freudian persuasion were suspicious when intelligence of the thing came in. But one never knows.
Alas,
little that can be adduced from this unearthly stew of dupery smacks of surety; it is plain that those in search of the sample size of the Kinsey study are well advised to look for it elsewhere than in the Kinsey Report. Turning to critical reviews of the report, the number that seems the most likely candidate was teased out of the veritable architectonic of incoherence in which it lies concealed by W. Allen Wallis, a noted University of Chicago scholar and statistician and sometime president of the American Statistical Association, who conducted an exhaustive review of the Kinsey Report in 1949, concluding, with admirable restraint, that "The inadequacies in statistics are such that it is impossible to say that the book has much value beyond its role in opening a broad and important field," and finding the sample size to be, in all likelihood, 4120.
12
Wallis was a notable scholar, but at the time that he reviewed Kinsey's report he was ill informed concerning the state of sexological knowledge. There existed at the midpoint of the twentieth century an enormous trove of sexological research and scholarship, chiefly European, the extent and depth of which greatly surprised the factotums of the American Statistical Association, by whose researchers it was discovered through a standard literature search. The status of Kinsey as a pioneering sexologist was established through the bullying nature, native cunning and natural born skill in the art of razzledazzle possessed by Alfred C. Kinsey, who could have taught the impresarios of the foofaraw factories of Madison Avenue a thing or two.
The
descriptions of the so called sexual behavior of infants and children found in chapter 5 of the Kinsey Report are of violated innocents, children whose specters can only turn stilled faces to us and watch with a fright in their eyes that damns us. For this book of Kinsey's was published a half century ago, and to this day no agency of law has required that the Kinsey institute account for these children, or that those of its functionaries do so who were accessories to these crimes and who still live. Kinsey and his research associates went well beyond simply witholding their hands against the pedophile subjects of their study: they requested that these monsters, during their future assaults, pay special attention to certain reactions of their victims and that they keep the institute informed of their continuing observations. Kinsey's biographer, James H. Jones, ascribes to "a huge moral blind spot," the delight with which Kinsey received reports from these pedophile subjects of his study describing the effects of their assaults on children, a blind spot that was in Jones's view a consequence of Kinsey's rage for scientific fact.
13
I
fear that it is Mr Jones who exhibits a huge blind spot in this matter. To read the descriptive passages, in chapter 5 of the Kinsey Report, of what Kinsey chooses to call an infantile orgasm, is to feel the sickly aura of a mentality seized with a barely restrained state of excitement at the agonies of helpless, terrified innocents in the grip of monsters.
These passages are the gabblings of a madman transfixed by fascination in a chamber of horrors:
Extreme tension with violent convulsion: Often involving the sudden heaving and jerking of the whole body. Descriptions supplied by several subjects indicate that the legs often become rigid, with muscles knotted and toes pointed, muscles of abdomen contracted and hard, shoulders and neck stiff and often bent forward, breath held or gasping, eyes staring or tightly closed, hands grasping, mouth distorted, sometimes with tongue protruding; whole body or parts of it spasmodically twitching, sometimes synchronously with throbs or violent jerking of the penis. ... A gradual, and sometimes prolonged build-up to orgasm, which involves still more violent convulsions of the whole body; heavy breathing, groaning, sobbing, or more violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears (especially among younger children) ...
[Emphasis added.]14
Do any of the social scientists who cite the findings of the Kinsey Report, with the certitude of preachers citing holy writ, ever read it? Any part of it at all? A book presented as a record of a scientific inquiry into the sexual habits of American men by an author who demonstrates in the passage quoted above that he is insane; an author who gathers psychopaths, rapists, pedophiles, sexual deviants, criminals of every stripe, and specimens of the feeble minded, and presents their sexual behaviors as those of representative examples of American manhood; who extorts from his subjects, where necessary to his purposes, bogus histories of deviant behavior; who sweeps under the rug evidence of a serious flaw in his methodology; who refuses to reveal the content of his database or the content of the questionnaire from which he developed it; who concocts subjects and data out of thin air, preparing tables and figures designed not to inform but to obfuscate, mislead and confuse.
