Attracks on the methodology and ideology of pioneering sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey have come out piecemeal over the decades. The recent biography by James H. Jones gathers the record together for dispassionate consideration. And it turns out that Kinsey was . . . a masochist, a sadist, a voyeur, and — to resurrect an apt old term — all around deviant. He was also a blackmailer. He secured a stream of foundation money for his research by “shrewdly obligating his sponsors in those organizations by collecting their sexual histories.” The orgies he organized for “senior staff, their spouses and outside volunteers” served the same purpose: to “bond them together under his paternal authority.”
But why is that anybody’s business? asks Richard Rhodes, reviewing the Jones volume last week in the New York Times Book Review. Kinsey was a pillar of the scientific method, Rhodes insists, if only we’d understand it properly It’s those who’ve assailed him for the past 50 years who are the true weirdos. Rhodes attributes all such attacks to vested interests, particularly among the “Eastern Establishment” that cut off Kinsey’s funding, out of sheer “homophobic McCarthyism.” But he attacks Jones, too, who ” appears to cherish the quaint notion that good science is disinterested science.”
When push comes to shove, Rhodes defends Kinsey not as a scientist but as a sexual liberator, one who “contributed vitally to the march toward tolerance that continues today.” We haven’t heard the last of Kinsey’s defenders. But we can now see that their final defense is an ideological, not a scientific one. Which is what Kinsey’s critics have said all along it would be.
