This article is part two in a Live Action News series about Alfred Kinsey and the impact his claims have had on our culture. Read Part One here.
WARNING: Content may not be appropriate for younger readers.
As mentioned in the first part of this series, there are many legitimate criticisms to be levied against the books of the “Father of the Sexual Revolution” Alfred Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in Male Humans” and “Sexual Behavior in Human Women.” In particular, aspects of Kinsey’s method are discussed – including his sampling methods, his statistical analysis, and his interview technique. Kinsey’s books have also been criticized for invoking the authority of science (which, as we shall see, is not really science) to promote a radical, revolutionary sexual agenda.
Kinsey himself said: “[R]remember that even the authorities sometimes publish things that are not so … [W]Hat experts believe to be true may be found false on further investigation.”[1] Although he almost certainly did not intend these words to apply to himself or his work, an examination of the methodology behind his books shows that they do, in fact, do.
SKEWED SAMPLING
Perhaps the most obvious methodological problem with Kinsey’s research lies within the sample population itself. Kinsey biographer James H. Jones wrote that, because Kinsey’s sample was “far from random,” its reliability was “problematic.”[2]
Kinsey’s sample was not only non-random – it was deliberately skewed to favor unusual individuals. Jones said Kinsey “went to great lengths” to obtain histories from people with non-traditional sexual histories and practices, which “undermines the[d] representative of the quality of his sample.”[3]
And who are these extraordinary individuals? Jones writes that Kinsey interviewed a large number of prisoners, including and especially sex offenders. He also interviewed many students, and “too many [people] he knew early on that he was gay.”[4]
Kinsey’s co-author Paul Gebhard says that, in their prison-based interviews, the Kinsey team “had no sampling plan — we just looked for sex offenders, and, after a while, avoided the more common types of offense (eg ) and directed our efforts toward the rarer types.”[5]
In other words, Kinsey sought out sexual deviants and derived his research primarily from them.
Although these individuals were clearly far from “normal,” Kinsey used the data obtained from them to make generalizations about the American population as a whole, effectively representing it as more sexually promiscuous than it actually is.[6]
Another problem with Kinsey’s sampling method is that he relied on volunteers. Only a certain type of individual is willing to be interviewed about his or her sex life — a problem Kinsey was aware of.[7] Renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow – architect of Hierarchy of Needs theory – conducted research on what he called “volunteer-error,” and stated that “any study where data is obtained from volunteers will… show falsely high percentages of non-virginity, masturbation, promiscuity, homosexuality, etc. .”[8]
In a paper co-authored by James M. Sakoda, Maslow concluded that people “with histories of unconventional sexual behavior will volunteer for [Kinsey’s] sex studies, while those with a history usually do not participate.[9]
Shortly after the “man” volume, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer said that, because Kinsey relied on volunteers in college lectures and “on personal introductions from interested individuals … his population was completely skewed” and “inaccurate according to statistics[.]”[10]
Noted statistician John W. Tukey said that there is doubt “whether useful and meaningful generalizations about the population as a whole can really be deduced from the type of samples used by Dr. Kinsey.”[11]
CLEAR STATISTICS
Neither Kinsey nor any of his co-authors were statisticians, and it showed.
Not only was Kinsey “uncritical and sometimes careless with the data he collected,” according to Jones, but his reporting of that data often did not add up.[12]
For example, the data on the so-called “Adult Partners” of pre-adolescent girls presented in a table at the bottom of page 118 of his “woman” the volume increases to 107%.[13] Reported sample sizes are often inconsistent across volumes; for example, in assigning “man” volume, Kinsey credits “twelve thousand people who contributed to this data,” while a map on page 5 suggests a sample size of more than 21,000.[14]
Jones wrote:
By the 1950s, half a dozen scholarly reviews focused on the statistical and methodological aspects of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and mostly critical. … [A] consensus builds that [Kinsey’s] the work is badly flawed from a statistical point of view.[15]
And the famous statistician W. Allen Wallis concluded: “The deficiencies in the statistics make it so impossible to say that the book is of great value.[.]”[16]
INTERVIEW ISSUES
Kinsey relied on in-person interviews to gather data, which was problematic for several reasons.
