"People can believe the most amazing things, if it comes under the rubric of a scientific institution, a university, and comes cloaked in scientific, objective language."
-- Judith A. Reisman
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Exposing Kinsey's fraud
By Robert Stacy McCain
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 11, 1999
Judith A. Reisman has spent nearly two decades exposing what she calls scientific fraud committed by pioneer sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, the man known as "the father of the sexual revolution."
Despite her evidence, Mrs. Reisman says American scientists have "steadfastly refused" to admit that the famous Kinsey Reports were fundamentally flawed -- using unrepresentative samples and invalid methodology, and even accepting "data" on children reported by habitual child molesters.
"The father of human sexuality education was, really, a sexual psychopath," says Mrs. Reisman, author of two books on Kinsey's fraud, including "Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences," published last year. She calls Kinsey's fraud "the major scientific scandal of our nation."
A 1997 biography of Kinsey by James H. Jones detailed Kinsey's sexual involvement with associates at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, which included filming sex acts between Kinsey, his wife, his staffers and their wives in various combinations.
"I think [Kinsey] was dramatically driven by his own sexual perversions," Mrs. Reisman says.
Instead of denouncing Kinsey, who died in 1956, American sex researchers have turned on Mrs. Reisman. She "has been vilified from coast to coast," according to the National Review.
Kinsey's research continues to be cited as authoritative by educational and legal journals, and influences both public attitudes and public policies, Mrs. Reisman says. For example, Kinsey was repeatedly cited in a 1993 Rand Corporation report that supported the "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward homosexuals in the military.
The media have also largely ignored flaws in Kinsey's work, Mrs. Reisman says. Last month, a New York Times interview with Kinsey Institute president John Bancroft did not even mention evidence of scientific fraud in Kinsey's 1948 "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" and its accompanying volume on female sexuality published in 1953.
In England, however, Mrs. Reisman's work got substantial publicity last year when Channel Four aired "Kinsey's Paedophiles," a documentary by Tim Tate. The hourlong film identified "Mr. X" -- a pedophile whose accounts of hundreds of sexual "contacts" with children were used in the Kinsey Reports -- as a federal Forestry Service employee named Rex King.
Mr. Tate interviewed Mrs. Reisman and Kinsey Institute officials for the British documentary. It also detailed Kinsey's use of reports by a Nazi officer who sexually abused children in occupied Poland during World War II.
Mr. Tate says he is "disappointed" his Kinsey documentary hasn't been shown in the United States yet.
"It strikes me that there must be a number of people who are adults now who were victims of Rex King who have no idea what was done with the information," Mr. Tate says, noting that King's victims are probably now 50 to 75 years old.
King's reports were "used by Kinsey . . . to suggest that children can enjoy their abuse," Mr. Tate says. "Unless that film is shown [in the United States] those adults won't know. I think they have a right to know."
One reason American broadcasters may be reluctant to investigate Kinsey, Mrs. Reisman says, is that many have forgotten how much impact the Kinsey Reports had a half-century ago.
With a publicity campaign funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, she says, the reports made newspaper headlines across the country. Kinsey was featured in a Time magazine cover story that portrayed him as "a noble man who was a scientist . . . a family man," she says.
"It was a Madison Avenue campaign to normalize Kinsey's view of sexuality," Mrs. Reisman says. That view -- including the claim that "children are sexual from birth" -- had a major impact because Kinsey was depicted as a scientist at a time when "the nation was really enamored of science and scientists," she says.
The first Kinsey Report was published just three years after the end of World War II. "The A-bomb had ended the war, brought the boys home," Mrs. Reisman says. "The scientists had become the heroes."
The first Kinsey Report was issued at a time when "every measure of sexual dysfunction was at rock bottom," she says, when rates of divorce and unwed births were low, and most people considered sex outside marriage immoral.
Kinsey shocked the country by claiming that "95 percent of American men were engaged in some form of illegal sexual conduct," Mrs. Reisman says, "that most married people had had premarital sex, that the majority of men went to prostitutes, that homosexuality was common . . . that adultery was common."
This claim that Americans were "all hypocrites" about sex was accepted, Mrs. Reisman says, because Kinsey -- whose original field of expertise was the study of insects -- was seen as an "objective scientist."
"People can believe the most amazing things, if it comes under the rubric of a scientific institution, a university, and comes cloaked in scientific, objective language," she says.
Kinsey's reputation as a scientist is undermined, Mrs. Reisman says, by the fact that much of his data was drawn from interviews with prisoners, that his interview techniques were biased, and that he used unverified "reports" from child molesters.
Kinsey "judged your happiness as a human being by the number of orgasms you had," Mrs. Reisman says, and his view of sexuality has been so widely accepted that people "have forgotten that we weren't always like this."
Mrs. Reisman's latest book documents that Kinsey's research was used to persuade courts and legislatures to change or abolish laws against extramarital sex, including child sexual abuse. Kinsey's research also formed the basis of modern sex education, which he considered "one of the most important aspects of his work," Mrs. Reisman says.
"Kinsey insisted that children should engage in sex joyfully," she says. "Today we now have graphic, really obscene material in the classroom. These are given to children under the umbrella of sex education, or it's taught as `health,' or `family life education,' or AIDS prevention."
The role of such organizations as Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States in promoting what Mrs. Reisman calls "Kinseyan sexuality" through sex education in public schools may explain their opposition to investigating Kinsey's fraud, she says.
"They've been instructing our children for years using fraudulent data," Mrs. Reisman says. "As experts, they were responsible for the product they were delivering -- product liability if you will. This will make the cigarette companies look like nothing, in terms of legal responsibility."
Mr. Tate suggests that the unpleasant topic of child abuse may lead some people "to attack the messenger rather than deal with the message," and that Mrs. Reisman has been partially the victim of "a rather silly battle between left and right."
But for Mr. Tate, the issue transcends politics. "It's really about the abuse of children and also it's about how that's been covered up. That's wrong and it's dangerous."
Copyright © 1999 News World Communications
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