Paul Gebhard, an associate of Kinsey’s who was a major source for the two biographers and is played in the film by Timothy Hutton, calls both books “reasonably accurate.” But he calls Mr.

By the time he got going, he was more unrepressed than practically anyone.” “I felt he’d done Kinsey a disservice,” says Mr. But today he says that though Kinsey’s reformist impulse probably did have an effect, any distortion was “unconscious and heartfelt.” “It shouldn’t surprise us that pleas for sexual tolerance would come from a person who couldn’t be himself in public.” He speculated that Kinsey’s personal preferences might have affected his findings, especially about the pervasiveness of homosexual activity.

“What I told myself, and I still think this, was that I was writing a biography of a tragic hero,” he says. Jones did not feel he was debunking Kinsey. Jones’s book revealed that Kinsey had had affairs with men, encouraged open marriages among his staff, stimulated himself with urethral insertion and ropes, and filmed sex in his attic. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life” appeared in 1997, and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, who published “Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. If the field of sex studies owes its existence to Kinsey, the field of Kinsey studies owes its existence to James H. “We see this movie,” says Robert Knight, Concerned Women for America’s designated Kinsey expert, “as really a godsend.”Ī film about Kinsey could hardly avoid controversy, since even the facts of his biography are in dispute. Already, there have been calls for a boycott and the beginnings of a counterspin media campaign. Wade, sex education, the glamorization of pornography and the loosening of sex-offender laws. But judging from the heated debate already swirling around the film, they’re not half as excited as Kinsey’s detractors, who are eager to take on the man they blame, in part, for the gay movement, Roe v. Kinsey’s admirers are looking forward to a respectful portrayal when “Kinsey” opens on Nov. One independent scholar has even accused him of sexual crimes.Īll of which makes the decision by the writer and director Bill Condon to place him at the center of a major Hollywood biopic - one loaded up with stars, including Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Peter Sarsgaard - rather striking. Both his biographers regard him as a brave pioneer and reformer, but differ sharply about almost everything else. Even among scholars sympathetic to Kinsey there’s disagreement. Though some hail him for liberating the nation from sexual puritanism, others revile him as a fraud whose “junk science” legitimized degeneracy. His studies helped bring sex - all kinds of sex, not just the stork-summoning kind - out of the closet and into the bright light of day.īut not everyone applauds that accomplishment. Thanks to him, it’s now common knowledge that almost all men masturbate, that women peak sexually in their mid-30’s and that homosexuality is not some one-in-a-million anomaly. He’s certainly the only entomologist ever to be immortalized in a Cole Porter song. Kinsey remains one of the most influential figures in American intellectual history.

MORE than half a century after the publication of his landmark study, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” Alfred C. He studied both male and female sexuality and spent his career publishing books, giving lectures, and conducting research that’s still influential in the field today, making him one of the most famous sex therapists of all time. He replaced outdated concepts of accepted sexuality with the idea that almost all sexual behavior could be considered normal from a biological perspective. Without Kinsey, the sexual revolution that came in the following decades may not have happened.

Alfred kinsey controversy