- It's been more than 10 years now since I was first introduced
to the issue of sex trafficking. As time has passed, I've become increasingly
convinced that one of the primary reasons that sex trafficking is such
a flourishing "enterprise" -- particularly in the U.S. -- is
in no small part due to the pornography consuming culture in which we live.
You cannot feed boys and men a continual diet of dehumanizing sexual images
and then expect them to not look on the women/children around them, and
indeed society at-large, without a pornified gaze.
-
- This is a diet that never satisfies. It leads to a need
for more and more. That "more" can and does extend beyond the
pages of magazines and television/computer screens to impact the lives
of countless persons who are used/abused to fill these appetites in more
material/"hands on" ways -- e.g. incest, sexual assault, and
those draw in and trafficked into the commercial sex trade.
-
- Moreover, the messages relayed in both the pornography
of the past and even more so the pornography of today, teach males that
women enjoy pain, humiliation, and divorce intimacy and love from the human
sexual exchange. Pornography's consistent message is that an individual
male's physical pleasure is all that matters, and if in getting that pleasure
someone else is hurt, it's doesn't really matter, since according to pornographers
women enjoy pain and degradation.
-
- Certainly one of the people most responsible for shaping
our sexual culture is Alfred Kinsey. The more I learn about this man, the
more depraved I believe he was, and the more I see our degrading and amoral
(yes, I believe that all aspects of human relations involve questions of
morality) sexual culture as his enduring legacy. The article below
explains the ludicrous methodology on which Kinsey's so-called research
was based, as well as how Kinsey's "findings" have been systematically
used to erode our institutions and laws.
-
- Still, this article omits some of the most horrifying
aspects of Kinsey's research. Kinsey's book Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male contains a chapter on "early sexual growth and activity"
in which the orgasms of children, including infants, are described in detail.
This chapter is based largely on the reminiscences of a man who claimed
to have engaged in sexual relations with 600 preadolescent boys and 200
preadolescent girls.
-
- Friends, that's the tip of the iceberg. For more on this
aspect of Kinsey's work and its consequences I recommend the documentary
film The Kinsey Syndrome (available at <http://www.kinseysyndrome.com>http://www.kinseysyndrome.com/).
Having watched this film I can tell you it's a hard thing to sit through
given the darkness of the topic, but it is very eye opening and I believe
will help anyone working in the fields of anti-sex trafficking, commercial
sexual exploitation, and child sexual abuse gain a better understanding
of the forces behind the monster we wrestle with. The film is based largely
on the analysis and work of Dr. Judith Reisman, an incredible and relentless
woman who has spent much of her life investigating Kinsey and his work
and championing the sexual safety of America's children. She has endured
a lot as a consequence. We all owe her a debt of gratitude.
-
- Abolition!
- Lisa
- http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option
- =com_content&task=view&id=6535&Itemid=48
-
- Kinsey's Secret: The Phony Science of the Sexual Revolution
- by Sue Ellin Browder
-
- July 23, 2009
-
- 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.
-
- 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 troublesome
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 deeply 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 2003 decision 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.
-
-
-
- Sue Ellin Browder is an award-winning investigative journalist
and co-author, with her husband, Walter, of 101 Secrets a Good Dad Knows.
This article originally appeared in the May 2004 issue of Crisis Magazine.
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