alfred kinsey experiment on babies

The Little Lady Who Brought Down Alfred Kinsey

PUBLISHED ON

April 16, 2021

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Sign up to get  Crisis  articles delivered to your inbox daily

Join the Conversation

Comments are a benefit for financial supporters of Crisis. If you are a monthly or annual supporter, please login to comment. A Crisis account has been created for you using the email address you used to donate.

Published on

Editor's picks

Anti-catholic revolution and catholic revival , bill maher: the prophet we need, dignitas infinita and the idolization of man, remaining faithfully catholic near the end of the francis pontificate , your cart is empty, signup to receive new crisis articles daily.

Stack Exchange Network

Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

Did Alfred Kinsey sexually abuse children for his studies?

The following is an interesting question posted in Psychology.SE which was closed as off-topic. It was not migrated here so I thought I would ask it. An article at https://web.archive.org/web/20150326173619/http://www.crosswalk.com/archive/dr-kinsey-the-un-american-marquis-de-sade-518418.html makes the claim in regards to Table 34:

Dr. Reisman continues to ask, "Where did Kinsey get the hundreds of infants and young boys who were sexually tortured? And, where are those boys today?" Jones does not say, and the Kinsey Institute, no doubt, hopes that tolerance of sexual 'diversity" is high enough today that attention can be diverted from the child sexual abuse conducted for the Kinsey Reports. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Table 34 was the table or list in Kinsey's famous treatise which purported to display the number of times infants and young children were aroused by the Kinsey researcher when the researcher attempted to masturbate the infant or young child....)

The Wikipedia article on Alfred Kinsey states that the data in tables 30 to 34

was said to have come from adults' childhood memories, or from parent or teacher observation. Kinsey said he also interviewed nine men who had sexual experiences with children, and who told him about the children's responses and reactions.

Is it true that at least some data was from children abused by Kinsey or his researchers?

• sexual-abuse

• I wanted to edit in a version of the claim which was more specific (Table 34 talked about multiple orgasms of young children, and the allegation was that Kinsey's researchers abuse them to get this data), and something more recent than a forgotten 1999 article. I wanted to edit in basic context - like a Wikipedia link to Alfred Kinsey to explain who he was. However, the Wikiepedia link does a reasonable job of explaining the two sides of the controversy. Please take a look at that, and explain what you are still skeptical about. –  Oddthinking ♦ Commented Nov 30, 2018 at 10:26
• 2 The quote actually doesn't make the claim in the title of this question. It in fact doesn't make any claim, it's just a bunch of questions. Other parts of the article do make the claim though, eg sourced to the hate group Family Research Council ("criminal child sexual experiments", "the researcher attempted to masturbate the infant"). –  tim Commented Nov 30, 2018 at 10:44
• 5 @Oddthinking I don't think that the linked wiki article mentions any experiments on children (only interviews of pedophiles and interviews of adults on their childhood memories). The Kinsey Institute rejects the claim of sexual experiments on children. The sources which do claim sexual abuse by researchers as part of their experiments seem dubious, but notable. I think this question should be on-topic. –  tim Commented Nov 30, 2018 at 10:46
• @tim - thanks for pointing out the deficiency. I have expanded the quote and hopefully it clarifies the claim –  Chris Rogers Commented Nov 30, 2018 at 10:56
• 3 Crosswalk.com, a very conservative religious organization making those characterizations about Kinsey should be viewed with the same skeptical and jaundiced eye that one would view the National Right To Life Council making characterizations about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. There might be a bit of a motivation to skew the characterizations in a particular direction. –  PoloHoleSet Commented Dec 4, 2018 at 20:27

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged sexual-abuse research ..

• Featured on Meta
• Bringing clarity to status tag usage on meta sites
• Announcing a change to the data-dump process

Hot Network Questions

• Geometry nodes: Curve caps horizontal
• Why is the stall speed of an aircraft a specific speed?
• Is loss of availability automatically a security incident?
• Does an unseen creature with a burrow speed have advantage when attacking from underground?
• Word for when someone tries to make others hate each other
• Is there a way to assign multiple meshes to an object and switch between them?
• Risks of exposing professional email accounts?
• Calculating area of intersection of two segmented polygons in QGIS
• Largest number possible with +, -, ÷
• A novel (and a movie) about a village in southern France where a strange succession of events happens
• Why are poverty definitions not based off a person's access to necessities rather than a fixed number?
• Fill the grid with numbers to make all four equations true
• Why doesn’t dust interfere with the adhesion of geckos’ feet?
• Why is charge on a conductor stable?
• What's "the archetypal book" called?
• How to reconcile the effect of my time magic spell with my timeline
• What would happen if the voltage dropped below one volt and the button was not hit?
• Is consciousness a prerequisite for knowledge?
• Getting an UK Visa with Ricevuta
• How to run only selected lines of a shell script?
• Light switch that is flush or recessed (next to fridge door)
• When did graduate student teaching assistants become common in universities?
• Not a cross, not a word (number crossword)
• Can Christian Saudi Nationals visit Mecca?

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Alfred Kinsey: Liberator or Pervert?

By Caleb Crain

• Oct. 3, 2004

Correction Appended

MORE than half a century after the publication of his landmark study, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," Alfred C. Kinsey remains one of the most influential figures in American intellectual history. He's certainly the only entomologist ever to be immortalized in a Cole Porter song. Thanks to him, it's now common knowledge that almost all men masturbate, that women peak sexually in their mid-30's and that homosexuality is not some one-in-a-million anomaly. His studies helped bring sex -- all kinds of sex, not just the stork-summoning kind -- out of the closet and into the bright light of day.

But not everyone applauds that accomplishment. Though some hail him for liberating the nation from sexual puritanism, others revile him as a fraud whose "junk science" legitimized degeneracy. Even among scholars sympathetic to Kinsey there's disagreement. Both his biographers regard him as a brave pioneer and reformer, but differ sharply about almost everything else. One independent scholar has even accused him of sexual crimes.

All of which makes the decision by the writer and director Bill Condon to place him at the center of a major Hollywood biopic -- one loaded up with stars, including Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Peter Sarsgaard -- rather striking. Kinsey's admirers are looking forward to a respectful portrayal when "Kinsey" opens on Nov. 12. But judging from the heated debate already swirling around the film, they're not half as excited as Kinsey's detractors, who are eager to take on the man they blame, in part, for the gay movement, Roe v. Wade, sex education, the glamorization of pornography and the loosening of sex-offender laws. Already, there have been calls for a boycott and the beginnings of a counterspin media campaign. "We see this movie," says Robert Knight, Concerned Women for America's designated Kinsey expert, "as really a godsend."

A film about Kinsey could hardly avoid controversy, since even the facts of his biography are in dispute. If the field of sex studies owes its existence to Kinsey, the field of Kinsey studies owes its existence to James H. Jones , whose "Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life" appeared in 1997, and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, who published "Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey" in 1998.

Mr. Jones's book revealed that Kinsey had had affairs with men, encouraged open marriages among his staff, stimulated himself with urethral insertion and ropes, and filmed sex in his attic. But Mr. Jones did not feel he was debunking Kinsey. "What I told myself, and I still think this, was that I was writing a biography of a tragic hero," he says. "It shouldn't surprise us that pleas for sexual tolerance would come from a person who couldn't be himself in public." He speculated that Kinsey's personal preferences might have affected his findings, especially about the pervasiveness of homosexual activity. But today he says that though Kinsey's reformist impulse probably did have an effect, any distortion was "unconscious and heartfelt."

Mr. Gathorne-Hardy took issue with Mr. Jones's portrait. "I felt he'd done Kinsey a disservice," says Mr. Gathorne-Hardy. "He wasn't repressed at all. By the time he got going, he was more unrepressed than practically anyone."

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

The True Story Of Alfred Kinsey, The Controversial Sexologist And Father Of The Sexual Revolution

Though his reports almost immediately made the new york times' bestsellers list, his research was very much not without its critics..

Keystone Features/Getty Images Alfred Kinsey in June 1952.

