Google Answers Logo
View Question
 
Q: Legacy of Kinsey work? ( Answered 5 out of 5 stars,   5 Comments )
Question  
Subject: Legacy of Kinsey work?
Category: Relationships and Society > Romance
Asked by: telarium-ga
List Price: $30.00
Posted: 06 May 2005 15:29 PDT
Expires: 05 Jun 2005 15:29 PDT
Question ID: 518669
What was the legacy of Alfred Kinsey's work?

I'm looking for articles related to the legacy of his 'new views' on
human sexuality.
Answer  
Subject: Re: Legacy of Kinsey work?
Answered By: nenna-ga on 18 May 2005 10:58 PDT
Rated:5 out of 5 stars
 
Good afternoon telarium-ga!  

I have done a bit of reading on Alfred Kinsey and would like to
present you with the answer to your question, ?What was the legacy of
Alfred Kinsey's work??
 
First, a brief background on Mr. Kinsey.  
 
Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1894. His father, a
teacher, was a devout Methodist who regarded singing and dancing as
ungodly activities and who enforced a strong sense of guilt about
adolescent sexual urges upon his children.   As Kinsey got older, he
became strongly anti-religion, considering it a root cause of sexual
repression and therefore human misery. He remained a virgin until 27,
when he married Clara McMillen.
 
Alfred Kinsley attended Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine from 1914 to
1916, graduating magna cum laude with a B.S. in biology and
psychology. He received his Sc.D. in biology from Harvard University
in September 1919, and came to Indiana University as an assistant
professor of zoology in August 1920.
 
Sex studies started to interest Kinsey, when he taught a sex education
course to Indiana undergraduates. In 1938, Kinsey took over
coordination of the new marriage course at Indiana University, and
soon after began gathering case histories of sexual behavior. He is
often credited as the first researcher to use science to address
sexual behavior. But Kinsey?s goal was to radically redefine what was
considered normal and abnormal behavior. Kinsey and his staff
collected over 18,000 interviews, and published Sexual Behavior in the
Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. He
died in 1956 at the age of 62.
 
Sources: 
 
The Kinsey Institute
(http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/kinseybio.html )
 
The Kinsery Whitewash
(http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146685,00.html ) 
 
Fairfax Digital
(http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/12/1100227565498.html?oneclick=true)
 
The Biography Channel
(http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/new_site/biography.php?id=755&showgroup= )
 
Alfred Kinsley, through his research and writings,  tried to persuade
the world that sex was good, and that tolerance for sexual variation
was acceptable.  He wrote: ?What is right for one individual may be
wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a
worthwhile part of the next individual?s life.?   He preached "free
sex" and "sex without consequences?.
 
He interviewed single and married straights, gays, lesbians,
incarcerated rapists and sex criminals.  Before his published works,
Americans assumed that sex occurred only between married couples,
behind closed doors and only after marriage had occurred.  His
research blew the lid off that.  In fact, he discovered:
 
More than 90% of American males masturbated
85% had had premarital intercourse
70% had patronized a prostitute at least once in their lives
almost 60% had had oral sex
30% to 45% had had extramarital intercourse. 
37% of American males had had at least one homosexual encounter 

Additionally:
 
more than 90% of females had indulged in sexual petting
66% had dreamt about sex
62% had engaged in masturbation
50% had had premarital sex
26% had had extramarital sexual encounters. 
 
Kinsey used these numbers to argue that women were no less sexual than
men. He further stated that a satisfying sex life was essential to
marital bliss, and that women who had had sex before marriage were
more likely to have happy, sexually satisfying marriages than those
who had not.
 
Sources:
 
The American Experience
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kinsey/peopleevents/e_male.html ) 
 
A Look at Kinsey
(http://www.townhall.com/columnists/johnleo/jl20041115.shtml )
 
Because of Kinsley?s research, the American Law Institute's Model
Penal Code, published in 1955, embraced the right of consenting adults
to engage in homosexual and anal sex. As the code was adopted by state
after state, the old crime of sodomy ceased to exist.  In 2003, the
U.S. Supreme Court dealt the final blow to the country's few remaining
sodomy laws, overturning Texas's prohibition of homosexual sex in its
landmark ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.
 
