THE SEXUALITY RESEARCH OF ALFRED C. KINSEY – 40 YEARS LATER
Time for Accountability
from Kinsey, Sex and Fraud. The Indoctrination of a People edited by John H Court
& J Gordon Muir (Lochinvar-
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Chapter Overview
No man in modern times has shaped public attitudes to, and perceptions of, human sexuality more than the late Alfred C. Kinsey. He advocated that all sexual behaviors considered deviant were normal, while polemicizing that exclusive heterosexuality was abnormal and a product of cultural inhibitions and societal conditioning. Beginning just over 40 years ago, he and his team of researchers presented the American people with "statistical data" showing that what they were supposedly doing sexually was more liberal, and more consistent with his own ideology, than anyone had believed possible. Put another way, Kinsey demonstrated with numbers that "normal" behavior was much more permissive than conventional wisdom had suspected.
Few people realized that the data he presented were not, as claimed, scientific. Nor were the data representative of societal norms. And it now is becoming clear that, in addition to being highly biased, Kinsey's results may have been fraudulent. For these reasons and because the foundation for some key Kinsey conclusions still accepted today as scientific fact is research conducted on human subjects illegally and against their will, it has become necessary to call on the scientific community to reexamine Dr. Kinsey's sex research effort.
That is one purpose of this book. The importance of this issue is underscored by
the fact that Kinsey's conclusions have become, to some extent, a self-
In 1948 and 1953 a two-
WHAT KINSEY CLAIMED
What Kinsey claimed about "statistically common behavior" in the United States population of the 1940s surprised most, shocked many and delighted a number of others. It was assumed that his "scientific" research among a sample of several thousand men and women could be extrapolated to the U.S. population as a whole to provide an accurate picture of national sexual behavior. Kinsey's findings were thus nothing short of stunning, but the most stunning finding of all went almost unnoticed, except, it appears, by the FBI.
Even before the 1948 appearance of the Male Report, magazine and newspaper articles proclaimed that a scientific study would reveal that:
• 85% of males in the U.S. have intercourse prior to marriage
• Nearly 70% have sex with prostitutes
• Between 30% and 45% of husbands have extramarital intercourse
• 37% of all males have homosexual experiences between adolescence and old age
Writing in Harper's, Albert Deutsch exclaimed, "The Kinsey survey explodes traditional concepts of what is normal and abnormal, natural and unnatural in sex behavior."
The Female Report in 1953 was almost anticlimactic by comparison. However, despite
Kinsey's protestations that his books were presenting facts without moral interpretations,
the "facts" of the Female Report continued the process begun in the male volume -
However, the most profoundly shocking findings of both Kinsey Reports were almost totally ignored. These were Kinsey's conclusions on childhood sexuality. Kinsey's "scientific" "research" purported to prove that children were sexual beings, even from infancy, and that they could, and should, have pleasurable and beneficial sexual interaction with adult "partners" who could lead them into the proper techniques of fulfilling sexual activity.
The damage done to children from sexual relations with adults -
According to an article in Esquire magazine, Kinsey was the "Patron Saint of Sex,"
whose books set in motion "the first wave of the sexual revolution." They inspired
the sexual philosophy of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine -
John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, in their book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Harper & Row, 1988), noted that "the strongest assault on sexual reticence in the public realm emerged not from the pornographic fringe, nor from the popular culture, but from the respectable domain of science," with the publication of Kinsey's Male and Female Reports. By purporting to demonstrate a wide divergence between real sexual behavior and publicly espoused norms, the implication was that "cultural values surrounding sex needed revision." D'Emilio and Freedman observed that Kinsey's "scientific credentials" "gave legitimacy" to the way the media presented his findings and the way the public received them. They further noted that "The Kinsey studies, as much as pornography, shaped the context in which the Supreme Court responded to the obscenity issue".
One Kinsey legacy is the active and prominent Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex,
Gender, and Reproduction -
If the legitimate pornography industry is, in a sense, another Kinsey legacy, then its leaders are clearly grateful. According to Christie Hefner, in the 1960s the Playboy Foundation became the major research sponsor of the Masters and Johnson Institute and made the initial grant to establish an Office of Research Services of the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS).1 The latter organization is heavily involved in the incorporation of Kinsey's basic sexual philosophy into school sex education programs, as is later explained (see chapter 4).