Alfred Kinsey has been hailed the “father of the sexual revolution.” For one, his open and curious attitude about sex brought the subject into the mainstream. He wrote two unprecedented and in-depth explorations of human sexuality known as the Kinsey Reports and has been credited with paving the way for the sexual liberation and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

But how Kinsey conducted his research is often revisited for its controversy and, by some accounts, for its immorality. Indeed, there is a far darker side to Alfred Kinsey’s legacy.

Alfred Kinsey’s Background

Alfred Kinsey was born in Hoboken, N.J. in 1894. His father, Alfred Kinsey Sr., was a devout Protestant who taught at Steven’s Institute of Technology. The home was not an intimate one, and could perhaps have been what stirred Kinsey’s interest in sex. He expressed an interest in biology from a young age and attended nature classes at the YMCA in the summers on Lake Wawayanda in rural northwestern New Jersey. In 1911 he joined the Boy Scouts, becoming an Eagle Scout in 1913, and he excelled in the classroom and would be valedictorian of his high school.

But Kinsey Sr. was not impressed with his young son’s interests. He was a harsh and exacting man where his son was fragile and often sickly and forced Kinsey into an engineering program at Stevens. But Kinsey would last barely two years, as his disinterest in the subject made for some bad marks.

Alfred Kinsey eventually decided to risk his father’s wrath and leave Stevens for Bowdoin College in Maine where he could finally study biology. Unfortunately, he would never reconcile with his father who would later not attend his graduation in 1916.

© Bettmann/CORBIS/Flickr Clara Kinsey knits on July, 15, 1948 in Chicago, Ill.

Some biographers argue that this early rebellion against his strict upbringing made the young Kinsey determined to “transform his private struggle against Victorian morality into a public crusade.”

After getting his Ph.D. in biology at Harvard , Kinsey became an assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University where he studied gall wasps. It was also here where he met Clara McMillen, a graduate student in chemistry. Obviously smitten, Kinsey proposed to her some two months later and they were married in June 1921.

But by the time Kinsey had met and married his wife, he was inexperienced as far as love goes. He had not dated before Clara nor had he had sex, and Kinsey had allegedly even questioned his own sexuality. In fact, when it came time for the couple to consummate, they struggled. But both being scientists, they did their research to determine how to be better partners. The two thus became a great source of sexual information for the inexperienced and ignorant students at the university, and it was during this time that Kinsey struck out on a new path.

Kinsey’s opportunity to solidify his newfound passion came in 1937 when a campus crusade against sex education so enraged him that he formed his own counter organization. His group sought to combat the religious campaign through science and he began to teach a noncredited course entitled “Marriage and Family” at the University. In its first year, 70 women and 28 men enrolled in the course. Within two years, the course attendance was over 400.

Keystone Features/Getty Images The staff of the department of sexology at Indiana University. Departmental head, Alfred Charles Kinsey is on the far right in the back row, June 1952.

Kinsey was galled by his community’s prudishness. “If Americans were not so inhibited,” Kinsey once stated to his class, “a 12-year-old would know most of the biology which I will have to give you in formal lectures as seniors and graduate students.”

But it was not enough for Alfred Kinsey to discuss the scientific basis around sex, he wanted also to prove and to illustrate it, so he began to collect data on his students’ sexual histories. He did this by requiring that each of his students meet with him for one-on-one conferences to pose personal questions they may not want to discuss in class. Kinsey then recorded the responses in a code only he could understand with the intention to distill a comprehensive record of human sexuality.

He also went into cities where he interviewed prostitutes, open homosexuals, criminals, and more. Meanwhile, the University in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation established The Institute for Sex Research in 1947, of which Kinsey was the director.

Alfred Kinsey ultimately collected around 5,300 “sex histories” from his subjects which he published in the first of his two-book series known as the Kinsey Reports, the explosive 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male .

Recent News

sentiment captivating

How Tim Allen Went From Cocaine-Trafficking Criminal To ‘Home Improvement’ Star

By All That's Interesting

The Kinsey Reports

Wikimedia Commons Kinsey’s 1953 cover on TIME Magazine.

Dubbed by one religious leader as “the most anti-religious book of our times,” Kinsey’s book provided theories on sexual topics ranging from masturbation to homosexuality. It quickly ascended the New York Times’ Bestsellers list despite the fact that it had provoked widespread outrage for its frank discussion of previously-taboo topics, including sex before marriage.

The reports made the astounding claim that “perhaps the major portion” of men have had or will have at least some kind of homosexual experience in their lifetime. Kinsey posited also that “60 percent” of teenaged boys have had some kind of “homosexual activities.” The book also introduced the “Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale” which is now usually referred to as “The Kinsey Scale.” The spectrum ranks people on a scale of 0 — exclusively heterosexual — to 6 — exclusively homosexual.

Kinsey declared that one of his goals was simply to show that “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality,” or that no matter what sexual urge one may experience, this is natural, normal, and acceptable. He further asserted this claim with 1953’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , which was also so successful that Kinsey made the cover of Time that year. But with this attention came great criticism.

His critics, among them the famous evangelist Billy Graham, tried to defame him, “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,” Graham said. Later that same year, Kinsey’s funding for the institute was pulled.

Wikimedia Commons Kinsey at a press conference in 1955.

Upon his death in 1956, Kinsey’s work had brought the discussion of sexuality into the mainstream. He seemed to have also prepared society for the sexual revolutions and human rights campaigns of the upcoming decades. He maintained a loving relationship with his wife and had four children of his own.

Despite this, Alfred Kinsey’s legacy is very much not without its controversies.

Alfred Kinsey’s Controversy

Sexual Behavior and the Human Male Taken from Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior and the Human Male , the chart shows the average stimulation of children as young as five months.

Although Kinsey has often been hailed as the “father of the sexual revolution,” it was not just religious voices who sought to defame him. Statisticians have pointed out that these subjects were not representative of the “population at large” and leaned towards people who were “sexually active and adventurous.” In other words, Kinsey’s research was in part biased.

Kinsey himself was certainly biased in favor of sexual activity, having once declared “there are only three kinds of sexual abnormalities: abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage.”

But how professional Kinsey was throughout his research is also often brought to question. He allegedly encouraged his research associates to engage in sexual activity with each other and pressured students and team members alike to engage in that activity with him. Kinsey’s assistant, Clyde Martin, even engaged in a sexual relationship with his wife.

Kinsey kept recorded video and image evidence of sexual intercourse between subjects, assistants, and friends. Some of these he even participated in. He collected erotica from around that world which was deemed illegal by the U.S. Customs Service.

“In a sort of way he was ruthless,” one biographer of Kinsey, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, speculated. “And one could almost go as far as to say immoral, at least not conventionally moral. If someone had sexual information that was germane, Kinsey would use it.”

Indeed, Kinsey went so far as to research sexual stimulation in children as young as five months old.

One of the subjects he interviewed for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was a 63-year-old pedophile named Rex King who had attempted “to bring to orgasm boys between the ages of 2 months and 15 years.” It only recently emerged that this data around sexuality in children came from one single man in Kinsey’s research, rather than from the several that Kinsey had initially claimed.

By shielding King in this way, Kinsey may have enabled him.

Although people disagree over whether he was a fearless pioneer or a sex-crazed “junk scientist,” Kinsey and his discoveries are unlikely to disappear from history any time soon.

After this look at the father of the ever-controversial Kinsey Reports, Alfred Kinsey, read about Emma Darwin , the famed scientist’s incestuous bride. Then, check out this study which claims to have found the average of sexual partners a person has in their lifetime.

PO Box 24091 Brooklyn, NY 11202-4091

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

• Why is biology important?
• What are the basic functional systems of animals?

Alfred Kinsey

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Academia - History of Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute
• Kinsey Institute - Biography of Alfred C. Kinsey
• The New York Times - Alfred Kinsey: Liberator or Pervert?
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer Of Sex Research
• The Washington Post - Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life
• PBS - American Experience - Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894-1956)
• Alfred C. Kinsey - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Alfred Kinsey (born June 23, 1894, Hoboken , New Jersey , U.S.—died August 25, 1956, Bloomington , Indiana) was an American zoologist and student of human sexual behaviour .

