November 26, 2004
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. World War II focused national attention on a global threat to mankind. Meanwhile, unobtrusively, in the heartland of America, the seed of a quieter, but equally profound attack on America was taking root.
On the quiet campus of Indiana University, a group of researchers was busy interviewing men and women, collecting data on their intimate sex lives. Alfred Kinsey seemed to be the perfect man to direct this project: married, a father of three children, a zoologist well-respected for his work with gall wasps, and known around campus for his open and comfortable approach to talking about sex.
Kinsey's move from gall wasps to humans began even before 1938 when popular lore has it that "the Association of Women Students petitioned Indiana University for a course for students who were married or contemplating marriage." On the side, outside of his regular teaching duties in the zoology department, he began to collect sexual histories, developing an extensive list of over 350 interview questions which he committed to memory.
When soldiers returned home in 1945, Kinsey was on the home stretch of preparing his findings for the American public. On January 5, 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published. While it had only one week as #1, it spent 43 weeks, just short of one year, on The New York Times bestseller's list. A second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, followed in 1953.
Kinsey's authority on sexual behavior went virtually unchallenged for 30 years. Then on July 23, 1981, at the Fifth World Congress of Sexology in Jerusalem, a diminutive American psychologist stepped to the podium to present her research findings to a standing-room only session.
"I was confident my sexology colleagues would be as outraged as was I by these tables [Tables 30-34 from Male] and the child data describing Kinsey's reliance on pedophiles as his child sex experimenters. Perhaps worst of all for me, as a scholar and a mother, were pages 160 and 161 where Kinsey claimed his data came from 'interviews.' How could he say 196 little children -- some as young as two months of age -- enjoyed 'fainting,' 'screaming,' 'weeping,' and 'convulsing'? How could he call these children's responses evidence of their sexual pleasure and 'climax'? I called it evidence of terror, of pain, as well as criminal. One of us was very, very sexually mixed up."
Dr. Judith Reisman laid out her charges methodically, presenting slides of Tables 30-34 and analyzing the specific entries which calculated the rates and timed the speeds of orgasms in at least 317 infants and children. How, she challenged the audience, did rape and molestation of children ever make the transition from criminal activity to research? And she rested her case.
