Does it matter that Alfred Kinsey enjoyed his work more than he let on?
...to conservative critics, Kinsey was a pervert lusting after approval for his own fetishes by exaggerating the extent which others shared his predilections.
Kinsey was a part of the generation that Arthur Schlesinger, writing in the Partisan Review in 1949, dubbed the age of the “Statistical Soldier,” when Americans' appetite for approaching social questions by accumulating massive case histories reached its zenith. In the 1940s, George Gallup gained icon status for pioneering political polls; GM sales managers plastered their walls with giant weekly maps of counties coded for color preference of cars; and economist Gunnar Myrdal exposed the systematic effects of racism on African Americans with a multi-volume encyclopedia, An American Dilemma.
Shortly after the first book's release, an influential review in The New York Times called for revising state sodomy laws in accordance with Kinsey's data that such acts were not altogether uncommon. Kinsey had documented that a plurality of younger American men were guilty of at least one act then illegal in some or all states, including premarital sex, homosexual sex, extramarital sex, oral sex with a spouse, anal sex with a fiancée, among others. Within a few years, the American Law Institute recommended decriminalizing consensual acts between adults, and many states subsequently revised their penal codes. His data, and that of subsequent researchers who followed in his wake, armed the lawyers who revised penal codes, educators who created sex-education curricula, and gay rights activists who lobbied for social acceptance and against discriminatory hiring policies that institutionalized their treatment as a deviant underclass. They cited his books, though rarely the man himself. Not everyone saw this as progress...
article by Christine Larson
Posted by Cieciel at February 27, 2005 08:44 AM