Alfred Kinsey, along with Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard, published ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Female‘ (W.B. Saunders: Philadelphia, Pa., 1953). This book by Alfred C. Kinsey and his research staff at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University first appeared in print on Sept. 14, 1953. It could be purchased for $8, and though published by W.B. Saunders, a Philadelphia company that specialized in medical textbooks (to add credibility), it quickly found a broad audience outside academia (exactly as planned to brainwash the masses with this false science).
According to Professor David Allyn, lecturer in the Department of History at Princeton University, this book, along with Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, served to solidify the move which changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches…. [Kinsey’s work] played [a] critical role in the mid-century privatization of morality. In the post-WWII era, experts abandoned the concept of “public morals,” a concept which had underpinned the social control of American sexuality from the 1870’s onward…. In the 1950’s and 60’s, however, sexual morality was privatized, and the state-controlled, highly regulated moral economy of the past gave way to a new, “deregulated” moral market…. Kinsey’s [work] argued against government interference in private life.
Indiana University zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey shocked the nation in 1948 with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male1, followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,2 whose 50th anniversary is being celebrated this year by the Kinsey Institute.
Compiling thousands of interviews, Kinsey reported that American women were either sexually repressed (married) or highly promiscuous. Kinsey’s studies have had an enormous impact on the law and the culture, despite later evidence that the research was fatally flawed and even involved cover-ups of child rape.
In Kinsey, Sex and Fraud (1990),3 Dr. Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel unmasked the Kinsey studies as a massive hoax. The medical journal The Lancet reviewed their findings and said: “[T]he important allegations from the scientific viewpoint are imperfections in the (Kinsey) sample and unethical, possibly criminal, observations on children. … Dr. Judith A. Reisman and her colleagues demolish the foundations of the two (Kinsey) reports.”4
Here are some ways the Kinsey reports distorted reality:
Denigrating motherhood
“The Kinsey team allegedly recorded the sexual conduct of a total of 7,789 women in their sample, but the only births recorded were from single women … and children born through adulterous unions. … Kinsey gave no data on normal marital birth, no data on normal mothers.”5
Misrepresenting the “married” sample
Kinsey’s team had difficulty persuading married women to talk about their most intimate experiences, so he inflated the numbers of “married” women by including “untold numbers of sexually unconventional women as ‘married.’”6 According to Kinsey, “They were identified as married if they were living with their spouses either in formally consummated legal marriages, or in common-law relationships which had lasted for at least a year.”7 As Dr. Reisman writes, “Since the Kinsey team did not insist that ‘married’ women be exclusively with one man, their definition of ‘married’ could include the large population of prostitutes the team interviewed if they lived with their pimps.”8
Defining American husbands and fathers as sex offenders
Kinsey falsely portrayed American men as awash in sexual experimentation, and said that 95 percent of men committed sexual crimes such as rape, sodomy, incest, homosexuality, adultery, public exposure, fornication or other offenses. If most men were sexual criminals of one sort or another, Kinsey reasoned, then society should redefine what is “normal” and reduce penalties for sex offenses.9
Sanitizing child sexual abuse
Kinsey also based his liberal view of child rape on research tabulated in Graph Tables 31-34 in the male volume, which chronicled systematic sexual abuse of boys aged 2 months to 15 years old. Kinsey concluded that the boys, despite violent reactions and crying, enjoyed being manually and orally stimulated by pedophiles. To Kinsey, what most people thought was rape was merely “sex play” with children, which was essentially harmless, particularly if the child gave “consent.”10 He also included this chilling observation: “Orgasm is in our records for a female babe of 4 months.”11 The Kinsey Institute, situated on Indiana University’s campus, continues to refuse to open the records
of the Kinsey child sex data to public scrutiny.
Kinsey’s fraudulent research painted a sanitized picture of sexual abuse. Of 4,441 females interviewed, 1,075 reported being “sexually approached” as a girl by an adult male. But Kinsey dismissed emotional and even physical harm. A comment: “[We] have only one clear-cut case of serious injury done to the child, and a very few instances of
vaginal bleeding which, however, did not appear to do any appreciable damage.”12
Letting off child molesters
With his benign view of child sexual abuse, Kinsey became an activist on behalf of child molesters. In 1949, for example, he testified before the California General Assembly’s Subcommittee on Sex Crimes, urging them to liberalize sex offense statutes. He argued specifically for granting immediate paroles to suspected child molesters, and warned that societal “hysteria” does more harm to children than the actual molestations.13
Kinsey wrote: “It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts.”14
Going easy on rapists
Over the years, law review articles and court opinions cited the Kinsey studies thousands of times. Kinsey worked with Columbia University law professor Herbert Wechsler to promote the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code (1955). Most states cited the code, which is largely based on Kinsey’s findings, as the blueprint to ease penalties for sex offenses, resulting in less protection for women and children from sexual predators.15
As researchers Linda Jeffrey and Ronald Ray write, “Fifty years ago, 33 percent of the states in the union had no statute of limitations for reports of rape. Eighteen states provided the death penalty for rape of an adult woman.”16 All states dropped the death penalty for rape, and many now follow the Model Penal Code’s suggestion to impose a statute of limitations and to require proof that a rape victim physically resisted her attacker. Under the liberalized laws, rape cases took off. From 1962 to 1990, even with a more narrow definition, “forcible” rape increased by 366 percent.17
The Kinsey team seemed particularly insensitive to rape victims. In a 1965 book, several of them wrote of “the female desire to be forced,” and that, “As Dr. Kinsey often said, the difference between a ‘good time’ and a ‘rape’ may hinge on whether the girl’s parents were awake when she finally arrived home.”18
Conclusion
Alfred C. Kinsey’s studies have had a profoundly negative impact on American women and children, weakening legal protection from sexual abuse and falsely portraying “sexual liberation” as an unalloyed good, despite astronomic increases in divorce, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases and physical abuse of women and children.
