Sexual Behavior in the Social Scientist
In his fine earlier book,
Bad Blood , James Jones exposed one of American medicine's most shameful
episodes: the Tuskegee experiment, in which doctors enlisted a group of black
men with syphilis and, without their knowledge or consent, withheld treatment
so as to observe the natural progress of the disease. In this new biography,
Jones outs Alfred Kinsey. He "lived with two terrible secrets: He was both a
homosexual and a masochist." Everything else about him seems to follow. "The
answer" to why he worked so hard "lies in his private life." His "spring-coil
vitality" was the product not of a naturally energetic constitution, or a
passion for science, or even old-fashioned ambition, but of "stupendous guilt."
He presented himself as a man of science but actually he was a "crypto-reformer
who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual mores and sex
offender laws of the United States." (Not exactly. He also spent 15 years
researching gall wasps and was a serious gardener, hiker, and record
collector.)
Others
may have had an inkling of his secret agenda but only now can the truth be
told. It is the following: Kinsey believed, in the words of one informant, that
"if only he could get the facts to people life would be a lot happier and less
guilt ridden." And moreover, "he was a great champion of tolerance and
liberality." Apparently only a guilt-ridden masochistic homosexual could be
driven by such suspect and cleverly disguised views. Kinsey fooled many. "The
irony, of course," is that many distinguished scientists who knew his work
intimately "were not able to see beneath the surface." "Incredible as it may
seem," the vice president and senior editor of the premier medical publishing
house also "failed to question Kinsey's scholarly objectivity." Not Jones.
The perpetrator of all these deceptions may not have been
the "successor to Darwin," as many contemporaries thought, but he was arguably
the paradigmatic social scientist of his generation, a man who more than any
other made the study of human sexuality a respectable and legitimate field of
inquiry. The author of the groundbreaking best sellers Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953), he was the pioneer in finding out what Americans actually do in bed and
with whom we do it. That Kinsey had intense homoerotic relationships with his
graduate students is certain. He was into group sex and he masturbated. His
sexual life unquestionably extended beyond the missionary position within
monogamous marriage, but then, as his--and much subsequent--research showed, so
does that of most Americans. More than likely, he had "orgasms derived from
homosexual contact." But he also had a long, loving, and complex sexual
relationship with his wife, Clara, and found stimulation in heterosexual
pornography. Whether he was a homosexual, readers can decide for
themselves.
Jones'
relentlessly hostile readings of the evidence, however, make this difficult.
When a graduate student on a field trip writes about Kinsey's "prick nibblin
tent," Jones suggests that "it is not hard to suspect that oral sex was going
on under canvas tops," because "Berland was a man who usually meant what he
said." (Berland also said that the retiring president of Indiana University had
"shriveled balls," and worried lest he himself "be castrated for biting a
coed's tit.") Kinsey's assignment of "0" to the exclusively heterosexual and
"6" to the exclusively homosexual in his famous scale leads Jones to comment:
"[H]ow interesting that he should assign this [heterosexuality] no value." One
can only wonder what snide comment he would have made if Kinsey had flipped the
values.
The evidence for Kinsey's masochism--mostly the
reports of anonymous sources--is much more difficult to assess. Consider Jones'
pièce de résistance : On "one particular evening," in response to "his
inner demons," and more specifically to the Rockefeller Foundation's rejection
of a grant application, Kinsey allegedly hanged himself by the hand and balls
from an overhead pipe "long enough for this self-appointed Messiah of the
sexually despised to experience much pain and suffering, precisely as he had
intended." (Forget the mocking tone; it pervades the book. Any reformer is
invariably described as a "chronic" or "habitual" "do-gooder." Forget, too, the
absence of even the semblance of evidence for Kinsey's inner state here as
elsewhere: Kinsey "must have felt" ambivalence about gardening because it
threatened his "fragile sense of masculinity.") A footnote reveals that the one
anonymous source for this episode of "self-torture" who is actually cited was
apparently not an actual witness and that it can at best be dated between 1951
and 1955. In the note, Jones also suggests that a "massive pelvic infection,"
which Kinsey suffered in the fall of 1954, may "pinpoint the most likely time"
and, of course, corroborate the incident. But back in the main text he says
Kinsey had an "infection in his pelvic region"--probably glomerular
nephritis , a different and more probable diagnosis--which would make the
public "cover story" (that a strep throat caused the problem) far likelier.