In 1971, Playboy, according to the junior Hefner, "awarded a grant to establish a pilot program at the University of Minnesota" with the aim of "changing the attitudes of men and women medical students". This was necessary because "today's medical students and practicing physicians perpetuate arbitrary judgments about normal and abnormal sexuality... [and] are ignorant of the variety of possible human sexual expression." Hefner added that "the state of medical practice today [in 1987] is not much better than it was in 1971".
Another group grateful to Kinsey is the proliferating pedophile movement, which justifies
its advocacy of adult sexual relations with children by quoting Kinsey's child sexuality
findings. Tom O'Carroll, an active pedophile, chairperson of the international organization
PIE (Pedophile Information Exchange) and author of Paedophilia: The Radical Case
(Alyson Publications, 1980), cites Kinsey's research (correctly) as supporting the
harmlessness of adult-
O'Carroll says,
A number of empirical studies have established some unassailable facts on the subject
[of children as innate sexual beings]. The most famous of these sources is of course
the work of the biologist Alfred Kinsey and his coresearchers which made almost as
much impact in the early post-
Perhaps the most striking of the Kinsey findings, as they concerned pre-
WHO WAS DR. KINSEY?
In his 1972 biography, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (Harper & Row),
Kinsey coworker and Male and Female Report co-
According to Pomeroy, Kinsey was a sickly child (rheumatic fever and rickets), brought
up in a strictly religious atmosphere, who blossomed out in adolescence -
Although he became "the world's foremost sex researcher," he was in his earlier years a "shy and lonely young man who had avidly pursued gall wasps instead of girls..." Naive and unsophisticated about girls and sexuality, the reserved young Kinsey, "The boy who never had a girl" and whose boyhood had been a "sexually sterile world," married the first girl he had ever dated!
Pomeroy relates that Kinsey was a "complicated man who remained virtually unknown to the public." Even his Male and Female Reports were probably not well known firsthand to the public. Pomeroy describes him as the "most talked about and least read author of our time; the majority of people got their opinions of his work second hand." This certainly appears true of many scientists then and since and may explain how major problems with his research (described later) have been overlooked for 40 years.
Kinsey, who majored in taxonomy (the classification of animals and plants), spent
his pre-
After 18 years at Indiana, Kinsey was chosen to be the coordinator of the university's
new marriage course.2 He quickly discovered that there was "no reliable body of statistics...
on what people did sexually which might serve as a guide when people asked for the
kind of advice he was expected to give." This was the starting point for Kinsey's
great lifework. He began to do for sexual behavior statistics what he had done for
gall wasps -
Ironically, and perhaps significantly, one of the forces that propelled Kinsey into
his sex research at Indiana was the fierce opposition from the focal clergy to his
Marriage Course lectures. This precipitated his choice between lecturing and field
work in human sexuality. Hostility from the religious stuffed-
According to Pomeroy, Kinsey had also come to see a basic incongruity between science and religion and couldn't understand why all scientists didn't feel the same way. It is clear that he shared Pomeroy's view that Christians inherited an almost paranoid approach to sexual behavior from the Jews. Knowledge of this particular background is essential to an understanding of the subsequent difficulties Kinsey got himself into with statistics, experimental research and the attempt to undermine a system of morality without (he claimed) making moral judgments.
KINSEY'S PHILOSOPHY
Following his formative years in which Kinsey came to reject the tenets of Judeo-
[C]onsidering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity [p. 451; emphasis added].
To Kinsey, being involved in all types of sexual activity would represent freedom from the cultural conditioning which society imposes and which leads to artificial distinctions such as "right and wrong, licit and illicit, normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable in our social organization" (Male Report, p. 678).
