Kinsey, Baby-Rape and the Sexual Revolution
Alfred Kinsey transformed Western culture and sparked a revolution in sexual attitudes but his research contained dark secrets he took to his grave.
“The atom bomb made absolutely no difference on foreign affairs…but Kinsey changed how the whole world looked at sex,” Gore Vidal.
KINSEY, PART ONE
No one I know, least of all me, wants to reverse the sexual revolution which -for all its faults- allows us to live lives today that are less guilt-ridden and less constrained than in, say the 1950s.
And yet.
If we say we value honesty then we must be willing to take an unflinching look at the person who, perhaps more than any other, helped drive the sexual revolution. Over the years I’ve read various, often conflicting, accounts of Kinsey and his work. Some of them deeply troubling. But I didn’t want to say much about him until I’d systematically researched him. This post is the result of that research and contains what I hope are a few genuinely new reflections, not least on Kinsey’s impact on the early gay movement, both for good and ill.
It’s hard for us to grasp today the impact Kinsey had on his contemporaries. His book ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male’ published in January 1948 became an instant best-seller. The publisher had printed a first-run of only 5000 copies. Two months later they had sold 200 000. Reviewers at the time compared it to epoch-changing tomes like Das Kapital and the Origin of the Species. Kinsey quickly became a household name. By the end of the year, Gallup reported one out of every five Americans had either heard of his book or read it.
Kinsey claimed that by interviewing thousands of men he had found definitive proof the real sexual behaviour of Americans was very different from that of the approved narrative. 85% of U.S. men had premarital sex and 70% sex with prostitutes. 10% were exclusively homosexual (I wish). 16% of American men, according to Kinsey, had had sex with an animal. Colour me sceptical. Over the years I’ve got about ….quite a lot….but I’ve never met anyone who’s had sex with an animal. And I grew up in Ayrshire which is famous for the seductive beauty of its cattle.
I digress.
His book turned Kinsey into an overnight celebrity and led to a sell-out tour in 1949 where he was feted as an academic superstar. Here he is lecturing at Berkeley that year.
Soon Kinsey was being quoted endlessly by intellectuals, writers, those campaigning for birth control and those who would become the beatniks. For many young Americans he embodied their generation’s determination to be truly “modern”. Then there was …the question of desire.
Before Kinsey, sexual desire was something mainstream culture mainly romanticised or sanitised. Sex - and sexual pleasure in particular- was often shrouded in secrecy and rumours. Kinsey opened the floodgates. When he read Kinsey’s book in 1948 Hugh Hefner was only one of millions who were shaken to the core. In the inaugural issue of Playboy, in 1953, he made his admiration for Kinsey clear,
“We believe… we are filling a publishing need only slightly less important than the one taken care of by the Kinsey report.”
We may criticise now -and rightly- Playboy for its role in the pornification of our culture but when Hefner put a nude picture of Marilyn Monroe on its first cover it marked a sea-change, one it seemed Kinsey had urged. It said the naked human body was beautiful …and the desire to look at it….was too.
It helped that Marilyn Monroe, who hadn’t been asked if she approved, laughed it off.
“I had nothing on but the radio”, she quipped.
It can’t be denied that Kinsey also made important contributions. He was, for example, the first sex expert to argue that the focus on the vaginal orgasm was completely misguided. Clitoral stimulation was the secret to female sexual pleasure, not vaginal as Freud claimed. Masters and Johnson often get the credit but Kinsey was there first.
More generally, Kinsey encouraged Western society to loosen up and be more frank. And millions of people, at the time, both male and female, said Amen to that. In the archives of Indiana University there are hundreds of letters from students who took his sex education course in the late 1930s. The course was the first to use graphic anatomical images of the genitals, and to discuss not just the mechanics of coitus …but wonders will never cease….different positions. The letters express heartfelt and effusive thanks to Kinsey for changing their lives.
There is though - and you knew it was coming- a dark side. It’s one so dark it beggars belief. Before we get to that I want to try in this post to understand Kinsey and what turned him into, what I consider, to be little short of a monster. I want to try and get a handle on what makes a real, clever human being, with all his flaws and talents mixed together, end up doing unforgiveable things.