WARNING: Due to the subject matter, this article contains graphic descriptions of pedophilia and other aberrant sexual behavior.— Ed.
If you’re like most Americans, when hearing the term "sexual revolution," you think of the 1960s. Conjured up are images of hippies in tie-dyed t-shirts, Woodstock, rock ‘n’ roll, and everything else that attended that tumultuous time in our history. Lying in contrast is the image of the 1950s, supposedly a time of white picket fences, Leave It to Beaver, and sexual "repression." Yet some would trace the beginning of the sexual revolution back to that purportedly staid decade, and among these are the creators of a new documentary, The Kinsey Syndrome.
The documentary identifies a seminal year in the sexual revolution: 1953. What happened then? Alfred Kinsey, the famous — perhaps we should say infamous — "sex researcher" and professor at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, issued the second volume of his research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, a work likened to an "atomic bomb" dropped on traditional morality in America. It was a follow-up to Kinsey’s 1948 work Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and together, they were a one-two punch, the Fat Man and Little Boy of the new morality, helping to change the way Americans viewed their nation — perhaps forever.
Father of the Sexual Revolution
This is not hyperbole. If we are to believe Kinsey, America didn’t need a sexual revolution — just sexual recognition. According to his findings — based on information collected from thousands of subjects — sexual behaviors that were considered rare and deviant in the 1950s were actually quite common.
For example, he claimed that 10 percent of American men were homosexual for at least three years of their lives; 69 percent of men visited prostitutes; 50 percent engaged in adultery; and, overall, 95 percent of the American male population regularly indulged sexual deviancy. He claimed that 50 percent of women had sex before marriage — shocking in the 1950s — 26 percent practiced adultery, and 87 percent of pregnant single women and 25 percent of married ones were having abortions.
Based on these findings, he claimed that sexual promiscuity was normal. Moreover, he said that children are sexual from birth and that rape is one of the most "forgettable" crimes. All this, people were told, was based on exhaustive sex research conducted by Kinsey et al. It carried the weight of academia and the researcher’s credentials as an Sc.D.
In a nutshell, man had never seen anything like it before. This was a supposed man of science, during a time in history when science was perhaps most respected (people are a bit more cynical today), who claimed to have conducted the world’s first wide-scale study of man’s sexual behavior. This wasn’t "just religion" making moral pronouncements. This wasn’t the Moral Majority. This was science, which, as we all know, is like Joe Friday and gives us "just the facts, ma’am."
But here are the facts. As C.S. Lewis once said, "Sex is not messed up because it was put in the closet; it was put in the closet because it was messed up." Sexual desires must be bayed by a thousand internal and external controls, those elements that have, to varying degrees, always existed in civilization and that libertines call "repression." And what was the effect of hearing that America was really more Nero and Caligula than Ozzie and Harriet? People said to themselves, "Hey, if all this is truly so common, why shouldn’t I give freer rein to my deeper, darker urges? Why should I be the only one missing out on the fun?"
As an example, The Kinsey Syndrome points out that Hugh Hefner founded Playboy magazine in 1953, the same year that Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Was this a coincidence? Well, Hefner read Sexual Behavior in the Human Male when he was young and wrote about it in a college publication, and the work convinced him that he had been lied to by the wider society. Moreover, The Kinsey Syndrome presents a clip of Hefner saying, "I refer to it [Kinsey’s Human Female book] in the introduction to the first issue; I called it ‘the other great book that was coming out in 1953.’"
This is why Kinsey has been called the "Father of the Sexual Revolution," why Human Events listed Kinsey’s Human Male book as "the fourth most harmful book of the19th and 20th centuries," behind only The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and Quotations from Chairman Mao. Kinsey claimed to have opened America’s closet and found a sexual killing field, and in doing so, he helped open the closet of the American mind and loose the dogs of lust.
Exposing the Kinsey Con
Here is where some may say, "All right, you claim it’s harmful, but should we suppress the truth? The truth will set you free, right?" But if the sexual revolution is a child, it is an illegitimate one — because its father was certainly so. That is to say, Alfred Kinsey was the author of possibly the most destructive scientific fraud in man’s history.
In exposing this deception, a great debt is owed to Dr. Judith Reisman. She is The Kinsey Syndrome’s leading expert witness, and the documentary is based mainly on her work, which represents decades of dogged research into the Kinsey con. And together with executive producers Joseph M. Schimmel and Christian J. Pinto, she has helped create a masterpiece in the effort to expose Kinsey.