According to Robinson in his 1976 book The Modernization of Sex (Harper & Row),
[Kinsey] believed that human fulfillment, in the sexual realm at least, lay in following the example of our mammalian forebears... He evaluated every form of sexual activity in terms of its role in the sexual lives of the lower species, and he frequently concluded that outlawed sexual practices were entirely natural because they conformed to "basic mammalian patterns." ... [He] even sought to invest [sexual relations between humans and animals] with a certain dignity by suggesting they could achieve a psychological intensity comparable to that in exclusively human sexual relations [pp. 55, 56; emphasis added].
A few pages later, Robinson noted that Kinsey strongly implied
... all orgasms were equal, regardless of how one came by them, and that there were accordingly no grounds for placing heterosexual intercourse in a privileged position [p. 59].
Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin and Gebhard claim in Hoch and Zubin's 1949 work, Psychosexual
Development in Health and Disease (Grune & Stratton), that this mechanical, stimulus-
[W]e suggest that sexuality, in its basic biologic origins, is a capacity to respond to any sufficient stimulus. It is simply a picture of physiologic response and psychologic conditioning in terms that are known to the biologist and psychologist. This is the picture of sexual response in the child and in most other younger mammals.. For a few uninhibited adults, sex continues to remain sex, however they have it [p. 27; emphasis added].
This of course is the Kinsey principle of "outlet sex" -
The notion of outlet, for all its apparent innocence, performed important critical services for Kinsey. Principal among these was the demotion of heterosexual intercourse to merely one among a democratic roster of six possible forms of sexual release (the six, in order of their treatment in the Male volume, were masturbation, nocturnal emissions, heterosexual petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual relations, and intercourse with animals of other species)... marital intercourse, was even more rudely confined to a single chapter toward the back of the book, where it received about one third the attention devoted to homosexual relations... a remarkable feat of sexual leveling... the fundamental categories of his analysis clearly worked to undermine the traditional sexual order [Robinson, 1976, pp. 58,59; emphasis added].
Robinson here points out a basic truth about the presentation of Kinsey's work: it was designed "to undermine the traditional sexual order". Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to change the traditional sexual order if sound scientific research shows it to be unfounded.
Some have dismissed critics of Kinsey's work as "moralists." However, careful review
shows that Kinsey's own position on sexuality was a moral one -
... in undermining established categories of sexual wisdom... .Kinsey assigned [prominence] to masturbation and homosexuality, both of which were objects of his partiality... [He had a] tendency to conceive of the ideal sexual universe according to a homoerotic model [ibid. pp. 54,64,70].
Wardell Pomeroy states in his Kinsey biography that some of Kinsey's best friends were scientists like himself who, in one way or another, were part of his "grand scheme" (Pomeroy, 1972, p. 155).4 Kinsey's research was in fact the scientific base which Kinsey and colleagues hoped to use in their effort to change society's traditional moral values. The specific tactics for implementing the "grand scheme" are examined in later chapters.
Essentially, Kinsey initiated a two-
KINSEY'S RESEARCH
Between the years of 1938 and 1963 (seven years after Kinsey's death), the Kinsey research team took the "sex histories" of about 18,000 persons. In his Male (1948) and Female (1953) Reports Kinsey used data from just over 5,000 of the male sample and almost 6,300 of the female sample. Somewhere and sometime in the course of the project, Kinsey appears to have directed experimental sex research on several hundred children aged 2 months to almost 15 years. These children were orally and manually stimulated to orgasm by a group of nine sex offenders, some of whom were "technically trained" (if they were not child sex offenders before, they were after the experiments). These orgasm tests on children constituted Kinsey's experimental child sex research database!
By presenting his male and female interview data in the form of numerous tables depicting
the frequencies of various sexual activities, Kinsey provided a picture of what people
were supposedly doing sexually in 1940s society. Kinsey co-
By shifting to a scientific methodology that largely involved frequency counts and
cross-
It was Kinsey who established in the public awareness what "statistically common
behavior" was. And this was far removed from what anyone had ever imagined. Moreover,
this revelatory behavior gradually came to be seen as normal. Psychologists Zimbardo,
Ebbeson and Maslach, writing in their 1977 book Influencing Attitudes and Changing
Behavior (Addison-
[T]he results of the Kinsey surveys on sexual behavior of the American male and female established, to some degree, social standards of what was acceptable common practice [p. 89; emphasis added].
