It means that they gather and interpret their material fairly and argue about its interpretations rationally. “Value-free” social science does not demand that its practitioners have no values. Moreover, the fact that Kinsey had a sexual life, however nonstandard it was, would not render him incapable of objectivity in writing about sex. Kinsey, like every other social scientist since the Enlightenment, was simply obeying the central tenet of his discipline: that the scientific study of society is possible that the results of such study are a better basis for policy than, say, the Mosaic interdiction against homosexuality. It was still illegal under various 19 th-century “Comstock” laws to disseminate information about birth control in many states. In fact, there is nothing “crypto” about his agenda writing about sex for a lay audience in the 1940s and 1950s was an openly revolutionary act. Readers can decide for themselves if they care.Ī self-righteous tone suffuses this biography: The author clearly feels he has exposed the dirty secrets that inspired his protagonist’s “crypto” agenda of reform. But back in the main text he says Kinsey had an “infection in his pelvic region”–probably glomerular nephritis, a different and more probable diagnosis–which would make the public “cover story” (that a strep throat caused the problem) far likelier. In the note, Jones also suggests that a “massive pelvic infection,” which Kinsey suffered in the fall of 1954, may “pinpoint the most likely time” and, of course, corroborate the incident. Any reformer is invariably described as a “chronic” or “habitual” “do-gooder.” Forget, too, the absence of even the semblance of evidence for Kinsey’s inner state here as elsewhere: Kinsey “must have felt” ambivalence about gardening because it threatened his “fragile sense of masculinity.”) A footnote reveals that the one anonymous source for this episode of “self-torture” who is actually cited was apparently not an actual witness and that it can at best be dated between 19. Consider Jones’ pièce de résistance: On “one particular evening,” in response to “his inner demons,” and more specifically to the Rockefeller Foundation’s rejection of a grant application, Kinsey allegedly hanged himself by the hand and balls from an overhead pipe “long enough for this self-appointed Messiah of the sexually despised to experience much pain and suffering, precisely as he had intended.” (Forget the mocking tone it pervades the book. The evidence for Kinsey’s masochism–mostly the reports of anonymous sources–is much more difficult to assess. Whether he was a homosexual, readers can decide for themselves. More than likely, he had “orgasms derived from homosexual contact.” But he also had a long, loving, and complex sexual relationship with his wife, Clara, and found stimulation in heterosexual pornography. His sexual life unquestionably extended beyond the missionary position within monogamous marriage, but then, as his–and much subsequent–research showed, so does that of most Americans. He was into group sex and he masturbated. That Kinsey had intense homoerotic relationships with his graduate students is certain. The author of the groundbreaking best sellers Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), he was the pioneer in finding out what Americans actually do in bed and with whom we do it. The perpetrator of all these deceptions may not have been the “successor to Darwin,” as many contemporaries thought, but he was arguably the paradigmatic social scientist of his generation, a man who more than any other made the study of human sexuality a respectable and legitimate field of inquiry. He also spent 15 years researching gall wasps and was a serious gardener, hiker, and record collector.) “The answer” to why he worked so hard “lies in his private life.” His “spring-coil vitality” was the product not of a naturally energetic constitution, or a passion for science, or even old-fashioned ambition, but of “stupendous guilt.” He presented himself as a man of science but actually he was a “crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual mores and sex offender laws of the United States.” (Not exactly. He “lived with two terrible secrets: He was both a homosexual and a masochist.” Everything else about him seems to follow. In this new biography, Jones outs Alfred Kinsey. In his fine earlier book, Bad Blood, James Jones exposed one of American medicine’s most shameful episodes: the Tuskegee experiment, in which doctors enlisted a group of black men with syphilis and, without their knowledge or consent, withheld treatment so as to observe the natural progress of the disease.
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