http://www.boundless.org/departments/atplay/a0000974.htmlLet's Not Talk About Sex
by Sam Torode
I’m not going to see Kinsey and I doubt any of my friends will, either. The movie is a sugarcoated biography of Alfred Kinsey, founding father of modern sexology. I walked by a poster for it the other day and noticed the promotional tagline: “Let’s Talk about Sex.” I politely declined the invitation.
Why are my friends and I opting out of the Kinsey conversation? Because we know what “Let’s Talk about Sex” really means: the aging veterans of the sexual revolution want to solemnly lecture us, for the umpteenth time, about the evils of “Victorian repression” and the wonders of “liberation.” Yawn.
All around, we see the fruits of the sexual revolution: half of marriages end in divorce; a quarter of the rising generation has been aborted; we’re swimming in sexual imagery and exploitation. Liberation has lost its charm.
So why memorialize Kinsey now? Maybe Hollywood senses that the sexual revolution is in trouble and needs reinforcement. If only people realize how awful life was before Kinsey and company came along, the Hollywood execs reason, they’ll forget about their longings for chivalry and romance and jump on the bandwagon of progress.
The Myth of Repression
What exactly was Kinsey’s contribution to our society? Is it true that nobody talked about sex before he came along?
I keep a stack of magazines from the 1930s on my desk, since I’m hopelessly procrastinating on writing a novel set in that period. Contrary to what you might expect, these magazines are far from silent about sex. A copy of The Home Friend, a publication for housewives, includes this ad for the book Sex Practice in Marriage: “Unless people learn how to make sexual intercourse harmonious and happy, a great deal of trouble usually follows. Many men are apt to blunder and then accuse their wives of ‘frigidity.’ Dr. Evans shows how to overcome this common condition.”
In fact, books on married sexuality were already so common by the late 1920s that E. B. White and James Thurber responded in 1929 with their hilarious parody, Is Sex Necessary? “The country is flooded with books,” they wrote. “To prepare for marriage, young girls no longer assemble a hope chest — they read books on abnormal psychology. If they do finally marry, they find themselves with a large number of sex books on hand, but almost no pretty underwear. Most of them, luckily, never marry at all — just continue to read.”
Kinsey’s Achievement
If Kinsey didn’t start the conversation about sex, as his movie’s slogan would have us believe, what did he do?
Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at the university of Indiana, specializing in the study of insects. But in the late 1930s, his interests shifted and he began collecting data on human sexuality. His great “breakthrough” was to approach his subject as a zoologist, treating human beings like any other animals. Under the banner of scientific objectivity, Kinsey set out to deliver “the facts” of human sexual behavior.
In his famous studies — Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) — Kinsey found that premarital sex, adultery, homosexual sex and other supposed “taboos” were widely practiced. He reported, for example, that 36% of men engage in homosexual acts, and that 50% cheat on their wives. Though he claimed to be a disinterested researcher, Kinsey’s reports had the effect of saying, “Everybody is doing it, and it’s perfectly normal.”
(Kinsey’s work was not limited to number crunching. He also carried on various sexual experiments in his lab, filming things that I don’t care to describe.)
Today, many mainstream sociologists acknowledge that his methods were flawed. Among his main sources of information were convicted sex offenders and pedophiles. Alan Wolfe, in a 1999 Atlantic Monthly article, stated that Kinsey “misrepresented the sexual habits and practices of Americans because [his] interviewees were so unrepresentative.”
If his statistics are wrong, why is Kinsey still celebrated? Because he separated sex from morality in the name of science. His particular findings don’t much matter. It’s more that he gave the authority of “science” to people who opposed the traditional Christian restraints on sexuality.
How successful was Kinsey? Consider the title of that 1930s guide, Sex Practice in Marriage. This book assumed that marriage provides the best context for healthy, fruitful, enjoyable sexual expression. But if it were published today, it would simply be called Sex Practice; and instead of “husbands” and “wives,” it would be about “partners” of interchangeable sex. That’s the difference Kinsey helped to make.
“Values-free” education
Perhaps Kinsey’s greatest influence has been through public school sex education programs. His philosophy became the basis of our nation’s “values-free” approach , which purports to teach “the facts” without drawing moral judgments. Opponents of this approach have argued that it only results in more broken hearts, unwanted babies and STDs. But no, the experts assure us — we just need to teach kids to gear up for sex like warfare, with an arsenal of barriers, shields and chemical weapons. Then all our problems will be solved.
If “values-free” sex education is such a great idea, why stop there? Let’s use this approach in teaching every subject. Imagine an English teacher unwilling to declare any one piece of writing better than any other; or a history teacher unwilling to “judge” Hitler and Stalin.
In the end, all education is about learning what to value. “Values-free” simply substitutes one set of values for another. Gone are the old-fashioned sexual virtues — love, beauty, romance, honor, respect and self-control—and in their place we now have “openness,” “exploration” and “freedom.”
Sex without Love
According to the old moral tradition, human beings are in an entirely different category from animals because we have souls. We are “created in the image of God,” as Genesis put it. (This is not limited to Christianity — orthodox Jews and Muslims would agree.) Our sexuality, too, is raised to a new level of dignity. We are called to express God’s self-giving love through our sexuality, either by forming lifelong, monogamous marriages, or by remaining celibate and dedicating our lives exclusively to God’s kingdom. Sexuality is both love-giving and life-giving. Childbearing is much more than biological reproduction, since the “image of God” is passed on through procreation. And honoring sexuality is a public concern, because the family — which springs from the sexual embrace — is the foundation of society.
That’s the tradition that Kinsey tossed aside. In order to do away with morality, his followers eagerly bought into the idea that human beings are just animals. What could be sillier than expecting animals to behave morally? We are creatures of instinct — our sex urge is no different from our hunger urge.
When sexuality is reduced to the animal level, it ceases to be an expression of love. Anything goes, and the strong are free to exert their will upon the weak. Of course, if Alfred Kinsey had openly mocked the ideal of love, or championed the exploitation of women and children, he wouldn’t be celebrated today. (On second thought, though, remember that pornographer Larry Flynt was given the same sugarcoated movie treatment a few years back.)
Another prophet of scientific naturalism, Francis Crick (best known for co-discovering the structure of DNA) took this philosophy to its logical conclusion. Love, he said, is a fiction. The physical world is all that exists, and there are no higher values. “Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will,” Crick wrote, “are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
A vast assembly of nerve cells? That’s it? That’s what makes heroes sacrifice their lives to save others, husbands to love their wives, mothers to give up everything for their children?
You can have “sexual freedom” and your vast assembly of nerve cells; I’ll take love, morality (which is just love in action) and the God on which they depend. Maybe I’m opting to believe in fairy tales. But what if fairy tales are truer to life than the reductions of science? If I’m wrong, I’ll have “paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve,” in the words of C. S. Lewis. “And yet how could that be?” Lewis asked. “How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?”
Restoring Wonder
My generation has its problems, but I don’t think we’re going to buy into Kinsey — the movie, the man or the myth. We’ve had enough of “sexperts.”
How amazing that a cohort of scientists, doctors and professors can take something as wonderful and mysterious as male-female attraction, and reduce it to something as dull and crude as “satisfying the sex urge.” Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised. These are the same sort of folks who make reading Shakespeare an agonizing exercise in “textual analysis.”
The sexual revolution was all about separating things — sex from marriage, sex from procreation, sex from love. Now our job is to put them back together again, rediscovering the full joy and wonder of our sexuality as expressed in the biblical account of Adam and Eve.
“Let’s Talk about Sex?” Sure. But first, we need to talk about love.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2004 Sam Torode. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.