So, what of the profound disconnect between the 1950s’ white-picket-fence image and the dark underbelly that Kinsey claimed was its reality? The Kinsey Syndrome points out that while the researcher-cum-fiction writer claimed to be presenting data based on interviews with thousands of average men and women, his sample was fatally — and purposely — skewed. As for the incidental error, as famous psychologist and Kinsey friend Abraham Maslow pointed out, only very rare people (especially in the relatively reserved 1940s and ’50s) would fill out a comprehensive survey of intensely personal questions.
In fact, these people were so rare that Kinsey couldn’t find enough to constitute a scientific sample. But that didn’t deter him. He wrote that he plied America’s prisons and back alleys, including in his sample 1,300 to 1,400 sex offenders; 199 sexual psychopaths; other prisoners; and members of Chicago’s homosexual underground, people from its bathhouses and homosexual bars. He then mixed them in his "regular-male data."
And Kinsey repeated this fraud when working on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female some years later. The Kinsey Syndrome tells us, "He redefined ‘married women’ to include any woman that had lived with a man for at least a year, a broad description that included prostitutes who had lived with their pimps." Kinsey regularly sought such women out and included them in the regular-female data.
It may be hard to believe that a man who, as recently as 2004 in the biographical movie Kinsey, was lauded as a brave revolutionary bucking a "McCarthyist" system could be guilty of such striking scientific fraud; thus, The Kinsey Syndrome documents its accusations well. For example, the documentary tells us that Kinsey divulged on page 39 of his Human Male book that he also included "bootleggers, gamblers, male prostitutes, ne’er do-wells, pimps, thieves, and hold-up men" in the regular-male data. The Kinsey Syndrome also includes other ironclad evidence, such as interviews with figures such as Dr. Paul Gebhard, the co-author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and second director of the Kinsey Institute. He admitted when asked about the research subjects that, "Fifty-five percent were prisoners…. We didn’t have enough non-prison people to do much of a comparison — but he [Kinsey] didn’t do a comparison. He simply took the prison people he got and used them as his less-than-college educated sample…. By emphasizing the less-than-college educated sample, he introduced a lot of errors into the data." That may be the understatement of the year. It’s more accurate to say that he portrayed perverts as the norm in an effort to prove perversion was normal.
And this fact is well known. For example, the British medical journal Lancet wrote that Kinsey "questioned an unrepresentative proportion of prison inmates and sex offenders in a survey of normal sexual behavior," and the Intercollegiate Review ranked Sexual Behavior in the Human Male as the third worst book of the 20th century.
Kinsey’s "Research": A Labor of Lust
But what motivated Kinsey’s descent into error? Sure, the study of sexuality certainly wasn’t his field of expertise (there was no such discipline as "sexology" at the time). Yet, as a biologist specializing in the study of the gall wasp and armed with a Doctor of Science degree from Harvard University, he certainly was acquainted with the scientific method. So what made this man of science so unscientific in the area of sexuality?
Quite simply, insects were Kinsey’s specialty, but sex was a labor of lust. As Kenneth Anger, an occultist and close friend of the researcher who is featured at the Kinsey Institute, said, "To obtain grant monies and maintain the support of the University, Kinsey needed the excuse of research … to validate his 24-hours-a-day obsession with sex." And as The Kinsey Syndrome pointed out, in an effort to justify his own deviancy, Kinsey aimed to destroy the traditional values of his youth and "reshape America in his own image."
But how twisted was this image? For one thing, Kinsey was a sadomasochist with a history of abusing his own sexual organs in bizarre and brutal ways, a practice that led to his demise. Dr. Reisman suggests that injuries sustained during his masochistic activities — problems such as "orchitis," a swelling of the male genitalia — contributed significantly to his untimely death from a heart attack in 1956 (extreme abuse of that area can induce heart-stopping neurogenic shock).
To complete the picture of Kinsey’s personal justifications, however, we must examine his attraction to young boys, a perversion that manifested itself at a tender age. In a letter written as a YMCA counselor, he boasted of a "nature library" he possessed, comprising pictures and drawings of nude men and boys that he would show to young male charges while camping — in his tent — late at night.
It is this obsession with children that led to Kinsey’s most serious trespasses. The Kinsey Syndrome speaks of the infamous "Table 34," a chart whereon Kinsey listed the orgasmic responses of his test subjects — all children — some still in infancy. Among these findings were that "researchers" observed 26 climaxes in a 24-hour period — in a four-year-old boy — and at least one example of such a response in a four-month-old girl. Such claims could understandably leave people speechless, but this doesn’t explain the mind-numbing incuriosity with which they were met. As the Intercollegiate Review wrote, "So mesmerized were Americans by the authority of science, with a capital S, that it took forty years for anyone to wonder how data is collected on the sexual responses of children." But we don’t have to wonder. The "how" is known, and it marks Kinsey as one of our nation’s most despicable sexual criminals.
