St. Prok’s Gospel
William Murchison on Alfred Kinsey’s Good News
Oh, the temptation is there all right. I’ll venture anyway that maybe we shouldn’t strive unduly long and hard to hang the sexual revolution albatross around the neck of Alfred Charles Kinsey, Ph.D.—who, to tell the truth, would have beamed and strutted on being offered such a device.
What are we to suppose—that a single Indiana University zoologist, dead for half a century, conveyed us to where we are today, sexually speaking? Many might doubt it, based on the commonplace observation that for revolutionary tinder to ignite, tinder must first exist in plenty, heaped by many hands over much time.
The lineaments of sexual revolution—AIDS, abortion, pornography, homosexual “marriage,” Howard Stern, etc.—may be glimpsed in warnings, c. 1911, when Kinsey was a mere lad of 17, about the eroticism and abandon of that new dance sensation, the Turkey Trot. (“Everybody’s doing it!” the lyrics cheerfully advised—an appropriate slogan, come to think of it, for the Kinsey Cult that was to come.) If indeed Americans have bought much of the sexual liberation package, is it because a slick salesman conned them—or because they were ready, with wallets out, when he launched into his pitch?
Kinsey’s Glory
Still, it makes nothing but sense to seize what might be called a “a teachable moment” to ponder the legacy of the scientist whose hugely publicized studies of male and female sexuality helped persuade Americans to regard sex as just the common currency of life, in whatever form it might come: wherever; whenever; with whomever; with whatever.
Professor Alfred Kinsey is before us again, in all his dubious glory. The timing seems ironic, given how zealously, and effectively, Red America overpowered Blue America on November 2. Nevertheless, the Liam Neeson-Laura Linney biographical film entitled Kinsey opened in theaters just nine days after John Kerry’s concession speech. Neeson, in the eponymous role, is being touted for an Oscar. Rex Reed, speaking for many, judges that the film “entertains, informs, and electrifies us with the highest values of traditional cinema while opening hearts and minds with the liberating potential of human diversity.” Sounds exactly like what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is usually looking for.
Meanwhile, in The Inner Circle, published shortly before the movie’s release, the prolific novelist-short story craftsman T. C. Boyle views Kinsey’s career through the eyes of a fictional research assistant and his wife. The novel is a brisk, bright read, with unexpected complexity and an absence of hagiographical asides.
Moral traditionalists, correctly sensing an opportunity to be heard, weighed in, rarely with a light touch. The California-based Catholic Outreach maintained that “Alfred Kinsey was instrumental in bringing about the widespread acceptance of perversity and immorality that exists today.” Both Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president R. Albert Mohler likened the professor to the Nazi death doctor Joseph Mengele, because of Kinsey’s use of data gathered from child abusers and pedophiles. Judith Reisman, a longtime Kinsey critic, called the man a “massive criminal” involved up to his eyebrows in dishonest research.
Amid such reproaches one could forget that Kinsey was also a kind of polymath: a concert pianist manqué, as well as a highly regarded zoologist and competent naturalist; a captivating lecturer; a man of huge energy and focus; a visionary even. To be sure, similar things could be said of many unsavory historical figures, including some who have defaced our own times. Talent and virtue frequently fail to keep step with each other.
This latest onrush of Kinseyana follows the publication in the late 1990s of two biographical studies, James H. Jones’s Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey. In fact, we never seem to finish talking about Alfred Kinsey, on account of our inability to finish talking of all he set out to teach us: specifically, that when it comes to sex, desire rules, and nobody, but nobody, is entitled to object.
William Murchison a syndicated columnist, is author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter Books).
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