Kinsey, a graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (B.S., 1916), and of Harvard (doctor of science , 1920), taught zoology and botany at Harvard before joining the faculty of Indiana University as an assistant professor of zoology in 1920. He became a full professor in 1929 and director of the university’s Institute for Sex Research in 1942; it was renamed the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in 1982. The institute was sponsored jointly with the university by the Rockefeller Foundation (until 1954) and the National Research Council.

Kinsey’s inquiries into human sex life led him to found the institute and to publish Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), in which the Kinsey scale first appeared, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). These reports, based on 18,500 personal interviews, indicated a wide variation in behaviour and sexual orientation . Although interviews were carefully conducted and certain statistical criteria met, the studies were criticized because of irregularities in sampling and the general unreliability of personal communication.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Am J Public Health
• v.93(6); Jun 2003

Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer Of Sex Research

Theodore m. brown.

1 Theodore M. Brown is with the Departments of History and of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester, NY. Elizabeth Fee is with the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

Elizabeth Fee

ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL Americans of the 20th century, Alfred Charles Kinsey conducted landmark studies of male and female sexual behavior that helped usher in the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in Hoboken, NJ, on June 23, 1894, the son of Alfred Seguine Kinsey and Sarah Ann Charles. His father, a zealously religious and intimidating man, and a teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, insisted that his son put aside his early interest in biology and instead enroll in Stevens to study engineering. After 2 lackluster years, Alfred rebelled and left for Bowdoin College in Maine, where he enrolled as a biology student. Father and son never reconciled; when Alfred graduated with high honors in 1916, his father refused to attend commencement. 1

Alfred became a student of applied biology at Harvard, where he came under the influence of William Morton Wheeler, an eminent field biologist, staunch Darwinian, and confidant of the irreverent H. L. Mencken. With Wheeler as his mentor, Kinsey jettisoned most of his religious ideas—although not all of his repressive upbringing—and embarked on a massive and meticulous Darwinian case study of the evolutionary taxonomy of the gall wasp. After identifying several new species, Kinsey received his doctor of science degree in 1919 and joined the faculty of Indiana University the following year. In 1924, he married Clara Bracken McMillen, then an outstanding chemistry student at Indiana University. Alfred and Clara had 4 children, 3 of whom survived into adulthood.

Kinsey advanced up the academic ranks, becoming full professor in 1929. 2 In 1936, he published The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study of the Origin of Species in 1930 and The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips . Although both were well received by specialists, Kinsey was deeply disappointed that he was not offered a professorship at a more prestigious university.

Perhaps because of this disappointment, Kinsey made an unusual career move in 1938: he agreed to lead a team-taught course on marriage and the family instituted in response to a student petition. High points of the course were Kinsey’s illustrated lectures on the biology of sexual stimulation, the mechanics of intercourse, and the techniques of contraception, as were his spirited denunciations of repressive laws and social attitudes. He also attempted to replace conventional ideas of normal sexual behavior with a new biological definition: “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality.” 3(p333) As his recent biographer James H. Jones observes, Kinsey was using the marriage course to “transform his private struggle against Victorian morality into a public crusade” and to “protest issues that had bedeviled him for decades.” 3(p335) The Indiana students responded enthusiastically, and his course enrollments grew to 400 by 1940.

Kinsey now shifted his research focus as well, transferring his obsessive concern with variation among gall wasps to the varieties of human sexual experience. He required students in his marriage course to have private conferences in which he took their sexual histories. On weekends and vacations, he conducted similar interviews in nearby communities, and later in such cities as Gary, Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. Kinsey received research support from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, which allowed him to hire research assistants, expand the geographic scope of his work, and found the Institute of Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947.

In January 1948, Kinsey and his collaborators published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the source of the excerpt reprinted here. It made the best-seller list within 3 weeks, despite its 804 pages, generally dry scientific style, and ponderous weight of statistics, tables, and graphs. By mid-March, it had sold 200 000 copies. The book, based on over 5000 sexual histories, provided a series of revelations about the prevalence of masturbation, adulterous sexual activity, and homosexuality. One religious leader attacked Kinsey for publishing “the most anti-religious book of our times.” 4 Some criticized his methods (and conclusions) because of inadequate sampling techniques; others extravagantly praised him as another Galileo or Darwin.

Kinsey’s next major project was Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953. Based on almost 6000 sexual histories, this book contained many revelations about such matters as women’s masturbatory practices, premarital sexuality, and orgasmic experiences. As before, Kinsey documented an enormous gap between social attitudes and actual practices. Also as before, the book was a media sensation, but this time the counterattack was so ferocious—including a congressional investigation of his financial support—that the Rockefeller Foundation terminated its funding.

Kinsey’s health deteriorated under the strain of public attack and uncertainty about the future of his institute. He suffered from heart disease and, after a brief hospitalization for pneumonia, died in Bloomington on August 25, 1956. In his own mind, his principal legacy was to have brought scientific rigor to the study of human sexuality. But as his biographer James H. Jones points out, Kinsey was not only a scientist; he was a reformer who sought to rid himself of his personal sexual demons, while at the same time revolutionizing the repressive society in which he had grown up:

His formative years were spent in a home and in a nation where many middle-class parents enshrouded sex in shame, heaping more than enough guilt on young people to mangle and twist them. This was particularly true for those like Kinsey who aspired but failed to achieve moral perfection. His great accomplishment was to take his pain and suffering and use it to transform himself into an instrument of social reform, a secular evangelist who proclaimed a new sensibility about human sexuality. 3(p772)

Alfred Kinsey and the Children Of Table 34

The theory of childhood sexuality advanced by Alfred Kinsey’s sex researchers has shaped how and when sex education is taught in the United States. It has also influenced the laws against sexual molestation.

Table of Contents

Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist, most famous for his sex research in the 1940’s. What is less well known is his use of known pedophiles in his experiments with children. There is evidence to suggest that Kinsey’s scientific research into child sexuality was actually molestation.

The Infamous “Table 34”

Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male 1 , 1948, offers proof of the systematic child abuse in Dr. Kinsey’s research.

Dr Judith Reisman documented the abuse of more than 300 infants and children in the production of Alfred Kinsey’s research. These kids were aged from 2 months to 15 years. She asks:

How did they (Kinsey and his staff) get the record of 26 orgasms in 24 hours for a 4 year old? -Dr Judith Reisman

The illegality of Kinsey’s child research

Pat Trueman is a former US Attorney for the US Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Unit. Trueman says, If these experiments took place, they involved acts to which no child could provide consent and for which no parent or guardian could provide consent on behalf of the child. Therefore we are talking about criminal behavior, the criminal sexual abuse of children.

How Alfred Kinsey’s child studies continue to Shape American Society and Culture

Research scientist Gordon Muir, MD:

The understanding that we have of childhood sexuality and normal childhood sexual development as it is believed and taught in academia today comes from the experimental evidence documented in Kinsey’s report published in 1948 with the childhood sexuality tables that we have just discussed. It is absolutely astonishing that this is taken as the basis of what we understand to be normal childhood sexual development.

And when I try to explain this to colleagues in the type of science I’m involved with in what I call the harder sciences of biology or medicine, statistics, immunology, they do not believe what I’m trying to tell them . And the only way I can convince them of the truth of this is to go to the library, pull off the shelf of Alfred Kinsey’s books and show them what is inside. And it’s quite shocking.

Gordon Muir continues:

(Kinsey) provided the “scientific” basis for (pedophilia). He felt the main problem with adult-child sexual relations was hysteria and over-reaction on the part of parents and authorities.

His co-author Wardell Pomeroy, a prominent sexologist has written that the Kinsey research uncovered, “many beautiful and satisfying relationships between fathers and daughters.” Pomeroy also in his sex-education book “Boys and Sex” refers to the possibility of “loving sexual relationships between children and animals”. -Gordon Muir, MD

Who was Mary Calderone?

Working with the Kinsey team was Mary Calderone, medical director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1953 to 1964. She later founded the Sex Information and Educational Council of the United States.

• Teachers in the US are only trained in the Kinsey sex education model.
• Sex conditioning under the guise of AIDS prevention begins in Kindergarden.

“Table 31” from Kinsey’s research

Video: The children of table 34

This short documentary explains how Alfred Kinsey’s research was based on the illegal sexual abuse of children.

