The Kinsey Legacy
In May 1995 when John Bancroft took over as director of Indiana Univensity's
Kinsey Institute, his priority was to recapture its former stature as a
leading research center.
What was a big challenge then is likely to loom much larger come October,
the publication date of a biography of Alfred Kinsey, the Institute's founder
and first director.
Bancroft noted that the Institute had been through a troubled time and needed
to get on wlth the serious business of research. He referred to nearly five
years of acrimonious disputes between IU administrators and his predecessor
June Reinisch, who directed the institute from 1982 to 1993.
Accused of sloppy Investigatlon and poor management, Reinisch sued the university
but later dropped the action when Thomas Ehrilch, then president of IU,
issued a formal apology. Shortly thereafter she resigned.
Not long after taking over Bancroft found the Institute embrolled in another
controversy, one involving data on child sexuality contained in Kinsey's
landmark 1948 book on male sexuality. Kinsey clalmed to document multiple
orgasms In 317 infants and pre-adolescents.
The Family Research Council released a video denouncing the data and the
manner in which it was collected. Males, with known histories of child moleslation
were sald to have been the main contributors.
In an interview in the Star later Bancroft sald he was, "fairly confident"
that the data for all 317 cases were based on the observations of a single
male pedophile.
That is a devastating statement considering that the study was cited as
affirmation that sexuallity in children is natural and healthy and should
not be repressed.
There may be more devastation ahead.
A lengthy article In the current New Yorker magazine reveals Kinsey was
a homosexual and a masochist whose deviant compulsions worsened as he grew
older. His secret life was shared with admirers, intimate friends and associates.
He encouraged the exchange of sexual partners and experiments in sexual
gratification.
He often filmed acts of intercourse, masturbation and masochism in an attic
studio; enjoyed trolling homosexual hangouts. had a particular fascination
for sex criminals and dseviants of every stripe and assembled what is considered
the world's most extensive collection of pornography.
The magazine article is written by James H. Jones, author of the pending
Kinsey biography and a former member of the institute's science advisory
board.
Jones charges that Kinsey's unusual proclivities almost certainly affected
the objectivity of his work. Kinsey's findings he believes were skewed by
a persistent engagement with "people who were either on the margins
or beyond the pale," sadomasochists, voyeurs, pedophiles, transsexuals
and the like. And, very conveniently, case histories were written in a code
known only to Kinsey.
Kinsey yave the world a distorted -- some would say sick -- view of human
sexuality. And what ought to enrage Hoosier taxpayers is that thelr money
helped him do It. For years the Institute received about $500,000 annually
from Indiana University. The funding was cut in half in 1995 largely at
the behest of some university trustees.
Political commentator Patrick Buchanan, never one to mince words, once called
Kinsey "America's original dirty old man." The New Yorker article
suggests Buchanan may be uncomfortably close to the truth.