The problem with Kinsey's "statistically common behavior" (or statistical morality),
however, is that it was defined by using data from a sample of interviewees that
was unrepresentative of society -
The entire make-
What was the ultimate goal of Kinsey's research? It appears to have been dual. The first part was, as noted, to change society's view of what "normal" human sexuality was. The second was to establish himself as the world's foremost sex researcher. Both parts of this goal have been achieved, temporarily. And the achieving of part two has placed a stamp of authority on the "rightness" of part one.
Information very recently unearthed from the archives of the University of Akron adds to our understanding of the lengths to which Kinsey was prepared to go, and the level of deceit he was prepared to practice, in order to realize his ambition. When confronted with evidence from an expert that there was bias toward unconventional sexual behavior among the subjects who volunteered for his sex research, Kinsey ended his professional relationship with this individual and, in a clear breach of scientific ethics, deliberately ignored and concealed the information. The expert was the late and noted psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow. The full story is recounted in chapter 6.
Even Kinsey's coworkers were chosen, apparently, with a particular set of results in mind. Pomeroy's qualifications for directing the evolution of human sexuality (by being part of the Kinsey team) were recognized by Kinsey himself (Pomeroy, 1972, p. 98). At a scientific conference in 1983, Pomeroy related that Kinsey had hired him on the basis of his personal sex history, deducing that he "had not picked up all the taboos, and the inhibitions, and the guilts that... [his] colleagues had..." (Eastern Regional Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Philadelphia, April 17, 1983).
Pomeroy mentioned Kinsey's hiring stipulations in his biography, where he relates that "no one could have come to work for Kinsey without giving his [sex] history first. It was a condition of employment, which a few employees in the lower echelons resented" (Pomeroy, 1972, p. 461). Elsewhere Pomeroy recounted that Kinsey refused to hire an applicant for a research staff position because the person believed "extramarital intercourse harmful to marriage, homosexuality abnormal, and animal contacts ludicrous".5
What Kinsey and this handpicked staff concluded from illegal and even violent sexual experimentation on child subjects was that the orgasmic potential of infants and children was scientifically established for the first time. This "research" on infants and children has been translated into the "widely recognized" fact of infant and childhood sexuality, as is explained in modern college human sexuality texts, eg, Crooks and Baur's Our Sexuality (Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co., 1983):
However, with the widespread circulation of the research findings of Alfred Kinsey and other distinguished investigators, the false assumption that childhood is a period of sexual dormancy is gradually eroding. In fact, it is now widely recognized that infants of both sexes are born with the capacity for sexual pleasure and response [p. 410; emphasis added].
Later chapters (especially chapter 1) examine the methods by which Kinsey's child sexuality "findings" were obtained.
KINSEY'S INFLUENCE
Kinsey's conclusions on human sexuality have to some extent become a self-
Today, in many school systems children learn the "Kinsey scale," a seven-
Parts of Kinsey's "prophecy" have, of course, remained unfulfilled. Most members
of the public have never heard of cross-
In this regard, influential figures in today's sex education establishment who share
Kinsey's views on childhood sexuality are beginning to broach the subject of the
legitimacy of adult-
The loosening up of restrictions on adult/child sex is just one of the goals of several
influential sex educators and their academic mentors. In the case of "sex across
generational lines," the "scientific" basis for the merit of these developments is
Kinsey's experimental research among children -
In the chapters to follow we will examine Kinsey's research and conclusions,particularly
with respect to children. In addition, we will look closely at the type of people
who formed the "samples" from which Kinsey got his information, and the persons involved
in his child sex experiments. It will become increasingly clear that many of Kinsey's
conclusions derived from his male and female samples are invalid because of the flagrantly
unrepresentative group of "interviewees" he used. With respect to Kinsey's experimental
child sex research, it will become obvious that this involved the actual perpetration
of illegal and sometimes violent sex acts on children -
Lately, the error of some other of Kinsey's conclusions is beginning to show up.