ISBN 978-0-253-33412-1 ↩︎

Your editor is a Bible-believing Christian with no illusions about our darkening age. Keep reading your KJV. If you don’t have one, get a printed copy with good type and read it every day. May God bless you, keep you, and protect you.

• Fake tolerance hates
• The Occult Danger of a Marianne Williamson Presidency [Video]
• The Shack - William Paul Young and Aleister Crowley [Video]
• Are these Christians or false converts? [Video]
• What does Orwellian really mean? [Video]

Why Kinsey's Research Remains Even More Controversial Than The 'Masters Of Sex'   

William Masters and Virginia Johnson — the duo currently portrayed in the television series " Masters of Sex " —  advanced the study of sex in the 1950s and beyond by observing people in the act.

Although their methods and findings often led to criticism, what they faced was nothing compared to the controversy that surrounds their predecessor — Alfred C. Kinsey.

It's not surprising that Kinsey would generate controversy by being the first to break so many taboos, demonstrating the commonness of things like sex before marriage, masturbation, and homosexuality.  What is notable is how much criticism his methods have faced despite him doing no more than interview people.

The problem was that Kinsey sometimes interviewed sex criminals and failed to report their behavior to the police, risking public safety for the sake of scientific data.

As Kinsey's biographer Gathorne-Hardy told The New York Times : "In a sort of way he was ruthless. And one could almost go as far as to say immoral, at least not conventionally moral. If someone had sexual information that was germane, Kinsey would use it."

Between 1938 and his death in 1956, Kinsey and his research team conducted more than 17,000 face-to-face interviews with a diverse group of people — college students, prostitutes, and even prison inmates — about their sexual experiences.

His most notorious subject, interviewed in 1944, was a sexual omnivore, "whose history of sexual encounters with men, women, boys, girls, animals and family members took 17 hours to record,"  according to The New York Times .  Not only did Kinsey fail to report this man, but it was also later revealed that he pretended that ample data taken from this source — including extensive documentation of the sexual response of young boys — came from multiple sources.

The results of his interviews were published in two separate volumes that together make up the "Kinsey Reports" —"Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" in 1948 followed by "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" in 1953. 

Both books became bestsellers. Their sensational revelations (i.e. 90% of American males masturbated, 85% had had premarital intercourse, and 70% had paid a prostitute at least once in their lives) were met with both awe and disgust. 

"Some criticized his methods (and conclusions) because of inadequate sampling techniques; others extravagantly praised him as another Galileo or Darwin," says a 2003 article published in the American Journal for Public Health . 

Critics also question Kinsey's sexuality. Paul Gebhard, an associate of Kinsey's between 1946 until his death in 1956, is tight-lipped about Kinsey's sex life: "One of the cardinal rules of the Institute is we do not talk about the sexual behavior of anyone we've interviewed,"  Gebhard said in an interview with PBS . "So all I can say is, Kinsey was an experimenter. He was interested in things, and so he did some experimentation. But it was rather infrequent."

The strongest opposition to Kinsey  came more than 50 years after his famous reports were published, as dissenters have tried to rebrand the "father of the sexual revolution" as a " sexual psychopath ."

Leading the anti-Kinsey campaign is a women named Judith Reisman, author of the 1990 book "Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud." In an 1998 interview with Illuminati News , Reisman blames Kinsey's work for "the skyrocketing incidence of all the social pathologies afflicting us today: divorce, abortion, sexual promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, illegitimate births, cohabitation, pornography, homosexuality, sadomasochism, rape, child molestation, sexual crimes of all types, family breakup, endemic violence, etc."

Reisman even alleges Kinsey was a pedophile himself,  and today,  Concerned Women for America  claims on its website that Kinsey "aided and abetted the molestation of hundreds of children in order to obtain data on 'child sexuality.'"

The Kinsey Institute rejects these claims, while admitting that the doctor's work may offend some.  John Bancroft, who ended his directorship in 2004, offered this response :

[Kinsey] obtained information about children's sexual responses from a few of his adult male research subjects, one in particular, who had been involved in sexual activity with children.  Resiman [sic] is entitled to disagree with Kinsey's use of such evidence; she is entitled to the opinion that no researcher should obtain information from a sexual offender without reporting it to the police; she is entitled to question the validity of such evidence; but she is not entitled to make the allegations of criminal behavior on Kinsey's part. He did not promote this activity; he did not train anyone to carry out such observations; neither Kinsey nor any of his research team was involved in any sexual experiments on children; and none of them was in any sense, a pedophile.

• Main content

Studies on Adult Sexual Contact with Children

Cite this chapter.

• Sarah D. Goode 2  

356 Accesses

25 Altmetric

The previous chapter concentrated on the work of one author, Alfred Kinsey, and his view of ‘children’s sexuality’, a view based not on children’s experiences of their sexuality but on adults’ experiences of their sexual interactions with children, using the one criterion which Kinsey found important and to which everything else became subservient: the orgasm. Kinsey wished to argue that children have a sexuality which is not harmed by being used for adult gratification, and thus he saw adults ‘manipulating’ children to orgasm as synonymous with children’s own authentic and autonomous sexuality. His views on childhood sexuality have continued to shape understandings of paedophilia and child sexual abuse up to the present day. In particular, Kinsey articulated a view of sex in which the only ‘abnormal’ sex is no sex and therefore, by extension, paedophilia does not exist as a pathology or even as a separate concept. Children — like animals, adults or wet dreams — are simply another ‘sexual outlet’ which may be used for orgasm. Kinsey also argued persuasively that ‘sex offenders’ do not exist and so should not be criminalized. Neither of his two encyclopaedic books on human sexuality deals with the reality of rape and nowhere is the concept of non-consensual sex addressed. According to Kinsey, therefore, it would be absurd to prosecute anyone for such an offence as ‘paedophilia’ or ‘child sexual abuse’, and indeed, his work has been used to argue for leniency and, more fundamentally, to revise legislation to make it less vigorous in prosecuting sexual offences.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Unable to display preview.  Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

Contesting the Dominant Discourse of Child Sexual Abuse: Sexual Subjects, Agency, and Ethics

Sexual Abuse and Sexual Function

Adult-child sex and the demands of virtuous sexual morality, author information, authors and affiliations.

University of Winchester, UK

Sarah D. Goode

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2011 Sarah D. Goode

About this chapter

Goode, S.D. (2011). Studies on Adult Sexual Contact with Children. In: Paedophiles in Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306745_5

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306745_5

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, London

Print ISBN : 978-1-349-32285-5

Online ISBN : 978-0-230-30674-5

eBook Packages : Palgrave Social Sciences Collection Social Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Gov’t
• Investigations
• Sign in / Join

University Honors Alfred Kinsey, Who Did Sexual Experiments on Hundreds of Children

Kinsey: adult-child sex is harmless, even beneficial, and described child “orgasm” as “culminating in extreme trembling, collapse, loss of color, and sometimes fainting. …”

By Steven Ertelt

When most people think of bizarre experiments on people that seem right out of the worst horror movie you can imagine, their thoughts usually turn to the gross human rights violations that took place in Nazi Germany as quack doctors experimented on Jews, disabled people, and prisoners of war.

But most people forget about the gruesome techniques of Alfred Kinsey, who has rightly been described as a “sexual psychopath.”

Alfred Kinsey authored the “Kinsey Reports” in 1948 and 1953. These reports were the basis for a sexual revolution that promoted and sanctioned pedophilia. Kinsey’s research was disproportionally based on surveys of prison inmates, sex offenders, and prostitutes.

Even today, most are completely unaware that during his tenure at Indiana University, Kinsey facilitated, with stopwatches and ledgers, the systematic sexual abuse of hundreds, if not thousands, of children and infants – all in the name of science.

Among other things, Kinsey asserted that children are “sexual from birth.” He further concluded, based upon experiments he directed and documented in his  infamous Table 34,  that adult-child sex is harmless, even beneficial, and described child “orgasm” as “culminating in extreme trembling, collapse, loss of color, and sometimes fainting. …”

Many children suffered “excruciating pain,” during his experiments he observed, “and [would] scream if movement [was] continued.” Some “[would] fight away from the [adult] partner and may make violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive[d] definite pleasure from the situation.”

