Kinsey, Bill Condon’s new biopic starring Liam Neeson, does the improbable. It succeeds in making a movie about sex boring. 

Kinsey fails on both ends of the “biopic” equation�as biography and as motion picture. A beautiful score, great cinematography, and an inspired performance by Peter Sarsgaard as Clyde Martin (Kinsey’s gardener turned lover turned coauthor), fails to redeem Kinsey as a movie. Neither Director Bill Condon’s nuanced portrayal of the Indiana University sex researchers’ attempts at sexual communism, nor his candor in showing the duplicity of Kinsey’s private behavior conflicting with his public posture, makes up for the appalling and deliberate dishonesty elsewhere in the film. 

To understand the mid-century sex researcher, Condon juxtaposes the son Alfred C. Kinsey with the father Alfred S. Kinsey. John Lithgow resurrects his bafoonish, Bible-thumping, authority figure from Footloose, playing Kinsey’s overbearing namesake. The senior Kinsey is more caricature than character, resembling not so much a holdover from a less enlightened age but a species altogether alien to this planet. He rails against such modern instigators of immorality as “the gas engine,” “the telephone,” and, of course, “the zipper.” We should all be so fortunate to have such enemies.

It is this ignorance that sets Condon’s Kinsey off on his quest to shine light onto darkness. On his journey, he comes across a young couple who believes that oral sex causes pregnancy and a college professor who teaches that ejaculation results in infertility.  

Against this backdrop of strawmen and stereotypes, a heroic Kinsey emerges to slay ignorance. Along the way, Kinsey gives audiences a treatment of its title character that ventures beyond the bounds of artistic license. Warts, removed; blemishes, airbrushed; the Kinsey of the silver screen is the consummate scientist whose pathological masochism is recast as scientific experimentation, collusion with pedophiles dismissed, and stacking of sample groups not addressed.  

Perhaps the film’s most memorable character is Kenneth Braun, a man who satisfies himself in ten seconds and brags of sleeping with his mother, grandmother, and hundreds of children. Referred to alternatively as Mr. X or Rex King in the literature about Kinsey, Braun infuriates Chris O’Donnell’s Wardell Pomeroy so much that the Kinsey associate barges out of the interview. Kinsey himself is shocked, shocked. “No one should be forced to do anything against their will,” a seething Kinsey sternly lectures the sexual predator. “No one should be hurt.” 

But the real Kinsey regarded the prolific pedophile as a hero, with Kinsey writing to the man: “I congratulate you on the research spirit which has led you to collect data over these many years.” While the movie depicts a one-time encounter between Kinsey and Braun, the Indiana University professor mined the pedophile for information about his continuing exploits for years. 

From watching Kinsey, one is left with the definite impression that pedophilia disgusted the famous professor. It didn’t. Sympathetic biographer James Jones concedes that Kinsey “unquestionably took tolerance to extremes, plunging into the abyss with regard to incest and child molestation.” When molesters such as “Braun” told him that their “partners” derived pleasure from their encounters, Kinsey uncritically repeated this as established fact. He literally relied on the word of rapists to determine whether their victims enjoyed sex. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) contends that among victims of pedophiles, “in most instances the reported fright was nearer the level that children will show when they see insects, spiders, or other objects against which they have been adversely conditioned.” In Kinsey’s judgment, it was usually the “hysteria” surrounding molestation and not the act itself that harmed children.                       

Kinsey’s anything-goes attitude clearly drove his research. Among 4,441 female histories, he held that he found just one case of a violent sexual assault upon a child. Rape, like venereal disease, abortion, and pregnancy, scarcely appears in his studies. In one instance where a discussion of rape does occur, Kinsey surrounds the word in scare quotes, comparing reports of rapes to cases in the animal kingdom where primate females caught in the act with a secondary suitor attack that suitor to feign that the encounter had been involuntary. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) then maintains, “A high proportion of the human ‘rape’ cases which we have had the opportunity to examine involve something of the same motifs.”

Condon similarly glosses over Kinsey’s masochism. In a single scene, Kinsey’s wife comes upon a pained Kinsey, drops of blood forming on the floor beneath him. “I wanted to understand different kinds of sensations,” Kinsey apologetically tells his wife. “It didn’t give me any pleasure.” This fictional Kinsey is at odds with the historical Kinsey, who masturbated with lengthy objects inserted in his urethra, circumcised himself with a pocketknife, used a noose to hang from an overhead pipe by his genitals, and, according to the biography upon which this film was partially based, pierced himself until there was “nothing left to pierce.” 

Countering the half-century old criticisms of Kinsey’s skewing his sample, the film implies that the sex study encompassed American diversity. One memorable scene superimposes scores of talking interviewees over a map of the United States. The diverse hues of the subjects’s faces and their proportional distribution over all corners of the map misleads on two counts. 

First, in presenting a patchwork of black, brown, yellow, and white faces, the film ignores the reality that the Kinsey Reports were surveys of white Americans and white Americans alone. The subjects interviewed for the reports resembled less a meeting of the United Nations than the roster of the New York Rangers. 

Second, the narrowness of the surveys weren’t simply confined to the racial category. The Kinsey Reports were disproportionately surveys of a specific type of white American�Easterners. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, for instance, contained roughly the same number of interviews of Pennsylvanians as it did of interviews of men in the entire Western half of the United States. 

Amazingly, the film contains not a single scene showing a member of the Kinsey team interviewing a prison inmate. This, despite incarcerated men composing somewhere between twenty and twenty-five percent of those interviewed for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Lest one view this as an inconsequential oversight on Bill Condon’s behalf, consider Kinsey’s later admission that between fifty and seventy-five percent of the inmates he interviewed reported some type of homosexual activity within their histories. This admission in the opening pages of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female demonstrates how the findings on homosexuality�famously morphing into the “1 in 10″ mantra�were wildly inflated in the male study. 

Kinsey is a reverse morality play. The hero is a man of science beleaguered by the forces of darkness. The villains are, well, straight out of central casting. Celluloid Kinsey liberates homosexuals and shows women how to have orgasms. His critics, we are led to believe, are driven by outrage at sexual diversity that extends beyond the missionary position. 

The film’s ongoing theme bluntly depicts the irony of Kinsey replacing his father’s preachy morality with a preachy immorality. A more subtle, unintended irony is at work throughout. In crafting this cinematic broadside against fundamentalist Christians, anti-Communists, and those speaking with Southern accents, filmmaker Bill Condon becomes what he denounces. If nothing else, Kinsey is a scolding, self-righteous, and preachy movie.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004), which features a chapter on Alfred Kinsey and his reports on human sexuality. He also edits www.flynnfiles.com.

 

 

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

About the author

2 Comments for Kinsey Myths Perpetuated in New Movie