Kinsey had working relationships with — or, I should say, fellow pedophiles. These were men actively raping children. But instead of turning them over to the authorities, Kinsey trained them to measure and record the sexual "responses" of their victims using stopwatches and charts. The Kinsey Syndrome presents airtight evidence for this, such as a 1992 interview in which Paul Gebhard revealed, "Most of it [the molestation] was done by one individual … a man with some scientific training … but not a … not a known scientist. Uh, the other cases were done by parents at pedophilesour suggestion. And … uh, let’s see … then there were some that were done by nursery school personnel." Then, when asked if pedophiles normally run around with stopwatches, Gebhard replied that they do if "we tell them that we’re interested in it." Moreover, when asked how the desired responses were achieved, Gebhard said by way of "oral and manual techniques."
Yet, while these "researchers" were no doubt highly skilled at their "techniques," how do you identify the response in question in a young child? Kinsey answered this on page 161 of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, writing that it "involves still more violent convulsions of the whole body … heavy breathing, groaning, sobbing, or more violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears (especially among younger children)…. Some males experience excruciating pain and may scream. The males in the present group … will fight away from the partner [rapist] and may make violent attempts to avoid climax." Kinsey called these responses "orgasms." Dr. Reisman makes a very astute point about this: what kind of person would associate sobbing, screaming, violent resistance, and pain with sexual climax in children? The kind Kinsey was: a sadomasochistic pederast.
Bear in mind, too, that this was financed with tax dollars, as Kinsey received grants and paid his child rapists for their contributions. And some of his innocence assassins were truly prolific. There was Rex King, aka "Mr. Green," who molested more than 800 children and was trained by Kinsey’s mentor, Dr. Robert Dickenson. An even more odious character, if that is possible, was Fritz von Balluseck, a Gestapo member who was the commandant of an occupied Polish town during WWII. He molested hundreds of children while in this position, telling them that it was either him or the gas chambers (Reisman points out that they were all killed anyway). After the war, he somehow escaped the hangman’s noose and continued his molestation in the shadows until he came under investigation for the sexual murder of a 10-year-old girl in 1956 and was apprehended. During the course of his trial, the authorities found letters from Kinsey thanking Balluseck for his reports on child rape, encouraging him to continue his "research" and warning him to "watch out" and avoid being caught by the law. In fact, this correspondence was so outrageous that the trial judge often railed against "the strange American scholar." And when the judge said that he got the impression that the Nazi was trying to impress Kinsey by delivering him material, Balluseck replied, "Kinsey himself asked me for that." (Balluseck was convicted for the sexual abuse of dozens of children, including the little girl who was killed, but the killer’s identity was never discovered.)
The truth is that Kinsey, who would tell his staff that "as scientists, they are not bound by bourgeois morality," wasn’t bound by any morality. Wardell B. Pomeroy, who co-authored Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, said, "Kinsey would have done business with the devil if it helped the research — and this is true."
But, in reality, Kinsey consorted with many devils. The Kinsey Syndrome tells us that Pomeroy himself "wrote the book Boys and Sex, in which he actually promoted the idea of boys having sex with animals, such as a dog, a horse or a bull." And in a different publication he wrote, "Incest between adults and younger children can … prove to be a satisfying and enriching experience." Then there is Kinsey photographer Clarence Tripp, who once said quite emphatically, "child molestation. What is that? Nobody knows. Abuse of children? Are they talking about boxing them against the ear or hitting them with a stove pipe? Are they talking about tickling them a little? Are you talking about fondling? I hesitate to even call [Rex King] a pedophile." There is the aforementioned Paul Gebhard who, when explaining why the Kinsey Institute refused to cooperate with German authorities during the Balluseck trial, said, "The poor pedophile … had his reputation destroyed." Perhaps the worst (although there is stiff competition for that title) was notorious British Satanist Aleister Crowley, whose sexual exploits Kinsey seemed to admire. These included things such as engaging in orgies with women and their children and dismembering virgins at the completion of sexual congress. The bottom line is that Kinsey was not a scientist. He was the Marquis de Sade mafia don of child molestation, the dark hand that provided pedophile trigger men with a scientific justification to destroy souls.
