Kinsey's Flawed Research

Kinsey's Flawed Research

National Catholic Register& Thomas A. SzyszkiewicsNational Catholic Register -

The Real Kinsey: Who He Was, What He Wrought

[Please note: This interview includes adult content.]

Judith Reisman got to know Alfred Kinsey long before Hollywood did.

An author and researcher on human sexuality, her 20 years of research on the celebrated sexologist is summarized in Susan Brinkmann's The Kinsey Corruption, published this year.

Reisman testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space Nov. 18 on the effects of pornography on the brain.

Register correspondent John Severance spoke with her.

What is new in the research on pornography addiction?

There are now studies under way on the effect of pornography on the brain. But many of these are being produced by institutions like the Kinsey Institute that are committed to the normalization of pornography. These "researchers" certainly cannot be objective.

I am one of the few specialists in human sexuality that have not been Kinseyan trained — one of the few that have scientific credentials that allow me authoritatively to identify the frauds that underpin that entire "field" — a pseudoscience created by Alfred Kinsey's followers.

What did you tell the Senate committee?

Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that emotionally arousing images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail.

Pornography triggers a myriad of endogenous, internal, natural drugs that mimic the "high" from street drugs. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins — mind-altering drugs produced by the viewer's own brain.

Can you describe the addiction?

The brain experiences a confusing neurochemical "high" that the mind mislabels as sexual arousal. But this is not just sexual. If pornography triggered mere sexual arousal, it would have little or no addictive properties. You'd be similarly aroused to your beloved spouse.

What pornography does is to simultaneously trigger other allied emotions — these would arguably be feelings of shame, fear and hostility. Those are the psychopharmacological emotions that are going to go off the charts. It is an arousal the brain cannot understand. That is one reason it so often becomes addictive.

You're talking about Nobel Prize winners, presidents of universities, prosecuting attorneys, doctors and judges who have been arrested because they have gotten involved in actual child pornography, leading from their initial hit in Playboy and Penthouse. And they have spent their lives in utter confusion, seeking to understand what this arousal is, and they can't understand it.

How did you get involved in this research?

I was delivering a paper in Wales for the British psychological association on children's sexual images in Playboy. A psychologist came up to me afterwards and said, "If you are concerned about child sexual abuse, you have to look at the Kinsey reports." That changed my life.

Also, I had a child who, at age l0 was raped by a 13-year-old boy upstairs. His father had stacks of Playboy. I later found out the boy had sexually assaulted children in the local neighborhood. He was in sex therapy at the time so no one claimed responsibility. Hugh Hefner said he was Kinsey's pamphleteer.

I then followed the trail to the Kinsey reports.

What do you research now?

I specialize in the communication effects of images on the brain, mind and memory, fraud in the human sexuality field and the addictive properties of sexually explicit images.

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, said pornography's effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine. Do you agree with this?

Yes, it could be more addictive than crack cocaine because cocaine can be excreted from the body. Pornographic images cannot. They remain, structurally and neurochemically, with a person forever.

So, once you're exposed, what can you do about it?

Well, people certainly need to try to remain unexposed and to purge themselves of it. It is helpful to understand what has happened to your brain. No one is exempt; it's just one's neurochemistry. We are designed to believe what we see, so highly stimulating images are instantaneously processed. The most important thing is to become part of the solution, to become knowledgeable and then to actively inform others. It is difficult to get rid of pornography as a society — although Americans are capable of amazing change. But, as with Alcoholics Anonymous, you've got to understand that it is there forever. And it can be triggered by inadvertent things.

So, we have a few lone voices crying out for changes. Where are we headed?

Well, we had a few lone voices crying out about drunk driving. And now people are getting that under wraps. We had certainly just a few people crying out against the toxic qualities of tobacco. So, there are lone voices crying out, but we're a really resilient people. And I have a lot of faith in the public if we can get past the controlled media. In fact, the controlled media is more of a problem than pornography.

Why is that?

Because no matter what facts we uncover, the public cannot read it and learn it in the press. Many "legitimate" media institutions now have corporate interests and various "ties" to this profitable business. Briefly, Madonna's pornographic book, Sex, was published by Warner Books (a subsidiary of Time Warner). Disney subsidiaries, such as Miramax, market what was once fully understood to be pornography, such as Kids and the scandalous teen film Powder, directed in 1995 by convicted child molester Victor Salva, just after he served seven years for sodomizing a young boy he directed in the film Clownhouse.

The public cannot make the appropriate decisions. Plato said to know the thing is to know what to do about it. The public cannot know what to do if the media are censoring the contrary facts as they have been doing. And now they have done the Kinsey film.

How about the Kinsey film?

The puppet press has been dancing all over the country. They say: Great film. Great pioneer. A little wacky — because he is a tragic hero. He was sexually repressed under the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Kinsey film is full of lies, and it is a million-dollar cover-up.

What's Kinsey's legacy?

He brought us all this terrific freedom. We've had a 418% increase in reported forcible rape from 1960 to 1999, and that does not include children. And from 1960 to 1999, we've had a 400% increase in out-of-wedlock births. Each year, we contract 70,000 new cases of syphilis, 650,000 cases of gonorrhea, 64,000 cases of AIDS, 3,000,000 cases of chlamydia, 1,000,000 cases of genital herpes and 5,500,000 cases of human papillomavirus. Sixty-seven percent of our sex-abuse victims are now under the age of 18. Thirty-four percent are under age 12. So, it's really great. This sexual revolution was so helpful. Thank you very much, Dr. Kinsey and your covetous cadre.