According to Kinsey's results, 10% of white American males are "more or less exclusively
homosexual" (ie, near the right end of Kinsey's "scale") for at least three years
between the ages of 16 and 55; 8% are "exclusively homosexual" (6 on the "scale")
for the same period; and 4% are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives (Male
Report, p. 651). These data have been used by the Centers for Disease Control and
others (including the New York City Department of Health) to prepare forecasts of
AIDS-
According to Bruce Lambert in The New York Times (July 19, 20, 1988), the estimate
of the number of homosexual/bisexual men in New York City, which was based on Kinsey's
1948 data, has had to be revised downward (based on observations of the spread of
AIDS) from 500,000 to 100,000-
Kinsey's statistics on the prevalence of homosexuality in society have been grossly
in error, which would probably be no surprise to Kinsey -
WHY THIS BOOK
There are now so many indications of serious error and irregularity in Kinsey's human
sexuality research, even upon a superficial examination, that it became necessary
for this book to be written. In fact the whole notion of Kinsey's sex studies being
considered "science" will have to be re-
It is Kinsey's work which established the notion of "normal" childhood sexual desire.
This "scientific" fact about children provides justification for pedophiles and a
"scientific" basis for the children-
Some readers will doubt that things have come to this pass. Society, they would argue,
could never look approvingly on adults having sexual access to children. This is
not necessarily a valid assumption. One requirement necessary for legitimization
of adult-
Whether or not Kinsey's research could stand close scientific examination was never
an issue in 1940s America. It had all the required attributes for that period: it
was a major project, it was headed by a scientist and it had never been done before.
Perhaps most impressive of all, it dealt with large numbers of "facts" that seemed
to have been handled in a statistically proper way. Co-
No research in human behavior on so broad a scale had previously been attempted. Along with this, one has to consider the peculiarly American trait of counting noses. If this project had been undertaken in Europe or Asia it might never have attracted any attention or even succeeded, but in America we like to count things. As a result, the research was done and it accomplished the primary objective of making such investigation acceptable [Pomeroy, 1972, p. 466].
Thus a new view of sexual behavior was presented in the form of numbers and brought forth to an awed American public. One of the early Kinsey reviewers caught on to this. Physician and author Iago Galdston wrote in his critique of the Female Report, "So Noble an Effort Corrupted",
Kinsey of course does not "advocate" libertinism. He doesn't advocate anything. He allows his figures to do that for him. But his figures are like puppets, and he pulls the strings [In Geddes DP: An Analysis of the Kinsey Reports on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female, Mentor Books, 1954, p. 47].
The scale of Kinsey's sex research was matched by the pretentiousness of its presentation. His book titles imply that sexual behavior for all peoples is being defined, when, in fact, as Kinsey contemporary Ashley Montagu of Rutgers University astutely noted, "These books deal with the sexual behavior of a very limited branch of humanity, namely the American variety, and a small segment of that variety at that" (ibid., p. 127).
Kinsey's Male and Female Reports did not, however, get the scrutiny of experts in the "hard" sciences that might have demolished their credibility at the time. Practically all of his advisors and scientific readers were "behavioral scientists" who knew very little about scientific procedures themselves. What Kinsey presented was scientism? as opposed to science. As such, it was not recognized or acknowledged by those also involved in its practice.
Since Kinsey's work was misconstrued as "science," serious error has been allowed
to masquerade as fact for 40 years in our understanding of perhaps the most important
area of human behavior. The ready acceptance of this "science"-
[It is believed that] the history of mankind is properly understood as a progress
from dark restricting superstition to reasoned liberating enlightenment. [It is also
believed that] since moral and spiritual versions of the human condition come to
us from the past, they're necessarily infected with superstition, whereas scientific
versions of our condition are myth-
A further reason for a second look at the work of Dr. Kinsey and colleagues is the disturbing fact that major social conclusions are based on a body of research that involved the use of experimentation on human subjects against their will. This actuality somehow escaped the notice of reviewers at the time. There remains therefore an obligation to the principle of scientific integrity, as well as a responsibility to the pursuit of truth in science, to reexamine the research of Kinsey and colleagues and the circumstances under which it was carried out.
