Kinsey's Crimes Against Children
May 1999
By Robert Stacy McCain
America has been duped and damaged, led astray by a monster named Alfred C. Kinsey.
This is the only possible reaction after viewing Secret History: Kinsey's Paedophiles, a startling documentary from British filmmaker Tim Tate, first broadcast in October 1998 on London's Channel Four. I received a video copy in the mail, accompanied by a letter which described the facts documented by Tate as "disturbing."
Enraging might be a better word for it. I defy any intelligent person with a shred of human decency to watch this hour-long film without feeling an overpowering rage at the fraudulent and criminal activity which Kinsey and his fellow "sex researchers" at the University of Indiana encouraged and abetted in the name of "science."
I brought Tate's work home and sat down with my wife to watch it. Toward the end, veteran Kinsey Institute "researcher" Clarence Tripp was defending Kinsey's cooperation with predatory pedophiles. "The thing that [Kinsey] hated most about [pedophilia] is that people use words like child molestation. What is that?" Tripp asked, mockingly. "As Kinsey said, by this kind of paranoia you do the child more damage for life than all the pedophiles in the world would do."
My wife, who had been watching in stunned silence, said slowly and deliberately: "I'd just like to shoot that man."
What is amazing is that such reactions did not greet Kinsey's work at the outset. Instead, his publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, as well as the 1953 publication of the companion volume Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, were celebrated as a triumph of science. Kinsey appeared on the cover of Time magazine. His work was funded by the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation. In the words of journalist and historian William Manchester, his 1948 report made Kinsey "one of the first instant celebrities." Tate's film accurately describes Kinsey as "the father of the sexual revolution."
In Partisan Review, then one of the most influential journals among America's intelligentsia, Lionel Trilling described the 1948 Kinsey Report (as it was commonly known) as "an event of great importance to our culture" which had "surely been made richer" by Kinsey's work. Kinsey's work, Trilling said, should be welcomed because its "permissive effect" would help create "the community of sexuality."
In an age where scientists had but recently split the atom, Kinsey's status as a tenured professor and his report's general tone of dispassionate clinical research (complete with impressive-looking charts and tables of "data") seem to have simply overwhelmed skepticism, despite the outlandish nature of some of his claims. Kinsey reported, for instance, suspiciously high levels of homosexuality and bestiality. He cited some case histories which seemed rather dubious, as in the case of a man (hailed by Trilling as "a new folk hero") described as a "scholarly and skilled lawyer" who reported that he had had 30 orgasms a week for 30 years. Do the math, and this lawyer was getting off a minimum of four times a day -- impressive even for the horniest 13-year-old, but highly suspicious for a middle-aged attorney in straitlaced (not to say puritanical) America circa 1948.
Such suspicions eventually proved warranted. Judith Reisman has detailed the serious methodological flaws -- amounting to outright fraud -- behind Kinsey's "research." Much of Kinsey's work was based upon uncorroborated testimony of prison inmates, including convicted rapists and sex offenders, while much of his other "research" relied heavily on questionnaires and interviews with respondents whose self-reported sexual activities were similarly unverified. Given these glaring flaws, it is unlikely that either of Kinsey's reports provided anything approaching an accurate reflection of American sexuality at a time when reliable data -- high rates of marriage, low rates of divorce and illegitimate births -- suggest most people were thoroughly conventional in their sexual behavior.
Despite the exposure of Kinsey's fraud by Reisman and other researchers, his influence on how we think about sex is undiminished. More than anyone else, it was Kinsey who convinced Americans that "everybody is doing it," that profligate sexual indulgence is "healthy," and that the only alternative to a laissez-faire endorsement of promiscuity is "repression" and "hypocrisy." As late as 1991, the Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge still described Kinsey's bogus reports as "empirical studies," "respected" and "authoritative." Gay activists continue to cite Kinsey's claim that 10 percent of American men were "more or less exclusively homosexual" for at least three years of their adult lives; even 50 years into the sexual revolution Kinsey helped launch, more credible studies estimate that no more than 2 percent of American men are homosexual.
But what seems to have been overlooked or ignored at the time he graced the covers of national news magazines was the fact that Kinsey claimed to have extensively studied the sexual responses of children, including even infants. Whatever Americans may have thought of Kinsey's other claims -- of farmers habitually buggering their livestock, for example -- the extensive documentation of "research" into the orgasmic potential of infants and toddlers should have raised an alarm. Yet nothing of the kind occurred during Kinsey's lifetime, as Tate's film shows. As recently as 1973, William Manchester cited without comment Kinsey's claims that infants "measured in the nursery with special instruments, were found to experience orgasms at the age of four or five months" and that "[o]ne preadolescent child had 26 orgasms in 24 hours." Manchester did not seem to wonder how or by whom these phenomena were recorded, nor did he seem to wonder whether there was something exploitative (immoral? criminal?) in the sexual stimulation of children for purposes of "research."