Readers can decide for themselves if they care.
They may
not. Suppose Kinsey were a card-carrying homosexual masochist; it would
seem to have little bearing either on his commitment to tolerance or on his
scientific practice. Even if his private life were relevant, once again Jones'
unrelieved disdain for his subject obscures any possible connections. Kinsey
never did anything for innocent reasons. Even when he tried to write
well he was "craft[ing] his prose with the care of a man for whom words are
weapons." He can't win. On one page he is charged with listening to music
analytically, in keeping with his general penchant to dominate, and on the next
with barely keeping from having an erection listening to the songs of Hugo
Wolf.
Whatever the problems with Kinsey's data, they had nothing
to do with his sexuality. He manifestly did not, as Jones claims, "place a
meaty thumb upon the scales" so that he was "virtually guaranteed" that he
would find what he was looking for. Again and again Jones himself reports that
Kinsey was "surprised" at this or that result. If indeed--following common
wisdom--he really did disparage "the sexual capacity of women," the volume on
the sexual response of the human female nonetheless contained all sorts of
things he was not looking for. Twenty years before Masters and Johnson, for
example, he discovered that, contrary to the then-dominant view, the great
majority of women experienced not vaginal but clitoral orgasm.
Of course,
Kinsey's statistics were and are open to criticism. His is not a random sample
and it's not clear exactly what population it represents. That said, a
blue-ribbon committee of the American Statistical Association concluded that
the interviews themselves were remarkably probing and that, under the
circumstances, a random sample was impossible. Most of us would respond to the
phone call or knock on the door from a total stranger announcing that we had
been randomly selected to tell them when we started to masturbate or how often
we had been unfaithful to our partners with a polite "no thank you, not
tonight." Jones, of course, claims that the committee of statisticians was
manipulated into supporting Kinsey and that his efforts to improve the quality
of his statistical work were merely cosmetic. The remarkable fact is that his
numbers have proven to be so robust and that the archive he assembled--of
sexual history and sundry other material--remains unrivaled.
Finally, Kinsey's insistence that there was no
such thing as a homosexual--a subspecies of humankind--but only an infinite
shading of variation, a continuum of practices, seems to have had more to do
with his training as an entomologist than with the nature of his own desires.
He inherited from his graduate-school mentors a resolute anti-essentialism.
This is a man who, before he collected 18,000 sexual histories, spent 15 years
collecting 300,000 gall wasps in order to argue, as he would again later,
against the ontological reality of established taxonomic categories.
A
self-righteous tone suffuses this biography: The author clearly feels he has
exposed the dirty secrets that inspired his protagonist's "crypto" agenda of
reform. In fact, there is nothing "crypto" about his agenda; writing about sex
for a lay audience in the 1940s and 1950s was an openly revolutionary act. It
was still illegal under various 19 th -century "Comstock" laws to
disseminate information about birth control in many states. Kinsey, like every
other social scientist since the Enlightenment, was simply obeying the central
tenet of his discipline: that the scientific study of society is possible; that
the results of such study are a better basis for policy than, say, the Mosaic
interdiction against homosexuality. Moreover, the fact that Kinsey had a sexual
life, however nonstandard it was, would not render him incapable of objectivity
in writing about sex. "Value-free" social science does not demand that its
practitioners have no values. It means that they gather and interpret their
material fairly and argue about its interpretations rationally. By these
criteria Kinsey fares well. That he exaggerated the power of biology, failed to
deal with love, and perhaps overextended the protective umbrella of tolerance
is beyond doubt. But overinterpretation or even misinterpretation are not the
same as bias.
It is distressing that in this time of AIDS it could still
be said that Kinsey's passionate interest in human sexuality could only be the
product of perversion. The book's cynicism is even more distressing,
symptomatic as it is of a larger cynicism that seems to have gripped our public
culture. We seem to believe that all human action is motivated not by the
desire to know or improve the lot of humankind, but only by the basest motives
of greed, power, and self-aggrandizement. Kinsey was of another age. "How
characteristically American," wrote Lionel Trilling of Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male , in its "impulse toward acceptance and
liberation, the broad and generous desire for others not to be harshly
judged."