Follow LifeNews on the Parler social media network  for the latest pro-life news!

Despite his disgusting experiments, for decades, scientific researcher Alfred Kinsey was synonymous with sex–the definitive source for data on Americans’ sexual habits. While Kinsey became a household name in the 1940s and ‘50s, many younger Americans have never heard of him.

He is still applauded today despite the stunning fact that much of Kinsey’s work has been revealed as fraud.

In fact, Indiana University, this past weekend, honored Kinsey  with with the unveiling of a bronze sculpture memorializing what it called “Alfred C. Kinsey’s significant and enduring contributions to Indiana University.”

Kinsey revolutionized the scientific study of sexual behavior and provoked an international conversation about sexuality. He founded The Kinsey Institute, the world’s leading sexuality research institute, in 1947. The life-size bronze is the work of Melanie Cooper Pennington, a lecturer in sculpture in the IU Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. The sculpture’s installation on the Bloomington campus demonstrates the university’s pride in the living legacy of research and academic freedom Kinsey helped to forge and the institute’s ongoing commitment to equity regarding sexual diversity established by Kinsey’s research.

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh condemned the award.

“Kinsey was a degenerate pedophile lunatic who conducted “research” on the orgasms of children and babies. One of the most prolific groomers of the 20th century. No wonder the Left honors him,”  he tweeted.

But one leading pro-life group has said Kinsey isn’t worthy of such an honor because his work has directly led to the modernization of sex ed programs that groom kids and push sex and abortion on them.

“From abortion to homosexuality to pornography, Kinsey’s research has been cited as proof that ‘science’ has done away with societal restraints based on religious beliefs,” Concerned Women for America states. “Kinsey’s conclusions paved the way for condom-based sex education in public (and many private) schools and furthered the agenda of pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).”

“To obtain data about the sexual behavior of children, Dr. Kinsey worked with trained pedophiles who sexually abused hundreds of children (as young as two months) to prove to the world that infants, toddlers, and juveniles could enjoy sex pre-puberty with the help of an adult. Their sexual torture was recorded as pleasure,” it explained.

“Instead of being lionized, Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi doctor Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist,” Robert Knight of Concerned Women of America’s Culture & Family Institute said.

Kinsey is credited with sparking the sexual revolution with his books, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (1948) and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” (1953). CWA says his work laid the foundation for acceptance of abortion.

CWA states, “The core of the Kinsey philosophy is anti-marriage, anti-woman, anti-family and anti-children.”

In her book, “Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences,” Dr. Judith Reisman argued that Kinsey denigrated motherhood.

“The Kinsey team allegedly recorded the sexual conduct of a total of 7,789 women in their sample, but the only births recorded were from single women…and children born from adulterous unions…Kinsey gave no data on normal marital birth, no data on normal mothers,” Reisman wrote.

“Dr. Reisman’s study supports the conclusion that Alfred Kinsey’s research was contrived, ideologically driven and misleading,” Dr. Charles Rice, professor emeritus of law, University of Notre Dame, has said.

“Any judge, legislator or other public official who gives credence to that research is guilty of malpractice and dereliction of duty,” Rice added.

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics . He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

• Read the Latest Posts from Jonas >>>
• Read Jonas’ Archives (2004-2015) >>>

ATTENTION READERS

Related articles more from author.

Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon

Age Old Battle Between Khazarian Mafia and True Christianity Crashing Into Finality

Bibi, a False Messiah

11 comments.

Another pervert/psychopath like Sigmund Fraud!

“When most people think of bizarre experiments on people that seem right out of the worst horror movie you can imagine, their thoughts usually turn to the gross human rights violations that took place in Nazi Germany as quack doctors experimented on Jews, disabled people, and prisoners of war.”

As for the lies with which we’ve been repeatedly told re- Dr Mengele, including his infamous “experiments”, see realhistorychan. com/the-myth-of-dr-mengele.html

Dr. Mengele, as one of the lead physicians in a camp afflicted from time to time with outbreaks of typhus, worked tirelessly to save lives – not take them. BTW, the Zyklon B “gas” was a pesticide used to kill lice, not people! Furthermore, under the jurisdiction of Mengele, and other camp doctors, an estimated 3000 Jewish babies were born and cared for at Auschwitz. See “The Auschwitz Baby Boom”: realhistorychan. com/auschwitz-baby-boom.html

It is a very interesting phenomenon that so many intelligent and otherwise well-informed people who are aware of most of the lies we’ve been told all our lives, who know that “the victors write the history books,” are very reluctant to believe we’ve been lied to about National Socialist Germany and hold fast to the lie that the Allies were the “Good Guys” in WWII. They also believe what “Auschwitz survivors” say, even though many lies by them have been exposed even by mainstream sources.

Why so many lies? For one thing, the state of Israel needed to be created (1948), and then supported (1948-2022). Why such widespread belief in the lies? Mainly fear and cowardice. There’s a social price to pay, and sometimes more, for going against this lie, much more so than other lies. I’ll leave it at that, but put your thinking cap on and try to connect some dots. And see Dr E Michael Jones’s recent interviews on the subject.

How to reach us

You can share your ideas and concerns about Indiana University with President Whitten as she works to build upon the university’s long-standing traditions of excellence.

Send a message to President Whitten at iupresATiuDOTedu, or contact the President’s Office.

Roger that.

SurThunder230 :La “izquierda” (comunista) lo promueve, lo establece, lo legaliza. La “derecha” ( muchos de ellos), lo aprovechan. El problema es la “legalización” , aceptación, de esas prácticas satanicas. ElTalmud, lo permite, y lo consiente. ( por éso esa tribu admite su practica, normalmente ). — no hay mensaje “subliminal” en esto…. —

Send a message to President Whitten at [email protected] , or contact the President’s Office.

No wonder the elites love this guy. He’s one of them. A perverted pedophile POS. Probably a Satanist as well.

The subliminal message of this article is apparent. Child molestation is not a left/right, religious/atheist black and white crime against humanity. I am not ‘getting into bed’ with any liberal or conservative side on this human horror show of universally despicable behavior. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh condemned the award.

“Kinsey was a degenerate pedophile lunatic who conducted “research” on the orgasms of children and babies. One of the most prolific groomers of the 20th century. No wonder the Left honors him,” he tweeted.

That my friend is propaganda and mind kontrol😞

Isn’t Indiana where prince Charles the pedo spent his first honeymoon ?

Let this criminal and perverted psychopath burn in hell forever! If I had the opportunity, I would have shot him with a heavy machine gun. Creatures like him don’t have the right to live. And besides, because of people like him, such creatures appear. It was very disgusting to read about him.

Comments are closed.

A Child Victim

Esther white:  an alfred kinsey child victim.

Young Esther White

One of the probable victims of Table 34 known as Esther White, is a woman now in her 80s.  Esther believes that it was Kinsey who encouraged her father (a former student of Indiana University who studied alongside Alfred Kinsey) and grandfather to sexually abuse her when she was a little girl and to time her sexual responses with a stopwatch. Esther testifies that she was personally interviewed by Kinsey at age nine, and at that time, she saw Kinsey pay her father a large sum of money.

Esther White with her father and younger brother.

The Kinsey Institute dismisses Esther’s claims with this statement on their website, “Kinsey did not ask people to fill out questionnaires or forms. There was no experimentation, and no one was ‘recruited’ to ‘participate,’ and certainly not to molest anyone.” It is surprising that not only did Kinsey collect data from child abusers, but he accepted them as scientifically valid, or at least he presented it to the world as if it were valid scientific research showing children are sexual from birth.

Esther has written a letter to the United Nations asking them to reject the Kinsey Institute and put a stop to the harmful practices and ideologies that led to her own sexual abuse as a child.