What's the effect on children in our schools?

Now children are exposed to this in the classroom because all pornography is pornography, whether it's called sex education or not. Children have little or no cognitive capacity even to begin to grasp the stimuli. So they are overwhelmed and captured, seduced into addiction, very quickly.

What's next for you?

I am coming out with a new book called The Impotence Pushers after my next book, Kinsey's Attic. Pornography is implicated in impotence, as well as in other forms of violent abuse, from harassment to sexual crimes. If a man cannot sexually respond to his wife, but has to picture someone else, he is rendered impotent, without power. And it isn't his wife's fault. I don't think that's too hard to understand.

John Severance writes from Chicago.

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12-18 December 2004, page 1

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Thomas A. Szyszkiewics -

Book Exposes Flaws in Kinsey's Research on Sex

Media, intellectuals accepted reports as fact despite errors in his approach, writers say

He was a zoologist, a specialist in the gall wasp and an atheist who supposedly turned a cold, scientific eye toward human sexuality to document and demystify it. But he soon turned sexual morality on its head because of his less-than-truthful approach.

Alfred Kinsey "was a bug man in a bow tie, and this man was retooling human sexuality;" said Susan Brinkmann, author of a new book titled "The Kinsey Corruption: An Exposé on the Most Influential 'Scientist' of Our Time." The book is a compilation of a series of articles she wrote about Kinsey as a staff writer for The Catholic Standard & Times, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Her work was based on that of Dr. Judith Reisman, a media specialist who has spent the last 20 years documenting Kinsey's failures and the societal fallout that resulted from them.
The book has come out just as a new film lionizes the man many consider the father of the sexual revolution.

A race of perverts?

Kinsey's books, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1952), claim that human beings have sexual responses practically from birth and that what most people consider deviant behaviors — homosexuality, incest, rape, pedophilia and even bestiality — are normal. In fact, he claimed that 95 percent of men engaged in some sort of such behaviors.

The conclusions of his first book were accepted at face value at first, but true scientists began to look at the work and question its validity. And they discovered serious problems, the first being the method of his sampling. One-third of his sample were prisoners arrested for various sexual crimes ranging from rape to pedophilia and young boys who had been sexually abused.

In addition, nearly 4,000 of those sampled volunteered to answer his questionnaire, which is bad form. But it's no wonder Kinsey needed volunteers: The 350 questions asked details about sexual behavior that most people would not want to discuss.

Scientists have tried to duplicate Kinsey's findings and failed. Perhaps his most famous statistic is that between 10 percent and 36 percent of men are homosexual. Subsequent studies have found the actual number to be between 1 percent and 3 percent. And some of the studies came from groups friendly to Kinsey, like the "pro-choice" Alan Guttmacher Institute.

It did not take long for media and scientists to turn on Kinsey. His funder, the Rockefeller Foundation, kept pressuring him to get a professional statistician on his team, but he refused.

Hook, line and sinker

So, how did Kinsey's studies continue to be taken as fact? There were two factors. The first, Reisman said, was that "university people promoted it."

The facts were "shunted aside because there were enough 'flingers,' I guess you could call them, in the academic world to regard it as true. And from there, the teaching and training began" to filter on to their students.

That filtering even reached the Catholic Church, Reisman alleges, because psychiatrists and psychologists who examined Catholic priests who had abused children had been trained in Kinsey's beliefs. These professionals claimed, like Kinsey, that pedophilia and homosexuality are normal behaviors, but many priests were sent to them for examination and treatment.

The second factor was the media. Even though there were voices questioning his work, there weren't enough, said Susan Ellin Browder, who wrote a piece on Kinsey for Crisis magazine. "There was still a lot of hoopla around it. You know that lies get perpetuated in the media."

Particularly revealing is how The New York Times dealt with it. The paper had reported on the errors in Kinsey's work. However, Times publisher Arthur Schlessinger was on the Rockefeller Foundation board, and although the foundation wasn't happy with Kinsey's work, the paper tried to put a good face on it.

He was treated in a "godlike" fashion, Browder said, because "he was going to change mankind in such a positive way."

Mankind changed, but not in a positive way, according to Bob Peters, president of Morality in Media. "Kinsey was big on promoting pornography," he said.

In fact, what Kinsey launched, Reisman said, is the "sex industrial complex." That complex includes not only purveyors of pornography, but pharmaceutical companies that develop contraceptives and Viagra, abortionists, schools and the media.

The media are developing a consumer base for this complex, Reisman said.

Such development happens with children, Browder said. "They educate these kids to see their bodies as objects, controlled with drugs." The sex education done in schools has "undermined their natural modesty. With no modesty and no innocence, they become perfect little consumers."

"The fact that there is still a credible defense for Kinsey has to do with people's eternal desire for sexual bad behavior," said media critic Michael Medved.

"There's a desperate longing for liberation from sexual guilt," Medved told OSV, "and that's what the whole gay-marriage movement is about."

What Kinsey and the new film perpetuate, he said, is the belief that "if something is widespread enough, that makes it legitimate. The Judeo-Christian worldview is that it's not just a widespread inclination to adulterous sex or gay sex - it's universal."
"Does that make it right?" he asked. "Kinsey says yes; the Holy Father says no. I have no doubt who's right. And it's not Kinsey."

Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz writes from Minnesota.

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