America's
sexual history
page
2
 ...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. r
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