Kinsey's "scientific" claims about juvenile sexuality may have done much to encourage pedophiles to pursue their desires -- a pursuit which Kinsey never condemned. Reisman told Tate that Kinsey "approved fully and wholly of adult-child sexual interaction" and even "recommended" it, a claim clearly suggested in Kinsey's writing: "Without help from more experienced persons, many preadolescents take a good many years to discover mastubatory techniques that are sexually effective .... It is probable that half or more of the boys in an uninhibited society could reach climax by the time they were three or four years of age." [Emphases added.] Both of these claims are false, of course: I have never heard any man complain of adolescent difficulty in discovering "sexually effective" masturbation techniques and think I was not alone in getting it right the very first time I tried; whatever pleasures a boy might experience from sexual stimulation before puberty, it is profoundly misleading to describe it as an "orgasm" or "climax" -- the underdeveloped preadolescent equipment simply doesn't produce such a response.
While the Kinsey passage cited above does not explicitly advocate "an uninhibited society" where "more experienced persons" give masturbation lessons to toddlers, neither does it argue against such activity. And, in a series of elaborate charts, Kinsey listed "data" supporting his claims of orgasmic infants and toddlers. These "data," Tate shows us, were supplied by habitual pedophiles whom Kinsey encouraged to keep careful records of their "contacts" with children, even suggesting that they time the "orgasms" which these children supposedly experienced. One such Kinsey correspondent was a man who claimed to have molested hundreds of children, while another was -- no kidding -- a Nazi stormtrooper who sexually exploited children in occupied Poland and was eventually accused of murdering a 10-year-old girl in postwar Germany.
These and other unsavory aspects of Kinsey's "research" (he encouraged his colleagues to perform sexual acts that were documented on films still kept tightly locked away in Kinsey Institute archives in Indiana) must inevitably inspire some to reconsider what we have come to consider "normal" in the half-century since this "event of great importance to our culture," as Trilling called the first Kinsey Report. Even if the revelations of fraud and criminality behind Kinsey's work don't lead one to my wife's murderous impulses, it is difficult to avoid questions about the motives and morality involved. Why would educated people -- Kinsey was a respected entomologist before he started researching human sexuality -- exhibit such indifference, if not indeed hostility, toward centuries-old societal restraints on sexual behavior? Did none of Kinsey's cohorts question the ethics of soliciting "data" from adults engaged in the sexual exploitation of children?
Qualms and questions, however, are far from the minds of the Kinseyites. The current director of the Kinsey Institute, John Bancroft, appears in Tate's film and is utterly unrepentant about the validity or morality of Kinsey's methods. Paul H. Gebhard, who co-authored Kinsey's report on female sexuality, tells Tate: "It was illegal and we knew it was illegal but it's very important for people to study childhood sexuality. In other cultures, anthropologists can sometimes do this, but in our culture, because of our insistence that children are non-sexual, studies of childhood sexuality were essentially impossible." Gebhard says that one of Kinsey's criminal correspondents "contributed a fair amount to ... medicine's knowledge of childhood sexuality." If one believes the charts in Kinsey's book, this "contribution" took the form of a man sexually molesting children for hours on end, while chronicling their responses with the aid of a stopwatch.
Tate even manages to find a woman who was apparently a victim of one of Kinsey's "researchers." The woman is gray-haired, probably well into her sixties, yet she cannot help breaking down in tears as she recounts how her father, a former college classmate of Kinsey, repeatedly raped her and kept a careful written record of these "contacts." Like all the other "data" collected from Kinsey's correspondents, those records are now locked away in the vaults of the Kinsey Institute.
Kinsey died in 1956, and never lived to see the full effect of his influence on American society. You have probably not seen Tate's shocking film, which has still not been broadcast in this country. The forces of political correctness in the American media establishment are powerful enough to suppress anything which undermines establishment dogma, and one tenet of that dogma is that the sexual revolution has been a glorious success. That this revolution was launched by a man who thought nothing amiss in pedophiles using stopwatches to record the results of their "contacts" with children is something the establishment wants to sweep under the rug of Kinsey's America. So far, so good.
r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net
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