![]() ![]() Where all this came from is the subject of James Jones’s book. He voted Republican, yet was contemptuous of the middle class he was in many ways conventional, yet also a genuine revolutionary, a moralist who in all matters relating to sex was very close to amoral he was a devoted husband and father of three whose own deepest sensual pleasures were homosexual. Yet he also took insane personal and professional chances in life, and his daily existence was marked as much by compulsion as by rationality. What we would nowadays call a “control freak,” he had a strong need to oversee every aspect of his life and work and to dominate everyone around him. His lengthy portrait of Kinsey, marked by its own deep earnestness, reveals a man whom perhaps only his family and a few friends and assistants really knew.Īlfred Kinsey was a man of more than ordinary contradictions. ![]() Jones’s biography may not be, in a cant phrase of our day, a page-turner, but it certainly is, in the cant phrase of another day, an eye-opener. Jones 1-he was not aware of a tenth of it. Given its potential for controversy, the Kinsey connection was quite worrisome, all the more so because Kinsey, a brilliant man at public relations, had cunningly attached the prestige of the foundation to his own work.īarnard was on to something, but, truth to tell-and now all of it has been told, in detail, in a massive biography of Kinsey by James T. “And yet in all the affairs of life this kind of investigation seems to be necessary, and I don’t think it can be avoided.” The subject of Barnard’s comment was Alfred Kinsey’s work at the Institute for Sex Research at the University of Indiana, which the foundation had been indirectly supporting for many years. Barnard, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote in 1951. “There are a good many fields of investigation, particularly in the social sciences, where in fact if you say anything at all it will not be scientifically justified,” Chester I. Or so the “Kinsey Report,” as Kinsey’s book came to be called, reported-scientifically. Resting his conclusions on a vast number of interviews, Kinsey was able to show that 90 percent of American men masturbated, 85 percent had had premarital intercourse, between 35 and 45 percent had had extramarital intercourse, 59 percent had engaged in mouth-genital contact, roughly 70 percent had had dealings with prostitutes, 37 percent had had at least a single homosexual encounter that ended in orgasm, and no fewer than 17 percent of farm boys had experienced bestiality. The particular truth brought to light by Kinsey’s book had to do with the wide discrepancy between official-which is to say, standard, middle-class-accounts of sexual behavior and what was actually going on in the sexual lives of American men. By his admirers his book was thought to be in the same class as Principia Mathematica, The Wealth of Nations, or Das Kapital its author was often compared to Galileo, Copernicus, and Freud, scientists who similarly had struggled against an obtuse and belligerent public to bring the truth to light. ![]() He was on the cover of Time, profiled in Life, the subject of New Yorker cartoons. His name was everywhere, from popular songs to church sermons, from limericks to newspaper editorials. With the publication in 1948 of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a book brought out by a scientific publisher that sold an astonishing 200,000 copies in hardcover in its first two months in print, Kinsey was declared (depending upon one’s point of view) a hero of the modern day or the greatest underminer of traditional morality the world had ever known. Nearly 50 years ago, Kinsey’s name was both a red and a white flag, a household word, an attention-getting device. What it stood for, of course, was sex, neither pure nor simple. Only one had, and he was not exactly sure what it stood for. Fame, like sex, is all too brief-a proposition I recently kitchen-tested by asking a classroom of 25 intelligent undergraduates if they had ever heard the name of Alfred C. ![]()
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