Source:  The American Experience
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kinsey/peopleevents/e_after.html )
 
Many researchers followed in his foot-steps, like William Masters and
Virginia Johnson.  Their research coincided with the sexual revolution
of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which hippies expounded on the
benefits of free love and implored people to "make love, not war."
 
Although Kinsey expelled the belief that sex should only occur behind
close doors and only as part of a marital union, his research sadly
became something of the standard for sexual behavior, putting the
human race in harms way.
 
A few statistics found that
 
..before Alfred C. Kinsey?s books (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
[1948] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female [1953]) inspired the
?sexual revolution,? just two sexually transmitted diseases?syphilis
and gonorrhea, both easily treated?were relatively common in the
United States. Now public health physicians regularly treat patients
for a range of STDs that numbers more than two dozen (some of them
potentially deadly). Now, nearly one in four Americans has an
incurable STD.
 
Before Kinsey?s ?sexual revolution? no one had even heard of AIDS.
Between 1981 (during the midst of the ?sexual revolution,? when AIDS
was discovered) and 2003, AIDS killed 20 million people.
 
Before Kinsey?s ?revolution,? among girls who had their 16th birthday
in 1950-1952, 6.6 percent reported being sexually experienced. Now,
about half of all high-school-age young people (male and female)
report being sexually experienced.
 
In 1960, as Kinsey?s ?sexual revolution? was just beginning, the
birthrate for unmarried women was 21.6 per 1,000. By 1990, the
birthrate for unmarried women was 43.8 per 1,000 (and that does not
account for abortion deaths, a procedure which, of course, was illegal
and very uncommon before Kinsey?s ?revolution?).
 
Source:  Family.org
(http://www.family.org/focusoverfifty/articles/a0034116.cfm )
 
 
[The US has] had a 418% increase in reported forcible rape from 1960 to 1999, 
 
From 1960 to 1999, we've had a 400% increase in out-of-wedlock births. 
 
Each year, we contract 70,000 new cases of syphilis, 650,000 cases of
gonorrhea, 64,000 cases of AIDS, 3,000,000 cases of Chlamydia,
1,000,000 cases of genital herpes and 5,500,000 cases of human
papillomavirus.
 
Sixty-seven percent of our sex-abuse victims are now under the age of
18. Thirty-four percent are under age 12
 
Source:  Kinsey's Flawed Research - Thomas A. Szyszkiewics
(http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/REALKINS.HTM )
 
The most controversial part of Kinsey?s research was his use of children.
 
??Even worse than Kinsey?s contrived science was the unspeakable harm
children endured as Kinsey?s associates gathered the data for Kinsey?s
books. John Gagnon, a close Kinsey research associate, said others
might describe as sex crimes the research Kinsey used for his books?in
her book Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, Judith Reisman states that
pediatricians and health professionals ?confirm what most mothers and
fathers know quite well; children, especially young children, would
not voluntarily submit to these abuses.?
 
There is a rather long but in-depth essay posted on the internet about
Kinsley?s research.  You can find it at
http://www.literatus.net/essay/KinseyReport.html
 
 
--------------------
 
Although Alfred Kinsey tried to leave the legacy of ?free love? and
?anything goes?, and although he opened the doors for a new sexual
frontier, it is my opinion after researching Alfred Kinsey, the true
legacy left was that Alfred Kinsey was a sexual psychopath whose data
was derived from an unrepresentative proportion of the population ?
mostly prison inmates and sex offenders, including pedophiles and his
own unusual sexual practices.
 
I would be happy to answer any additional questions you may have.  
Please let me know if this answer is sufficient. Thank you!
 
Nenna-GA
Google Answers Researcher
 
Google Search:
 
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=alfred+kinsey+biography
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=alfred+kinsey+autobiography\
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=alfred+kinsey+legacy
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=alfred+kinsey+sexual+interest
telarium-ga rated this answer:5 out of 5 stars and gave an additional tip of: $7.00
Perfect, thanks.

