The oldest known penis dates to about 100 million years ago.

Found in 2002 by a team from the University of Leicester, the fossilized phallus belonged to an ostracod, the early ancestor of today’s water fleas. It’s just a millimeter long hollow spike, but it was one heck of a jump in primordial nookie efficiency. Before that spike, most critters mated in a messy, grimy bump and grind--hoping that the right bodily fluids fell into the right holes.
But even nature’s good ideas can be taken too far.

Take for example, the beetle. There’s more than 350,000 different beetle species on record. For many of them, the only marked physical difference is their genitals. They have specialized penises-- three pronged doohickies that branch in different ways or have bumps in just the right spot. These act as keys that only fit the right female locks, and only if inserted in the right position.
Gall Wasps are the same way. These stinging wasps have bodies so heavy that their wings can’t carry them. So they trudge, slowly, from one area to the next, each time marking out their own community by changing the shape of the genitals. Tracking the evolution of the wasps is as simple as walking from place to place, and that’s how a zoologist from Indiana University by the name of Alfred Kinsey spent most of his early career. By the early 1930s, he’d catalogued more than 1250 species of gall wasps – and then he finally figured out why he was becoming so bored.

Kinsey realized that humans are not gall wasps. We’re not locked into a specific, rigid sexual norm. For us, it’s not just “tab a” into “slot b.” There is no right way--regardless of what your mother, your church, and even your government might want you to think.

Kinsey isn’t exactly a household name—not like Freud or Einstein—but it should be. And if anyone pays attention to Searchlight Picture’s new movie, Kinsey, it might just become one. The film charts Kinsey’s life, starting with his troubled childhood and following through the establishment of the Kinsey Institute, which is still one of today’s foremost research institutes in sex, gender and reproduction research. The movement of the movie is built around the some 17,000 personal interviews collected by Kinsey’s research team to uncover the truth about America’s hidden sexual behavior.

With two notable exceptions, the movie is as accurate as any interpretation of someone’s life can be. Sure, it makes certain assumptions about Kinsey’s sexual affairs, it throws in some zingy one-liners, and it has the graphic pictures of intercourse. But it gets the point right: what some call “sexual deviancy” isn’t abnormal at all, but a normal part of the human condition.

The movie does have two major flaws. The first is the utter failure to put Kinsey’s research (including his two best selling books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female) into a larger social perspective. Kinsey’s work proved to be a cornerstone of the gay rights movement and a gateway to a sexual liberation for women as a whole. Instead, the audience is thrown some one-off comments about book sales and then shown a sickingly sweet end-of-movie encounter with an elderly woman who thanks Kinsey for saving her life because his book gave her the courage to hook up with female coworker.

This leads me to my second gripe. Watching the movie, you just know that during a pre-screening, some producer had the end of the film remade to be a happily-ever-after sign off instead of giving the real idea of how Kinsey’s life wound up. Aside from a totally fictitious reconciliation with his father, the movie’s biggest lie was hinting that Kinsey may have died a happy man. The truth is that his later life was consumed in a battle against unsubstantiated accusations that his facts and interviews were fabricated. The memoirs of Kinsey’s friends and wife all show that he was severely depressed and considered himself--at the time of his death in 1956--to be an utter failure.

For the record, 50 years later, Kinsey’s numbers still hold up—although they’re often misinterpreted. Kinsey was a researcher who had enough guts to turn the microscope of research around to study humanity’s own precious organs. There’s a lesson that we can still learn from what he discovered, and one from how he was treated.