John Romano, then a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, said that people resist revealing the truth about their sexual histories as a result of “cultural forces,” and as such, may result the “severe distortion”. He added: “The emotional blind spots in the interviewer are [also] often a source of distortion,” concluding, “I am afraid my impression has led me to believe that [Kinsey’s] learning consists of accurately recording inaccurate data.[17]
Jones revealed that Kinsey put the “burden of denial” on interviewees, asking leading questions: “For example, instead of asking people if they had ever masturbated, he would ask how old they were when they started masturbating.”[18] Kinsey also relied on his own subjective instincts to determine whether people were honest – all filtered through his personal, far-from-impartial lens.[19]
Furthermore, Kinsey’s co-author Paul Gebhard confirmed that the interviews were often forced.[20] Along the same lines, two nurses interviewed by Kinsey charged that “he could provoke any answer he might want.”[21]
AN ALARMING AGENDA
It appears that Kinsey was actually looking for some kind of so-called ‘scientific data’ that would absolve him of his guilt about his own unusual sexuality by ‘proving’ that it was ‘normal.’ Kinsey had “a strong need for self-justification,” according to biographer Jones.[22] But it is flawed to assert that numbers make behavior normal and/or that behaviors are moral simply by their existence.
As Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” said: “No matter how many murderers there are, killing will never be normal.”[23]
Similarly, in its analysis of “Sexual Behavior in Human Women,” Science magazine says, “[I]It often seems to end in propaganda for some sociological view: that what is normal in sexual behavior must be right[.]”[24]
And Time magazine said, “Kinsey’s work expresses and reinforces an attitude that can be dangerous: the idea that there is morality in numbers.”[25]
MANIPULATION OF THE MEDIA
Despite all these flaws, Kinsey’s “discoveries” were parroted and promoted by an overeager press where Kinsey’s articles were essentially censored to make them conform to his agenda; prior to publication, primary reviews of “Sexual Behavior” The books were submitted to Kinsey for his own approval and revisioncompletely destroying their objectivity.[26]
According to Jones, Kinsey did not restrict his manipulation to members of the mainstream press, but extended it to scholarly authors as well. He was reportedly “done[d] a way to subvert a peer review system designed to operate without input from authors” by getting experts “in various fields” to “volunteer to review the book,” thereby is “plant[ing]… many reviews in academic journals.” In essence, he chose his own biased reviewers.
Eventually, Kinsey’s ‘discoveries’ found their way to an unsuspecting public that naively accepted anything presented as ‘science.’ Even the most startling claims are swallowed whole and diluted by an overconfident and unquestioning culture.
The damage done by this wholesale acceptance of Kinsey’s pseudoscience is most evident in its effects on children, as will be discussed in the next installment of this exclusive Live Action News series.
1 – Alfred C. Kinsey, An Introduction to Biology, JB Lippincott Company, 1926, p. 529.
2 – James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life, WW Norton & Company, New York, 1997, p. 522.
3 – Ibid, p. 349.
4 – Ibid, p. 522.
5 – Paul Gebhard et al, Sex OffendersBantam Books, New York, 1965, pp. 31-3.
6 – Wardell Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, Harper & Row, New York, 1972, p. 293.
7 – Jones, pp. 641, 687.
8 – AH Maslow, “Self Esteem (Dominance-Feeling) and Sexuality in Women,” The Journal of Social Psychology1942, 16:2, pp. 259-294.
9 – AH Maslow and JM Sakoda, “Volunteer-error in the Kinsey study,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology1952, 47(2), pp. 259–262.
10 – Geoffrey Gorer, “A Statistical Study of Sex,” New York Herald Tribune, February 1, 1948, p. 4.
11 – Jones, p. 647.
12 – Ibid, p. 509.
13 – Alfred C. Kinsey et al, Sexual Behavior in Human Women, WB Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1953, p. 118.
14 – Alfred C. Kinsey et al, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, WB Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1948, dedication page, p. 5.
15 – Jones, pp. 635-6.
16 – W. Allen Wallis, “Kinsey Report Statistics,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1949, 44:248, p. 466.
17 – Jones, p. 453.
18 – Ibid, p. 363.
19 – Ibid, pp. 363-4.
20 – Masters et al, Ethical Issues in Sex Therapy, Volume II, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1980, p. 256.
21 – Jones, p. 399.
22 – Ibid, p. 411.
23 – Norman Vincent Peale, “Should We Change Our Gender Standards?: A Reader’s Symposium,” Reader’s Digest, June 1948, p. 4-5.
24 – Bentley Glass, review of Sexual Behavior in Human Women, ScienceApril 30, 1954, pp. 601-2.
25 – “5,940 Women,” Time, August 24, 1953, p. 58.
26 – Jones, pp. 546-7.
27 – Ibid, p. 552.
