Kinsey's Dark Secret

A Man For Our Times

The following paragraph introduces Wikipedia's article on Alfred Kinsey:

Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has profoundly influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.

So far, so good.  Kinsey has been lionised, celebrated and glorified.  But it appears he was an acutely depraved man.

His goal was "to create his own sexual utopia," says biographer James Jones, and Kinsey built up a select circle of friends and colleagues who committed themselves to his philosophy of total sexual freedom.  Since the results were often captured on film, we know that Kinsey and his wife both had sexual relations with a host of male and female staff members and other people.  Kinsey was also a masochist, sometimes engaging in bizarre and painful practices.

But Kinsey had an even darker secret.  In Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud, researcher Judith Reisman argued convincingly that Kinsey's research on child sexual responses could have been obtained only if he or his colleagues were actually engaged in the sexual molestation of children.  How else could "actual observations" be made of sexual responses in children age (sic) two month to fifteen years old?  And this is the man whose ideas have been so influential in shaping American sex education.  [Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 242f.]

Kinsey was a libertine, who told us what we all wanted to hear.  And the next generation, profoundly influenced by Kinsey, has become like the idols it has worshipped.  It has always been the way.