Comments  
Subject: Re: Legacy of Kinsey work?
From: nenna-ga on 20 May 2005 09:08 PDT
 
Thank you for the wonderful rating and tip! I'm glad I could be of help!

Nenna-GA
Subject: nenna
From: badger75-ga on 24 May 2005 20:35 PDT
 
Don't mean to be presumptuous or to intrude, but that was an excellent
answer. Kinsey was all that you documented. The most lasting harm he
did was in recruiting his staff who carried on his work long after his
death. The last of the Kinsey researchers died last year. A gay man
with an agenda, he has a new biography of Abraham Lincoln on the book
market that claims on thin evidence that Lincoln was a latent
homosexual. The casual labeling of historical figures with thin
evidence seems to typify the work Kinsey and his staff did.
Subject: Re: Legacy of Kinsey work?
From: myoarin-ga on 25 May 2005 11:09 PDT
 
Telarium-ga and nenna-ga,
I won't argue with Nenna's concluding remarks about A. Kinsey as a
person, and the rating is certainly deserved.
There were indeed complaints about the impartialitiy of his choice of
interviewees, but a subsequent study found that regardless of this his
statistics were not so inaccurate, and also that those relating to
children did not come from direct interviews with them.  (Sorry, maybe
I can find the site about this again later.)
If his numbers were pretty much accurate, they only revealed what was
already going on.  This alone did not create the "sexual revolution",
which to be one would have to be a significant change in mores and
behavior.
I believe this was more a result of the "anti-baby pill, which came on
the market for married women in 1960, but was the result of research
by Carl Djerassi that had its first success in 1951: 
http://www.chemheritage.org/EducationalServices/chemach/ppb/ld.html

Providing women and girls with their own means of birth control, the
Pill removed THE most significant restrain on more liberal sex.
Yes, Kinsey's work made it easier for others like Master and Johnson
to research and publish about sexuality, but IMO the Pill was the most
significant factor in the "sexual revolution" that then ensued.
And it did, everyone was doing it, and when everyone is doing it, it
becomes more public; the media dared to talk about it and show it in
films, and kids learned about it before their parents spoke of it (if
they ever did).

Of course, for some folks it is conveniet to damn Kinsey for revealing
what was already going on, as though that was a change in mores, but
it was just the revelation, not the revolution.
IMHO, Myoarin
Subject: Re: Legacy of Kinsey work?
From: telarium-ga on 25 May 2005 13:06 PDT
 
This wasn't the only source I used, assuredly. Still, this was an
excellent answer that helped me to get started on some serious
research, both on and off the net.
Subject: Re: Legacy of Kinsey work?
From: googagoo-ga on 24 Dec 2005 22:18 PST
 
The answer started out great, but I felt that the concluding argument
was a little weak.  I liked how you listed pros and cons about Mr.
Kinsey, but the cons were not convincing.  The reference that Kinsey
was harming children was really nebulous, and the link for some reason
took me to Ebay.

I guess the main thing I'd like to say is that I agree with
Myorarin-ga about there being more than one factor aside from Kinsey
that has led to the Sexual Revolution.  And take a look at history's
cycles Dark Ages (Free Love), Middle Ages (Restraint), Renaissance
(free love), Victorian Era (restraint), and finally there's Turn On,
Tune In, and Drop Out (free love).  I wonder if people wil ever go
back to restraint mode.  It doesn't seem like it would be possible
unless we were forced to.

Let me name some other factors... the A Bomb, the Pill, Timothy Leary,
Vietnam War, Amphetamines, Rock n Roll, LSD, etc., etc., etc.

Important Disclaimer: Answers and comments provided on Google Answers are general information, and are not intended to substitute for informed professional medical, psychiatric, psychological, tax, legal, investment, accounting, or other professional advice. Google does not endorse, and expressly disclaims liability for any product, manufacturer, distributor, service or service provider mentioned or any opinion expressed in answers or comments. Please read carefully the Google Answers Terms of Service.

If you feel that you have found inappropriate content, please let us know by emailing us at answers-support@google.com with the question ID listed above. Thank you.
Search Google Answers for
Google Answers  


Google Home - Answers FAQ - Terms of Service - Privacy Policy