Below is  Esther’s letter to the United Nations dated April 12, 2014:

To the United Nations Accreditation Committee: I was outraged when I saw the Internet video of the Kinsey Institute testifying before the United Nations accreditation committee for NGO status. I was infuriated that there was no opposition to their application. Were all of those on the Committee ignorant of the Kinsey Institute's history and the founder, Alfred Kinsey, with his famous "orgasm charts" documenting the molesting of children with a stop-watch? I am one of those children! Alfred Kinsey founded the Kinsey Institute on the campus of Indiana University when he wrote his first book, "Sexuality of the Human Male" that was pre-published in 1947. I still remember that forest green edition that was disguised to look like the Holy Bible. My father was proud to be one of the so-called researchers for this book while he was using me as his sex slave to do the so-called research. I personally witnessed Alfred Kinsey hand my grandfather and my father a joint check for just $6,000.00, for his several years of so-called research for the Kinsey books. Alfred Kinsey also wrote "The Sexuality of the Human Female" (1953). The first book was recently re-published for the Kinsey Institute to commemorate their 60 years in the illicit sexuality business. The profits still go to finance the Kinsey Institute today. The childhood sexual incest committed against me, that Kinsey hired my father to do, severely affected me and later also my husband and has caused us both great pain during our marriage. When I was older my father had a massive stroke that took away his speech and paralyzed the right side of his body. It was really hard for me to be my father’s 24/7 caregiver for two years. Bathing the man that committed incest against me for money, paid by Alfred Kinsey himself, was really tough on me emotionally. By God's grace and with a loving husband, I have survived. It took a long time. I have found the way to forgive my father but I have not forgiven Alfred Kinsey. In my ten-minute personal interview with Alfred Kinsey himself when I was a child in about 1944, I was forced to shake hands with the devil himself. He is dead now and God has judged him already. The Kinsey Institute still promotes the idea that "children are sexual from birth." That's a lie from the pit of hell. Children are too young to even give consent to irresponsible sex with anyone! My uncle, who was also one of Kinsey's incest so-called researchers, molested his stepdaughter when she was five years old, and it caused her terrible trauma throughout her life. My uncle and his wife were personal friends with Alfred Kinsey and his wife when they lived in Bloomington and called Kinsey a “Queer Duck.” How can this organization be accredited to the United Nations, an organization that claims to protect children? The Kinsey Institute testified that they promote "responsible sexual behavior." Any organization that agrees with the promotion of sexual promiscuity to children is definitely NOT responsible! All this sexual abuse, especially those children who were molested for hire by Kinsey, has devastated their "sexual health." Of course the Kinsey Institute never did any “research" on the consequences of what they promoted. I know these are shocking words to comprehend. This is only my family story. What a terrible family scandal! For all the hundreds of other children who were tortured as I was, we need to stop the Kinsey Institute from spreading this sex “research.”  I'm sure some of them committed suicide years ago. Most of them are dead now. I am now in my 80s. Please educate your UN Committee on what is really going on at the Kinsey Institute today. The acute, unconcerned silence on the video clip as the Kinsey Institute gave their testimony was devastating to me. I guess you just didn't have any information. I pray that you will do the right thing and eventually come to your own conclusion that the Kinsey Institute should not be able to use the United Nations as a way to advance their radical sex research. This has been very sincerely written, by a so-called “Kinsey Institute Research Survivor”. Sincerely, EsterWhite This is documented by Esther White, my assumed name to protect my identity.

Be a voice for the other Kinsey child victims and help STOP the spread of Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute's dangerous sexual ideologies!

Stop the Kinsey Institute!  Act Now!

1. sign the letter, 2. recruit others, get free news updates, join our free family newswire email service to receive weekly news from around the world on this and other issues impacting children and families..

Alfred Kinsey

Biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was based on research he and his colleagues conducted at the Institute for Sex Research.

(1894-1956)

Alfred Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1938, he launched a sex studies program. In 1947, he incorporated under the name, the Institute for Sex Research, Inc. In 1948, Kinsey published his first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , followed by a sequel in 1953. On August 25, 1956, Kinsey died in Bloomington, Indiana, from complications caused by congestive heart failure.

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, to engineering professor Alfred Seguine Kinsey and his wife, Sarah (Charles) Kinsey, in the tenement town of Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the oldest of three children in a devout Methodist family. Alfred Kinsey's mother described her firstborn son as, "shy and soft spoken."

In 1912, Kinsey graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. He worked to fund his undergraduate education while attending Bowdoin College, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in biology and psychology in 1916. In 1920, Kinsey received a doctorate degree in biology from Harvard University. He met his future wife, Clara McMillan, at a zoology department picnic that same year.

Shortly after earning his doctorate at Harvard, Kinsey accepted a job as a professor in the zoology department at Indiana University in Bloomington. A specialist in botany and insects, through his research, Kinsey established himself as the No. 1 authority on the gall wasp. From 1926 to 1929, he took field trips all over the country with his students, collecting tens of thousands of gall wasp specimens along the way. He focused intently on categorizing and numbering his specimens, but longed to take his scientific investigation a step further. Turning his focus to questions of evolution and natural selection, in 1930—a year after he was promoted to full professor—Kinsey published his findings in a paper called The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of the Species.

Sexual Behavior Studies

In the 1930s, Kinsey agreed to teach a marriage course. When his students starting asking him questions about sex, Kinsey realized there was very little scientific data on the matter. He decided to apply the principles of scientific research toward the topic of sexual behavior. In 1938, he launched a sex studies program. In the early 1940s, he procured funding from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation's Medical Division. In 1947, Kinsey and his research assistants became incorporated under the name the Institute for Sex Research, Inc.

In 1948, Kinsey published his first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male . He based the book on more than 10,000 interviews—during which men and women of all ages provided candid answers to personal questions about their sexual feelings and behaviors. The book quickly sold close to 500,000 copies. Kinsey used the royalties from the sales of his book to do more research. He came out with a sequel called Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953, but it didn't sell as well as his first book.

Because Kinsey's research dealt openly with human sexuality during a time when the topic was taboo, his work was the subject of much controversy. During the course of his study, Kinsey was subjected to anti-Communist investigations, loss of funding and a lawsuit by U.S. Customs over a collection of erotic photos. Nevertheless, Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research still survives today, under the new title the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.

During the last six months of Kinsey's life, his health steadily declined as he gradually developed congestive heart failure. On August 25, 1956, Kinsey died at Bloomington Hospital in Bloomington, Indiana. A few days earlier, he had bruised his leg after tripping in his garden, and the bruise had developed into a deadly embolism. Kinsey was 62 years old at the time of his passing. He was survived by his wife, Clara, and their three children.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Alfred Kinsey
• Birth Year: 1894
• Birth date: June 23, 1894
• Birth State: New Jersey
• Birth City: Hoboken
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was based on research he and his colleagues conducted at the Institute for Sex Research.
• Science and Medicine
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• Bowdoin College
• Harvard University
• Occupations
• Anthropologist
• Death Year: 1956
• Death date: August 25, 1956
• Death State: Indiana
• Death City: Bloomington
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

• We are recorders and reporters of the facts—not judges of the behavior we describe.
• The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.

Famous Scientists

Did This Newly Found Compass Belong to Copernicus?

Stephen Hawking

Chien-Shiung Wu

The Solar Eclipse That Made Albert Einstein a Star

Jane Goodall

Marie Curie

Howard Carter, King Tut's Tomb, and a Deadly Curse

Benjamin Banneker

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Daniel Hale Williams

Patricia Bath

Mae Jemison

• Resources Home
• What You Need to Know
• Catholic Dictionary
• Church Fathers
• Most Collection
• Free eBooks

Kinsey's Secret: The Phony Science of the Sexual Revolution

by Sue Ellin Browder

Description

Through his landmark research, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey fired the opening shots of the sexual revolution. There are now growing doubts about the integrity of his work. In this article Sue Ellin Browder, an award-winning investigative journalist, brings to light some of the main criticisms of Kinsey's scientifically-flawed version of the truth regarding human sexuality.

Larger Work

Publisher & date.