Defining Deviancy Downwards
Yet the story gets worse. If we didn’t know better, we might think such deviance would have landed Kinsey in prison. Instead, the release of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female afforded him the opportunity to define deviancy downwards. Not only did Kinsey’s newfound fame launch him onto the college lecture circuit, he also appeared in front of state legislatures and lobbied for a relaxing of sex-offender laws. In fact, Dr. Reisman has a chart on which she has documented how Kinsey went from state to state convincing ingenuous legislators to dumb-down punishments for sex crime. The result was that the Model Penal Code issued in 1955 already reflected Kinsey’s pseudo-science, and between 1982 and 2000, the great legal database Westlaw had roughly 650 citations to Kinsey.
Yet what is perhaps even more distressing is that Kinsey’s ideas imbue modern sex education. The Kinsey Syndrome speaks of how Sexual Behavior in the Human Male co-author Ward Pomeroy founded the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. This institution spawns sex educators — Ph.D.s, Masters holders, etc. — who then enter schoolrooms throughout the nation and spread Kinsey’s philosophy.
The Kinsey Syndrome also makes the case that Kinsey’s lies helped jump-start the porn industry and illustrates how porn magazines’ use of images depicting molestation of and violence toward children has desensitized many to those acts. In fact, the documentary devotes much footage to the proliferation of such crimes during the last few decades, and Dr. Reisman asserts that you can draw a "straight line" between this increased incidence and Kinsey’s handiwork. Simply put, the reduction in punishment removed the stick, Kinsey-based sex education helped to sexualize children, and porn stoked the fires of man’s darkest urges, conditioning young minds with imagery of sex and violence. The documentary even touches on moral relativism, in so many words. The spreading of this philosophy is a significant factor because, since it sends the message that what constitutes "evil" behavior is simply a matter of opinion, it removes moral constraints that would militate against doing evil.
Of course, many scoff at the idea that pornographic images influence people to act wrongly, claiming that it’s much like blaming society’s woes on television or violent video games. But if such things are meaningless, why do so many say that we mustn’t broadcast programs such as Amos & Andy because they contain racial stereotypes? Or, to use The Kinsey Syndrome’s example, why do we take issue with the Nazis’ use of anti-Jewish imagery, the obscenely negative depictions of Jews designed to desensitize people to their persecution? If entertainment cannot influence minds, why trouble over such things?
While everything discussed above would be enough for any documentary, The Kinsey Syndrome is especially powerful because it also looks at the less visible dark hands in the Kinsey saga. It deals with the power of tax-exempt foundations, such as Rockefeller, which financed Kinsey’s research and the Model Penal Code, and which, asserted the Reece Committee (a congressional body), aimed to destroy America’s Judeo-Christian foundation. It explains the link between Kinsey-trained sexologists and the Catholic Church sex scandal. It reveals that there are pedophiles in academia devising sex-education curricula even today — and it names names. And it illustrates how Kinsey helped animate the homosexual-rights movement, quoting the leader of the North American Man/Boy Love Association as saying in 1981, "Gay liberationists in general, and boy lovers in particular, should know Kinsey’s work and hold it dear…. Implicit in Kinsey is the struggle we fight today."
But, as The Kinsey Syndrome also explains, the real struggle is exposing the Kinsey con. Every time headway was made in this area, the effort was thwarted. This happened to the Reece Committee in the 1950s — and to Dr. Reisman decades later. As she told me when I questioned her for this piece, "The FBI/DoJ coalition Task Force that was created to use my research to help reverse child sex trafficking and pornography was spiked…. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations rushed to aid the Kinsey Institute, with Gray & Co and other PR firms receiving millions to assure my expurgation from future academic conferences and university professorships and to kill the 1995 federal investigation of Kinsey." It’s a fascinating story that is still unfolding. And all this and much, much more is presented in The Kinsey Syndrome.
I can issue a warning about the documentary, however. It made me angry. Angry that justice was denied and most of the mafia dons of pedophilia died natural deaths without tasting prison. Angry that academia and government were sufficiently corrupt to facilitate their deception and degradation. Angry that Kinsey and his cohorts did manage to help reshape America in their own sick, twisted image. But if what the documentary evokes isn’t righteous anger, I don’t know what it is.
So Kinsey has certainly earned his infamy. Yet, when I ponder his war on virtue, I’m reminded of what the great ancient statesman Cicero said about Julius Caesar’s rending of the Roman Republic: "Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man." Kinsey was a bad man, a twisted man, but he was only one man. What is truly sad is that, even in the 1950s, America was the kind of place where a Kinsey could be a pied piper. Perhaps it wasn’t just white picket fences after all.
For ordering information for The Kinsey Syndrome, click here.
