Kinsey Reports

Kinsey's research, based on extensive interviews with volunteers, indicated that 90-95% of people are somewhat bisexual. His results astounded the general public, which had believed that heterosexuality was both the ethical and statistical norm.

Kinsey et al. gathered their data primarily by means of interviews, which they encoded using a code to maintain confidentiality. Later the data was computerised for processing. The data and the researcher's notes are only made available to qualified researchers who demonstrate a need to view the materials, in order to maintain confidentiality; they are currently held by the Kinsey Institute. The institute, however, allows researchers to submit SPSS programs to be run on the data.

Kinsey's methodology was criticised by some of the leading psychologists of the day, including Abraham Maslow[?]. Fully 25% of Kinsey's survey group were, or had been, prison inmates, 5% were male prostitutes, and the majority were volunteers. It has been claimed that he refused to consider volunteer bias as a confounding factor even when he was warned by prominent research psychologists, that he provided incomplete demographic data, and that his statistical methods of analysis were inappropriate.

In a response to these criticisms, Professor Martin Duberman writes:

Paul Gebhard (one of Kinsey's co-authors and his successor as director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research -- he retired in 1982), himself reacting to criticism leveled against the two volumes, spent years "cleaning" the Kinsey data of its purported contaminants -- removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard, with Alan Johnson, published The Kinsey Data, and -- to his own surprise -- found that Kinsey's original estimates held: Instead of Kinsey's 37 percent, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4 percent; the 10 percent figure (with prison inmates excluded) came to 9.9 percent for white, college-educated males and 12.7 percent for those with less education. And as for the call for a "random sample," a team of independent statisticians studying Kinsey's procedures had concluded as far back as 1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey's interviewing technique had been "extraordinarily skillful." They characterized Kinsey's work overall as "a monumental endeavor."

Supporters of Kinsey argue that while his research had inevitable imperfections, it was a great advance at the time (and in its extent remains unique until today). Kinsey's own sexual behavior has been subject of more scrutiny than that of perhaps any other researcher. Kinsey biographer James H. Jones claims that Kinsey was bisexual, masochistic and an avid group sex practitioner (see Alfred C. Kinsey).

Reisman campaign

Since the late 1980s, conservative author and speaker Dr. Judith A. Reisman has spearheaded an effort to discredit Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Reports. She now leads a campaign called Restoring Social Virtue & Purity to America (RSVPAmerica), whose primary purpose is to disseminate what is believed to be crucial information about the nature of Kinsey's reports. It advertises publications such as "Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences" and "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People" (both by Reisman) and the video "The Children of Table 34", funded by the Family Research Council[?]. The video, according to the campaign website, "presents the story of Dr. Reisman's discovery of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's systematic sexual abuse of 317 male children".

Reisman claims that Kinsey employed a pedophile man to obtain data about child sexual behavior, and interprets parts of the descriptions of the children's sexual behavior ("gasping, eyes staring", "groaning, sobbing, or more violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears") as evidence that the children were tortured against their will. Also based on claims about Kinsey's personal sexual conduct, she concludes that Alfred Kinsey deliberately promoted a pro-sexual agenda which since dominated American schools and media. This, she argues, directly led to a massive increase in sexual diseases, and to a homosexual/pedophile conspiracy to subvert the media in order to convince the public that homosexual and pedophile sexual behavior are harmless.

Her publications have been eagerly reproduced and funded by conservative organizations, and used as arguments to reduce funding for sexology, which, Reisman claims, is not really a science but a cover for pro-homosexual/pedophile campaigners to obtain funding.

In its 1998 response [1] (http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/cont-akchild) to the core allegations made by Reisman, Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft[?] stated:

• The data on children in tables 31-34 of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male came largely from the journal of one adult "omniphile", who had illegal sexual interaction with these children. The man's journal started in 1917, long before the Kinsey Reports.
• Kinsey explicitly pointed out that the data came from the journals of adults who had such illegal sexual contacts, but he granted his source anonymity.
• Kinsey did never have any sexual interaction with children, nor did he employ others to do so. He interviewed children in the presence of their parents.

Bancroft claims that the subject of child/adult sexual interaction was deliberately chosen by Kinsey's opponents to discredit him because of the emotions surrounding it: "In recent years, when there has been anxiety bordering on hysteria about child sexual abuse, often resulting in circumstances where the accused is regarded as guilty until proved innocent, what better way to discredit someone?"

Based on the above arguments, most of Kinsey's supporters find no professional misconduct and regard the anti-Kinsey publications as propaganda.

References

• A.C. Kinsey, W.B. Pomeroy, C.E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, (Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders, 1948)
• A.C. Kinsey, W.B. Pomeroy, C.E. Martin, P.H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, (Philadelphia, PA: W.B. Saunders, 1953)
• Dr. Judith A. Reisman, Edward W. Eichel, Dr. John H. Court & Dr. J. Gordon Muir, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, (Lafayette, LA: Lochinvar-Huntington House Publishers, 1990).
• Dr. Judith A. Reisman: Crafting "Gay" Children. An Inquiry Into the Abuse of Vulnerable Youth via Government Schooling & Mainstream Media. Online Version (http://www.rsvpamerica.org/crafting%20august%202001.htm).
• Martin Duberman, "Kinsey's Urethra". The Nation, November 3, 1997, pp. 40-43. Online Version (http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/publications/duberman).