Instead of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Kinsey’s female volume, Indiana University – and Congress – should investigate Kinsey’s junk science and criminal cover-up.
Robert H. Knight is director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. He wrote and directed the Family Research Council video documentary about Alfred Kinsey, titled The Children of Table 34, as well as a booklet, Dr. Kinsey and The Children of Table 34, which accompanies the video. Mr. Knight is indebted to Dr. Judith A. Reisman, who continues to shine a light on the Kinsey studies and their consequences.
The Kinsey Syndrome points out that Hugh Hefner founded Playboy magazine in 1953, the same year that Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Was this a coincidence? Well, Hefner read Sexual Behavior in the Human Male when he was young and wrote about it in a college publication, and the work convinced him that he had been lied to by the wider society. Moreover, The Kinsey Syndrome presents a clip of Hefner saying, “I refer to it [Kinsey’s Human Female book] in the introduction to the first issue; I called it ‘the other great book that was coming out in 1953.'”
Here is where some may say, “All right, you claim it’s harmful, but should we suppress the truth? The truth will set you free, right?” But if the sexual revolution is a child, it is an illegitimate one — because its father was certainly so. That is to say, Alfred Kinsey was the author of possibly the most destructive scientific fraud in man’s history.
In exposing this deception, a great debt is owed to Dr. Judith Reisman. She is The Kinsey Syndrome’s leading expert witness, and the documentary is based mainly on her work, which represents decades of dogged research into the Kinsey con. And together with executive producers Joseph M. Schimmel and Christian J. Pinto, she has helped create a masterpiece in the effort to expose Kinsey.
So, what of the profound disconnect between the 1950s’ white-picket-fence image and the dark underbelly that Kinsey claimed was its reality? The Kinsey Syndrome points out that while the researcher-cum-fiction writer claimed to be presenting data based on interviews with thousands of average men and women, his sample was fatally — and purposely — skewed. As for the incidental error, as famous psychologist and Kinsey friend Abraham Maslow pointed out, only very rare people (especially in the relatively reserved 1940s and ’50s) would fill out a comprehensive survey of intensely personal questions.
In fact, these people were so rare that Kinsey couldn’t find enough to constitute a scientific sample. But that didn’t deter him. He wrote that he plied America’s prisons and back alleys, including in his sample 1,300 to 1,400 sex offenders; 199 sexual psychopaths; other prisoners; and members of Chicago’s homosexual underground, people from its bathhouses and homosexual bars. He then mixed them in his “regular-male data.”
And Kinsey repeated this fraud when working on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female some years later. The Kinsey Syndrome tells us, “He redefined ‘married women’ to include any woman that had lived with a man for at least a year, a broad description that included prostitutes who had lived with their pimps.” Kinsey regularly sought such women out and included them in the regular-female data.
It may be hard to believe that a man who, as recently as 2004 in the biographical movie Kinsey, was lauded as a brave revolutionary bucking a “McCarthyist” system could be guilty of such striking scientific fraud; thus, The Kinsey Syndrome documents its accusations well. For example, the documentary tells us that Kinsey divulged on page 39 of his Human Male book that he also included “bootleggers, gamblers, male prostitutes, ne’er do-wells, pimps, thieves, and hold-up men” in the regular-male data. The Kinsey Syndrome also includes other ironclad evidence, such as interviews with figures such as Dr. Paul Gebhard, the co-author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and second director of the Kinsey Institute. He admitted when asked about the research subjects that, “Fifty-five percent were prisoners…. We didn’t have enough non-prison people to do much of a comparison — but he [Kinsey] didn’t do a comparison. He simply took the prison people he got and used them as his less-than-college educated sample…. By emphasizing the less-than-college educated sample, he introduced a lot of errors into the data.” That may be the understatement of the year. It’s more accurate to say that he portrayed perverts as the norm in an effort to prove perversion was normal.
And this fact is well known. For example, the British medical journal Lancet wrote that Kinsey “questioned an unrepresentative proportion of prison inmates and sex offenders in a survey of normal sexual behavior,” and the Intercollegiate Review ranked Sexual Behavior in the Human Male as the third worst book of the 20th century.
Yet the story gets worse. If we didn’t know better, we might think such deviance would have landed Kinsey in prison. Instead, the release of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female afforded him the opportunity to define deviancy downwards. Not only did Kinsey’s newfound fame launch him onto the college lecture circuit, he also appeared in front of state legislatures and lobbied for a relaxing of sex-offender laws. In fact, Dr. Reisman has a chart on which she has documented how Kinsey went from state to state convincing ingenuous legislators to dumb-down punishments for sex crime. The result was that the Model Penal Code issued in 1955 already reflected Kinsey’s pseudo-science, and between 1982 and 2000, the great legal database Westlaw had roughly 650 citations to Kinsey.