THE ISSUE OF FRAUD
It will become clear from subsequent chapters that the issue of fraud in Kinsey's
research is one that now has to be faced squarely by scientists and lay persons alike.
The critical importance of this is that many influential figures in sex education
are "true believers" in a philosophy of human sexuality shaped by Dr. Kinsey and
his coauthors. And the Kinsey team's research conclusions provide a scientific basis
for, among other things, the acceptability of early childhood sexual activity and
adult sexual relations with consenting children. Just as Hugh Hefner, according to
author Thomas Weyr,8 found in Kinsey's work "demonstrable evidence" to undergird
his Playboy philosophy, so does today's sex education establishment find in Kinsey
the justification for teaching the normalcy of homosexuality, bisexuality -
If Kinsey's research is seriously flawed or fraudulent, a whole house of cards collapses.
Could a research project of this magnitude and importance be bungled or even rigged
and no one notice for 40 years? Even in the 1970s and '80s, when scientific research
has been scrutinized and peer-
Breuning's data impacted public health policy nationally. Kinsey's data have impacted
public morality and the understanding of human sexuality internationally. There is
good evidence that Kinsey's research was designed to provide a scientific base for
his preexisting radical sexual ideology: his coworkers were chosen for their bias;
biased samples were knowingly used; unwarranted conclusions were drawn from data
presented; methods are sometimes obscured, sometimes flawed; some data are contradictory;
there is a prior history of deception in other scientific endeavors; Kinsey has dissembled
in the medical literature; Kinsey co-
If even only some of the above are correct, then Kinsey's research results clearly are false. Normally in a major project in an important area of research, false conclusions would sooner or later be detected. As Daniel Koshland, editor of Science, has pointed out, "You may falsify an important finding, but then it will surely form the basis for subsequent experiments and become exposed" (Science 235:141, 1987). However, the Kinsey research never has been replicated, and even an attempt to "clean up" the data was suspiciously botched. False conclusions in science can be an honest mistake, but outright deception is quite another matter. In the case of Kinsey's sex research, there is strong (we believe compelling) evidence of fraud, which would make this research the most egregious example of scientific deception in this century.
This brings us to an interesting situation. With the exception of Dr. Kinsey, all of the scientists involved in the creation of the Kinsey research findings are alive and functioning as influential scholars, writers, lecturers, experts on national and international panels and commissions, courtroom witnesses, and academic luminaries in the sexology and sex education fields. What will now happen? Will scientific peers have the courage to investigate this landmark work of 40 years ago? If they do not, the public will be entitled to know why. Here is what should happen when there is even a suspicion of fraud in scientific research:
[O]nce suspected or detected, fraud needs intensive investigation with publicity given to the results and retraction in the journals concerned and in the bibliographical databases [Stephen Lock, Editor, British Medical Journal, February 6,1988, p. 377; emphasis added].
The argument for investigation is even more powerful when data have been derived
from the abuse of human subjects -
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1 Christie Hefner, in the Foreword to Sexuality and Medicine, Volume 11, Earl E. Shelp (ed.), Reidel Publishing Co., 1987.
2 In her forthcoming book Sofiporn Plays Hardball (in press, Huntington House Publishers), Dr. Judith Reisman challenges the official version, repeated here, that Dr. Kinsey was "chosen" for the university's new marriage course. Reisman argues that Dr. Kinsey maneuvered for many years to gain approval for this course.
3 Two of Kinsey's four favorite books, according to Pomeroy, were Man and His Gods,
by Homer Smith (1952), and Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism, by L.M. Epstein (1948).
Pomeroy noted that "Kinsey knew a great deal about the Judeo-
4 Pomeroy elsewhere in his book says that the "grand scheme" or "design" was in its "simplest terms" to find out what people did sexually (p.4). As will later become apparent, it was to provide a statistical base for a new morality.
5 Brecher R. Brecher E (eds.), An Analysis of Human Sexual Response, Andre Deutsch, 1967, p. 117.
6 See Appendix D for an account of Project 10 in action.
7 Defined as the application of quasi-
8 Reaching for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America, Times Books, 1987, p. 11.