Kinsey

Today I saw Kinsey: Let’s talk about sex, written and directed by Bill Condon with Liam Neeson, 2004.
In short it is the biography of Alfred Kinsey, an American biologist and professor who in 1947 founded the institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University. “… he was first, last, and always a scientist … Any sort of scientific approach to the problems of sex is difficult because the field is so deeply overlaid with such things as moral precept, taboo, individual and group training, and long established behavior patterns. Some of these may be good in themselves, but they are no help to the scientific and empirical method of getting at the truth. Dr. Kinsey cut through this overlay with detachment and precision …” [2]

According to the movie Kinsey’s two publications Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, 1953 are received in a very different way. The first book was a bestseller, but the second attracted criticism. It is interesting to realize that not that long ago, a scientific report about anyone’s “mother and sister sexuality” was seen as such an abomination. Kinsey lost his grant and had to endure all sort of ad hominem fallacies: The demonizing campaigns accused Kinsey and his staff of sexually abusing children, his supporters were portrayed as dissolute libertines and his work as morally corrupting.

It seems to me that this movie had many parallels with much of what we see today: From global warming to terrorism and religion, it is so difficult to see a scientific and neutral approach emerge in the middle of all the mis-dis-information.

See also: Alfred kinsey, How it is and how it could be, how it was and of course how it should be …by Mick Farren

“[Kinsey] equated ignorance with pain and the absence of joy.”

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