Morley Publishing Group, Inc., May 2004

Free eBook:

It's now more than 50 years since the revolution began. Sexual "liberation" has been endlessly ballyhooed by the national media, promoted in the movies, embraced by Playboy guys and Cosmo girls as a freedom more delicious than Eden's apple. No American under 40 can honestly remember a time when sex on TV was taboo, when "living together" meant married, when "gay" meant happy, and when almost every child lived with both parents. If truth be told, the revolution has been a disaster. Before the push to loosen America's sexual mores really got under way in the 1950s, the only widely reported sexually transmitted diseases in the United States were gonorrhea and syphilis. Today we have more than two dozen varieties, from pelvic inflammatory disease (which renders more than 100,000 American women infertile each year) to AIDS (which presently infects 42 million people worldwide and has already killed another 23 million). According to a report by scientists at the National Cancer Institute, a woman who has three or more sex partners in her lifetime increases her risk of cervical cancer by as much as 1,500 percent. In another finding that runs contrary to all that the sex researchers preached, a survey at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center showed that married men and women, on average, are sexually happier than unwed couples merely living together. And even if live-in couples do marry, they're 40 to 85 percent more likely to divorce than those who go straight to the altar. So what happened? Was science simply wrong? Well, not exactly — the truth is more complicated than that. And much more interesting. Con Man Alfred C. Kinsey had a secret. The Indiana University zoologist and "father of the sexual revolution" almost single-handedly redefined the sexual mores of everyday Americans. The problem was, he had to lie to do it. The weight of this point must not be underestimated. The science that launched the sexual revolution has been used for the past 50 years to sway court decisions, pass legislation, introduce sex education into our schools, and even push for a redefinition of marriage. Kinseyism was the very foundation of this effort. If his science was flawed — or worse yet, an outright deception — then our culture's attitudes about sex are not just wrong morally but scientifically as well. Let's consider the facts. When Kinsey and his coworkers published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953, they turned middle-class values upside down. Many traditionally forbidden sexual practices, Kinsey and his colleagues proclaimed, were surprisingly commonplace; 85 percent of men and 48 percent of women said they'd had premarital sex, and 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women had been unfaithful after marriage. Incredibly, 71 percent of women claimed their affair hadn't hurt their marriage, and a few even said it had helped. What's more, 69 percent of men had been with prostitutes, 10 percent had been homosexual for at least three years, and 17 percent of farm boys had experienced sex with animals. Implicit in Kinsey's report was the notion that these behaviors were biologically "normal" and hurt no one. Therefore, people should act on their impulses with no inhibition or guilt. The 1948 report on men came out to rave reviews and sold an astonishing 200,000 copies in two months. Kinsey's name was everywhere from the titles of pop songs ("Ooh, Dr. Kinsey") to the pages of Life , Time , Newsweek , and the New Yorker . Kinsey was "presenting facts," Look magazine proclaimed. He was "revealing not what should be but what is." Dubbed "Dr. Sex" and applauded for his personal courage, the researcher was compared to Darwin, Galileo, and Freud. But beneath the popular approbation, many astute scientists were warning that Kinsey's research was gravely flawed. The list of critics, Kinsey biographer James H. Jones observes, "read like a Who's Who of American intellectual life." They included anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman; Karl Menninger, M.D. (founder of the famed Menninger Institute); psychiatrists Eric Fromm and Lawrence Kubie; cultural critic Lionel Trilling of Columbia University, and countless others. By the time Kinsey's volume about women was published, many journalists had abandoned the admiring throngs and joined the critics. Magazine articles appeared with titles like "Is the Kinsey Report a Hoax?" and "Love Is Not a Statistic." Time magazine ran a series of stories exposing Kinsey's dubious science (one was titled "Sex or Snake Oil?"). That's not, of course, to say that the Kinsey reports contain no truth at all. Sexuality is certainly a subject worthy of scientific study. And many people do pay lip service to sexual purity while secretly behaving altogether differently in their private lives. Nevertheless, Kinsey's version of the truth was so grossly oversimplified, exaggerated, and mixed with falsehoods, it's difficult to sort fact from fiction. Distinguished British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer put it well when he called the reports propaganda masquerading as science. Indeed, the flaws in Kinsey's work stirred up such controversy that the Rockefeller Foundation, which had backed the original research, withdrew its funding of $100,000 a year. A year after the book on female sexuality came out, Kinsey himself complained that almost no scientist outside of a few of his best friends continued to defend him. So, what were the issues the world's best scientists had with Kinsey's work? The criticism can be condensed into three devastating points. Problem #1: Humans as Animals Before he began studying human sexuality, Kinsey was the world's leading expert on the gall wasp. Trained as a zoologist, he saw sex purely as a physiological "animal" response. Throughout his books, he continually refers to the "human animal." In fact, in Kinsey's opinion, there was no moral difference between one sexual outlet and any other. In our secular world of moral relativism, Kinsey was a radical sexual relativist. As even the libertarian anthropologist Margaret Mead accurately observed, in Kinsey's view there was no moral difference between a man having sex with a woman or a sheep. In his volume about women, Kinsey likened the human orgasm to sneezing. Noting that this ludicrous description left out the obvious psychological aspects of human sexuality, Brooklyn College anthropologist George Simpson observed, "This is truly a monkey-theory of orgasm." Human beings, of course, differ from animals in two very important ways: We can think rationally, and we have free will. But in Kinsey's worldview, humans differed from animals only when it came to procreation. Animals have sex only to procreate. On the other hand, human procreation got little notice from Kinsey. In his 842-page volume on female sexuality, motherhood wasn't mentioned once. Problem #2: Skewed Samples Kinsey often presented his statistics as if they applied to average moms, dads, sisters, and brothers. In doing so, he claimed 95 percent of American men had violated sex-crime laws that could land them in jail. Thus Americans were told they had to change their sex-offender laws to "fit the facts." But, in reality, Kinsey's reports never applied to average people in the general population. In fact, many of the men Kinsey surveyed were actually prison inmates. Wardell B. Pomeroy, Kinsey co-author and an eyewitness to the research, wrote that by 1946 the team had taken sexual histories from about 1,400 imprisoned sex offenders. Kinsey never revealed how many of these criminals were included in his total sample of "about 5,300" white males. But he did admit including "several hundred" male prostitutes. Additionally, at least 317 of Kinsey's male subjects were not even adults, but sexually abused children. Piling error on top of error, about 75 percent of Kinsey's adult male subjects volunteered to give their sexual histories. As Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman observed, volunteers for sex studies are two to four times more sexually active than non-volunteers. Kinsey's work didn't improve in his volume on women. In fact, he interviewed so few average women that he actually had to redefine "married" to include any woman who had lived with a man for more than a year. This change added prostitutes to his sample of "married" women. In the December 11, 1949, New York Times , W. Allen Wallis, then chairman of the University of Chicago's committee on statistics, dismissed "the entire method of collecting and presenting the statistics which underlie Dr. Kinsey's conclusions:' Wallis noted, "There are six major aspects of any statistical research, and Kinsey fails on four." In short, Kinsey's team researched the most exotic sexual behavior in America — taking hundreds if not thousands of case histories from sexual deviants — and then passed off the behavior as sexually "normal," "natural;" and "average" (and hence socially and morally acceptable). Problem #3: Faulty Statistics Given all this, it's hardly surprising that Kinsey's statistics were so seriously flawed that no reputable scientific survey has ever been able to duplicate them. Kinsey claimed, for instance, that 10 percent of men between the ages of 16 and 55 were homosexual. Yet in one of the most thorough nationwide surveys on male sexual behavior ever conducted, scientists at Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers in Seattle found that men who considered themselves exclusively homosexual accounted for only 1 percent of the population. In 1993, Time magazine reported, "Recent surveys from France, Britain, Canada, Norway and Denmark all point to numbers lower than 10 percent and tend to come out in the 1 to 4 percent range." The incidence of homosexuality among adults is actually "between 1 and 3 percent;" says University of Delaware sociology and criminal justice professor Joel Best, author of Damned Lies and Statistics . Best observes, however, that gay and lesbian activists prefer to use Kinsey's long-discredited one-in-ten figure "because it suggests that homosexuals are a substantial minority group, roughly equal in number to African Americans — too large to be ignored." Not surprisingly, Kinsey's numbers showing marital infidelity to be harmless also never held up. In one Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy study of infidelity, 85 percent of marriages were damaged as a result, and 34 percent ended in divorce. Even spouses who stayed together usually described their marriages afterwards as unhappy. Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman, M.D., estimates that among couples who have been married for a long time and then divorce, "over 90 percent of the divorces involve infidelities." Speaking at a 1955 conference sponsored by Planned Parenthood, Kinsey pulled another statistical bombshell out of his hat. He claimed that of all pregnant women, roughly 95 percent of singles and 25 percent of those who were married secretly aborted their babies. A whopping 87 percent of these abortions, he claimed, were performed by bona fide doctors. Thus he gave scientific authority to the notion that abortion was already a common medical procedure — and should thus be legal. Living With the Wreckage When Reader's Digest asked popular sex therapist Ruth Westheimer what she thought of Kinsey's misinformation, she reportedly replied, "I don't care much about what is correct and is not correct. Without him, I wouldn't be Dr. Ruth." But Kinsey's deceptions do matter today, because we're still living with the Kinsey model of sexuality. It permeates our entire culture. As Best observes, bad statistics are significant for many reasons: "They can be used to stir up public outrage or fear, they can distort our understanding of our world, and they can lead us to make poor policy choices." In a 1951 Journal of Social Psychology study, psychology students at the University of California, Los Angeles, were divided into three groups: Some students took an intensive nine-week course on Kinsey's findings, while the other two groups received no formal Kinsey instruction. Afterward, the students took a quiz testing their attitudes about sex. Compared with those who received no Kinsey training, those steeped in Kinseyism were seven times as likely to view premarital sex more favorably than they did before and twice as likely to look more favorably on adultery. After Kinsey, the percentage of students open to a homosexual experience soared from 0 to 15 percent. Students taught Kinseyism were also less likely to let religion influence their sexual behavior and less apt to follow sexual rules taught by their parents. Influencing Court Decisions Kinsey's pseudoscience arguably did the most damage through our court systems. That's where attorneys used the researcher's "facts" to repeal or weaken laws against abortion, pornography, obscenity, divorce, adultery, and sodomy. In the May 1950 issue of Scientific Monthly , New York City attorney Morris Ernst (who represented Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Planned Parenthood) outlined his ambitious legal plan for Kinsey's findings. "We must remember that there are two parts to law," Ernst said. One was "the finding of the facts" (Kinsey's job); the other was applying those findings in court (Ernst's job). Noting that the law needed more tools "to aid in its search for the truth," the attorney argued for "new rules," under which "facts" like Kinsey's would be introduced into court cases in the same way judges allowed other scientific tools, such as fingerprints, lie-detector results, and blood tests. The inexhaustible Ernst also urged the courts to revise laws concerning the institution of marriage. The legal fallout from Kinsey's work continues. The U.S. Supreme Court's historic decision last year striking down sodomy laws was the offshoot of a long string of court cases won largely on the basis of Kinsey's research. And 50 years of precedents set by Kinsey's "false 10 percent" are now being used in states like Massachusetts to redefine marriage. A Sorry Legacy Inspired by the first Kinsey report, Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953. A decade later, Helen Gurley Brown turned Cosmopolitan into a sex magazine for women. Even today magazines like Self and Glamour continue to quote Kinsey with respect, never acknowledging the grave errors riddling his research. An estimated 30,000 Web sites offer pornography, and U.S. producers churn out 600 hard-core adult videos each month. Although reliable figures are difficult to come by, the U.S. sex industry pulls in an estimated $2.5 billion to $10 billion a year. Clearly, we're living Kinsey's legacy. In his book The End of Sex , an obituary of the sexual revolution, Esquire contributor George Leonard accurately observed that "wherever we have split 'sex' from love, creation, and the rest of life . . . we have trivialized and depersonalized the act of love itself." Treasuring others solely for their sexuality strips them of their humanity. When Kinsey tore the mystery of love from human sexuality, he abandoned us all to a sexually broken world. It's time to heal. The Dark Side of Alfred Kinsey Was Alfred Kinsey a dedicated truth-seeker who was simply side-tracked by bad science? Or did he have a more disturbing side? These questions — long debated among critics and supporters — are coming to light once again with a new film about Kinsey's life. Tentatively titled Kinsey and starring Liam Neeson, the movie will reportedly lionize the controversial figure. Even before its scheduled fall release, the film is provoking heated debate, with critics charging that it's merely Hollywood's attempt to whitewash the reputation of a man who was a practicing homosexual, sadomasochist, and voyeur who advocated — and possibly even directed — the sexual abuse of children. Leading this charge is internationally known pornography researcher Judith Reisman, Ph.D. She has been studying Kinsey's work and its effects on our culture for 25 years. (Her initial research on pornography was financed by an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of juvenile justice and Delinquency Prevention.) In an open letter to Neeson, Reisman urged the actor to reconsider his decision to play Kinsey. Referring to the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi Auschwitz concentration camp doctor, Reisman told Neeson that playing Kinsey would put him in a "hideously inaccurate role, much like playing the monster Mengele as a mere controversial figure." Neeson chose to remain with the project. According to Reisman, Kinsey trained pedophile observers who sexually abused more than 300 minors to prove that children "enjoy" sex with adults. "Some of the victims were only two months old, and some were subjected to more than 24 hours of nonstop sexual atrocities," Reisman says. "One Kinsey contributor was a World War II Nazi officer. His young victims had to choose between rape and the gas chamber." As extravagant as Reisman's claims may seem, they're not without warrant. In Kinsey's 1948 book, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male , he recounts the experiments of nine pedophiles he employed for his research. "Some of these adults," Kinsey wrote, "are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which have been put at our disposal." He includes a chart that indicates that these "trained" pedophiles were inducing orgasms in babies as young as five months of age. One four-year-old is reported to have had 26 orgasms in 24 hours. And just how were children and infants judged to be having orgasms? For that, Kinsey looked for several behaviors: violent convulsions, groaning, sobbing, violent cries, "an abundance of tears," extreme trembling, fainting, excruciating pain, and screaming. In other words, what any normal adult would view as a child's severe reactions to trauma, Kinsey saw as children enjoying themselves. When Reisman first saw these data, she was horrified. Where, after all, did this information come from? Who's waking up that little kid and molesting him for 24 hours around the clock? What parents would permit their children to be part of such a brutal experiment? And why did these nauseating crimes go unaddressed in the countless reports of Kinsey's work? She got some answers in December 1990 while on the Phil Donahue show. One of the other guests, Clarence Tripp, a photographer who knew Kinsey, said this information was gathered by pedophiles using stop watches to record the children's responses. "So it was very scientific," Tripp noted. (Reisman's child-abuse charges against Kinsey were also validated by several Kinsey-research eyewitnesses interviewed in the 1998 British television documentary, Secret Histories: Kinsey's Paedophiles .) On the other hand, historian James H. Jones, the Pulitzer-Prize finalist who spent 25 years researching Kinsey's biography, says, "There is just no evidence of which I am aware" that Kinsey trained and directed pedophiles to collect data. He believes the pedophile charges against Kinsey are "not credible" and tends to believe the Kinsey Institute's version of the story. In 1995, the institute's director went public with his belief that Kinsey had based much of these data on the diaries of one anonymous pedophile who had kept detailed records of his sexual abuse of 317 children from 1917 to 1948. Whether Kinsey personally directed the abuse of children may never be known. Nevertheless, any film based entirely on Kinsey's public image will be factually wrong. In public, Kinsey presented himself as a stable married man, a disinterested scientist just reporting "the facts." But, privately, Jones's research revealed Kinsey to be a homosexual, voyeur, and sadomasochist who unquestionably plunged "into the abyss with regard to incest and child molestation." Kinsey's own sadomasochism led him to bizarre extremes. After the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew his funding, Jones reports, Kinsey went to a basement, tied one end of a rope to an exposed ceiling pipe and the other end around his scrotum, then stood on a chair and jumped off. As for his homosexuality, were Kinsey and his coauthor, Wardell Pomeroy, lovers? "They were sex partners, but I wouldn't call them lovers," Jones says. "They weren't that close." S E B Sue Ellin Browder is an award-winning investigative journalist and coauthor, with her husband, Walter, of 101 Secrets a Good Dad Knows . © 2004 Morley Publishing Group, Inc.

This item 6036 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org