An author who could not cope with an idea that touched upon an abstraction, and who simmered with impatience when confronted by one; who had difficulty in fact comprehending how to formulate a systemic description save in terms of counting state transitions: considering the human male in function as a sexual being, he characterized him in terms of his orgasm (outlet) count per unit time, with a breakdown of this count in terms of the outlet inducing sources. Kinsey was, it seems to me, a simpleton who possessed an animal cunning, a slow, heavy, limited intelligence, and an overweening sense of self-esteem, and who made a career of counting things in the belief that this was the stuff of scientific research. Tangible or observable things. The only word for the man is numerant.
It is dubious whether anyone of balanced mind can read the Kinsey Report without concluding that it records a study driven by hidden and shadowed purpose or by witlessness, manifesting itself, in either case, in a protocol of unreason that is a compelling demonstration of what is possible in the absence of peer review, which the study did not receive, and without proper oversight by the funding authority, in this case the Committe for Research in the Problems of Sex (CRPS), a standing committee of the National Research Council (NRC), an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. This standing committe received its major funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and, from first to last, Kinsey effectively controlled, with the arts of a gifted, and very secretive, natural born humbug, the functionaries of the CRPS and the Rockefeller Foundation whose responsibilities were to evaluate the progress and worth of his study.
The shared characteristic of these watchmen, of which Kinsey took full advantage in his gulling of them, was an enthusiasm for a study of human sexual behavior of the sort he had undertaken, for they were believers in the power of science to illuminate the nature of man, and, so, to point the way to a revision of law and custom that could bring in the millenium.
There is an immediacy for us in the questions of how and why this shabby essay into the meaningless turned out by Kinsey came to loom large in the national consciousness and to lodge there as scientifically determined truth, causing it to weigh heavily among the things that brought us the so called sexual revolution. Despite the denial of the reality of evil that is the mark of modernity, the real and malevolent works fashioned by those who move in darkness are everywhere evident in our age. And nowhere more so than in the disparagement of the marital bond that now plagues the nation and in the desolation visited upon the little ones born of the transient unions that are its consequence. A state of things brought to being by the triumphal advances won by a mentality still in function in the shadows, still driven by revolutionary fervor, for its victory is by no means complete. Kinsey's heirs and assigns are with us, and their most pressing object of the moment is the normalization of pedophilia; which is to say, the force of their onslaught against the order of civilization is now directed to the dismissal and abandonment of children, whose fates are of no more concern to these celebrants of the orgasm than are those of so many gerbils.
Comments
Endnotes
Publisher's Catalog
Endnotes
1 "Sexual Behavior in the American Male", A. C Kinsey, W. B. Pomeroy, C. E. Martin, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948.
2 "Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life", James H. Jones, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. This is the primary source of the material on Kinsey appearing in this essay. Its author, it should be borne in mind, is not unsympathetic to Kinsey.
3 Ibid 2, pp. 505-513.
4 Ibid 2, pp. 610-611.
5 "An Anthropologist Looks at the Report", Margaret Mead, in Conference on Problems of Sexual Behavior, New York, 1948.
6 Ibid 2, p. 638.
7 "Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences", Judith A. Reisman, PhD, The Institute for Media Education, Arlington, Virginia, 1998. p. 102.
8 "Volunteer Error in the Kinsey Study", Maslow and Sakoda, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47, 1952. The term dominance is a polite one for aggression among some psychologists, and for self esteem among those who are abreast of the latest rages in the social sciences.
9 Ibid, 6. p. 53.
10 'An Evaluation of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male"', Albert H. Hobbs and R. D. Lambert, The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 104, No, 12, June 1948.
11 Ibid, 1. p. 650.
12 "Statistics of the Kinsey Report", W. Allen Wallis, Journal of the American Statistical Association, December, 1949.
13 Ibid, 2. p. 512.
14 Ibid, 2. p. 510.
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