Kinsey & sexual liberation

The politics of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey was discussed widely not so long ago, when the Hollywood film about Kinsey was released.

I think Kinsey is worth having another shot at, though, in the light of a university thesis I recently happened across online.

The thesis, by Brandy Renee McCann, starts out as a criticism of the book The Body Project, by Joan Brumberg. From what I can gather, the book asserts that girls were better off when they had a “protective umbrella” of guidance from older women, to get them through their early teenage years until they were emotionally and psychologically mature enough to deal with issues of sexuality.

Brandy doesn’t like Brumberg advocating such a “protective umbrella.” Brandy, you see, believes in a permissive philosophy of sexual liberation, in which individuals are “liberated from any ideologies about sex that inhibit pleasure.”

Which is merely to say that Brandy is a radical liberal, who takes seriously the liberal dictum that we should not be impeded in our individual will in choosing who we are and what we do. Obviously, a sexual morality does put limits or restraints on individual behaviour, so a radical liberal will view such moral codes negatively as external, artificial, socially imposed controls from which the individual will should be emancipated.

Brandy, though, realises that most people are not as radical as she is. So she believes that it’s necessary for people like herself to develop a strategy for sexual liberation which “makes sense to even the most conservative members of American society.”

“No matter our particular sexual ideology, we have to start out where people are. Especially for those of us who practise and believe in a permissive sexual ideology, we need to remember that ultimately our goal is one of persuasion. Therefore, we must cloak our liberation in a rhetoric that makes sense to conservative teens and parents, as well as people who think like us.”

Which then raises the question of how a radical liberal might sell sexual permissiveness to a conservative public. Brandy believes she knows the man with the answers: none other than Alfred Kinsey. It is Brandy’s opinion that,

“We cannot hope to make real social progress by operating in the margins of the social or by belittling the concerns of those who do not think like us; instead, as Kinsey’s life and work shows, resisting a constricting moralism means meeting its proponents on their own terms; it means developing a strategy for sexual liberation.”

Why Kinsey? The argument is that Kinsey was publishing his major works at a time (late 1940s and early 50s) when the American public was concerned with the stability of the family. Kinsey’s strategy was to argue that sexual repression was destroying marriages and that increased sexual permissiveness would therefore be a boon for family life.

Furthermore, Kinsey insisted that his researchers be married and that they present an image of respectability to the general public.

At one level, therefore, Brandy is right: Kinsey did try to market his message strategically to the wider public. But it was not a very clever deception. When Brandy goes on to look at Kinsey’s arguments in more detail, you quickly discover just how alienating Kinsey’s views must have been to a conservative of the 1950s.

For instance, when discussing Kinsey’s work Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953), Brandy tells us that “If good sex made for strong marriages, then Kinsey needed to argue that sexual liberation, sex outside marriage, strengthened the marriage bonds.” Kinsey did, in fact, claim of wives who had had affairs that, “sometimes sexual adjustments with the spouse had improved as a result of the female’s extra-marital experience.”

So we start out with a justification for adultery. But it gets much, much worse. We are informed that “Kinsey believed that nothing causes greater harm to a female’s “marital adjustment” than a sexually restricted childhood and adolescence.” Brandy adds at this point that

“While admittedly, for many people, Kinsey’s claims about adult/child sexual contacts are controversial and/or offensive ... his ultimate purpose is to show that any incurred psychological problem is more the fault of the girl’s culture rather than the activity…”

“Kinsey is really arguing for the sexual child; he suggests that perhaps some people are horrified about sexual contacts between adults and children because they are invested in a picture of childhood in which sexuality has no part ... Unlike his contemporaries, Kinsey’s main argument ... is that many pre-adolescent females do, in fact, have a sex life.”

Kinsey, to put it bluntly, is justifying pedophilia. But there’s more. Kinsey writes further on in his book that,

“The classification of sexual behaviour as masturbatory, heterosexual or homosexual is [...] unfortunate if it suggests that three different types of responses are involved, or suggests that only different types of persons seek out or accept each kind of sexual activity.”

Brandy’s own take on this comment is that,

“Kinsey not only wants the public to de-pathologize homosexuality, but also wants to question the supremacy of a heterosexual identity ...

“Kinsey turns psychoanalysis on itself by suggesting that those who advocate any particular stable sexual identity are no doubt suffering from a pathology.”

There is not only a justification of homosexuality here by Kinsey (himself bisexual), there is a refusal to even accept the category of “heterosexual” as an acceptable identity.

If this weren’t enough, there’s still more. Kinsey in 1953 was discussing “sexual experiences with animals”. We are provided with the following Kinsey quote:

“In discussing this matter in our volume on the male ... we pointed out that there is no sufficient explanation, either in biologic or psychologic science, for the confinement of sexual activity to contacts between females and males of the same species.”

Brandy then tells us that,

“Kinsey wonders why more people do not have sexual contacts with other species. As far as females goes he says that frequently girls are ‘kept away from breeding animals by their parents’ ... Kinsey uses the low incidence of female human contacts with animals as an excuse to attack the institutions that keep sexual knowledge away from young women.”

So we have a book in which Kinsey justifies adultery, pedophilia, sex with animals and the abolition of a heterosexual identity.

Given the explicit and radical nature of his work, I don’t find Brandy’s thesis credible. It is difficult to believe that Kinsey succeeded because he argued for sexual liberation strategically to conservatives. It’s unlikely that a conservative public would have accepted arguments for bestiality or pedophilia just because it was claimed that they would benefit family life.

So why did Kinsey succeed? Why was he accepted by Indiana University as a leading researcher? Why did Hollywood make a respectful film about him? Why are there American graduate students who look to him as a role model?

Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that the American establishment was (even in the 1950s) and is liberal, rather than traditionalist conservative in its politics. Kinsey may have pursued the logic of liberal first principles to more radical ends than mainstream liberals, but he was working within the general framework accepted by the establishment.

In other words, if the accepted aim of politics is an individual freedom, understood to mean the liberation of individuals from unchosen, traditional forms of identity or external codes of behaviour, then Kinsey would appear to be a “progressive” working in the right direction, even if he was thought to be taking things too far.

My own view is that we will always have the Kinseys pushing us in a certain direction, with society in general lurching into more radically liberal forms of behaviour and then reeling (part of the way) back again, until there is a stronger non-liberal presence within the political class, to challenge the overall course of development.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 08:05 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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