KINSEY Notes
Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) and his wife Clara had four children. Only three are shown in Bill Condon’s biopic Kinsey. Their firstborn, Don, died from diabetes shortly before his fifth birthday. Clara Kinsey died in 1982 at the age of 83.
In the film, Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard) is seen seducing Alfred Kinsey. According to Kinsey’s biographers, Kinsey pursued Clyde, who became the researcher’s somewhat reluctant sex partner.
Kinsey never saw his father after his parents divorced. In the film, Kinsey is shown at his father’s home after his mother dies.
Indiana University came up with the money necessary to fund Kinsey’s research after the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its support due to pressure from right-wing and religious leaders. In the film, the university board members decline the chance to support the researcher.
Following the confiscation of sexually related materials by the Indianapolis customs collector in 1950, the Kinsey Institute sued U.S. Customs. Although not mentioned in the film, the Institute won the legal battle in Federal District Court in 1957. By then, Kinsey had been dead for a year.
According to Kinsey Institute Senior Research Fellow and former director John Bancroft, politically motivated anti-Kinsey factions have focused on the subject of child/adult sexual contact to discredit the researcher because "in recent years, when there has been anxiety bordering on hysteria about child sexual abuse, often resulting in circumstances where the accused is regarded as guilty until proved innocent, what better way to discredit someone?" The Kinsey Institute has publicly denied the accusations, asserting that Dr. Kinsey never conducted experiments with children. Condon’s film only touches on the subject once, when we see Kinsey explaining to a pedophile that he doesn’t condone forced sex.
Although only barely mentioned in the film, the Kinsey methodology has been much criticized because of the samples used in his studies. The survey group was composed of mostly volunteer subjects (as opposed to random samples); about 25% of them were, or had been, prison inmates; and 5% were male prostitutes. Kinsey was warned by prominent psychologists about the unreliability of data based on information originating mainly from volunteers, but the researcher refused to consider the criticism. In addition, Kinsey’s statistical methodologies and incomplete demographic data have been put into question.
Yet, despite those flaws, Kinsey’s studies may ultimately be no more inaccurate or tendentious than modern studies on human sexuality. In a critique of one of Kinsey’s biographers, Dr. Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History at CUNY, wrote in The Nation:
"Paul Gebhard (one of Kinsey’s co-authors and his successor as director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research — he retired in 1982), himself reacting to criticism leveled against the two volumes [Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)], spent years ‘cleaning’ the Kinsey data of its purported contaminants — removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard, with Alan Johnson, published The Kinsey Data, and — to his own surprise — found that Kinsey’s original estimates held: Instead of Kinsey’s 37 percent, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4 percent; the 10 percent figure [for homosexual behavior/orientation] (with prison inmates excluded) came to 9.9 percent for white, college-educated males and 12.7 percent for those with less education. And as for the call for a ‘random sample,’ a team of independent statisticians studying Kinsey’s procedures had concluded as far back as 1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey’s interviewing technique had been ‘extraordinarily skillful.’ They characterized Kinsey’s work overall as ‘a monumental endeavor.’"
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Tags: Alfred Kinsey, Bill Condon, Clara Kinsey, John Bancroft, Kinsey, Kinsey Institute, Liam Neeson, Martin Duberman, Sex, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
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