Sunday, October 10, 2004
Critical Faculties
I want your sex (history)
By Christopher Shea October 10, 2004
"GENIUS OR PERV?" That was the rather indelicate headline atop a story in a Toronto newspaper about "Kinsey," a new film starring Liam Neeson set to open next month. The movie portrays the taboo-flouting scientific zeal that drove pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to take down the sexual histories of thousands of Americans -- demonstrating for the first time just how far actual American sex departed from the missionary-position, husband-and-wife ideal. Yet it also shows him cheating on his wife with a man, circumcising himself, and -- worst of all -- failing to tell police that one of his subjects claimed to have sexually molested hundreds of children.
Kinsey is currently enjoying a cultural revival of sorts. The film is winning plaudits at film festivals, T.C. Boyle's Kinsey-inspired novel "The Inner Circle" is climbing the best-seller lists, and a documentary is slated to run on PBS in February. Today's sex researchers -- who include everyone from reconstructive surgeons to biomedical types studying the female orgasm to Kinsey-style survey-takers -- are also enjoying a momentary spotlight.
Yet sex research remains somewhat of an orphan in American academia, falling through disciplinary cracks, says Vern Bullough, an emeritus professor of history at California State University in Northridge and author of "Science in the Bedroom" (Basic), a history of the field. "Most universities have a course in human sexuality, but departments fight over whether it should be in psychology or biology or sociology or nursing or what," he notes.
Bullough traces the roots of sex research in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria, where empiricists like Magnus Hirschfeld conducted surveys about homosexuality and Freud proposed more abstract theories about sexuality. That tradition, Bullough says, was basically "destroyed in Europe by Hitler and picked up in the United States," where it joined with America's own tradition of "hygiene commissions" set up by city governments and charitable foundations to combat venereal disease.
Kinsey began his own career as an entomologist studying gull wasps before he shifted toward his famous inquiry into human sexuality. In interviews he and his staff at Indiana University conducted, he documented the sexual histories of some 18,000 Americans, discussing everything from masturbation to same-sex experimentation to premarital sex. In 1948, the famous "Kinsey Report" on male sexuality notoriously found that 37 percent of men surveyed had had at least one homosexual encounter. In 1953, his follow-up on female sexuality reported the even more shocking fact that 64 percent of married women had had an orgasm before their wedding night through a scandalous variety of means.
The study still infuriates some social conservatives today. "Kinsey's `Male' book libeled our World War II grandfathers and fathers. His `Female' book libeled our grandmothers and mothers," the independent scholar and longtime Kinsey critic Judith Reisman wrote last year. Sex researchers expect a backlash against the movie. "People who don't want to know more about sexuality [are] concerned that the film will somewhat make sex research more respectable," says Julia Heiman, a psychologist who took over as the new director of Indiana Kinsey Institute in June.
Even more sympathetic observers acknowledge that Kinsey's work suffered from a lack of scientific sampling methods. Still, his reports provided the richest information on American sexuality for four decades -- at least until a team of University of Chicago sociologists published a more statistically sophisticated study in 1994. That study lowered the incidence of homosexuality to about three percent and generally highlighted the mundane, seven-times-a-month-for-married-couples quality of American sex. But some scholars think Kinsey's work has some advantages -- that his long, ingratiating interviews may have elicited more frankness than the just-the-facts-ma'am approach of the volunteers who went door-to-door for the Chicago sociologists.
In "Science in the Bedroom," Bullough says sex researchers break down into camps: the "Sex is good, and let me convince you" crew, as he puts it, and more buttoned-down types who declare, "Sex is an important topic to investigate, and I'm doing it scientifically." That division is evident in the program for next month's annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, which is set to draw 400 scholars and sex therapists to Orlando, Fla. Turn your head from the list of sober talks on STDs and erectile dysfunction to gaze on ads for Natural Contours vibrators (pitchwoman Candida Royalle, a feminist-porn director, will put in an appearance in Orlando) as well as videotapes with such titles as "A Lover's Guide to Self-Pleasuring" and "Enjoying Guilty Pleasures."
But don't be fooled by the "Floridian Poolside Fantasy" party scheduled for Saturday night. "It is like any scientific meeting," observes Beverly Whipple, an emerita professor of nursing at Rutgers, past president of the Society, and coiner of the term "G-spot," who will be receiving an award at the session. "It is not a carnival."
So what will the actual science be like? To judge from some recent issues of the Journal of Sex Research, some sex specialists have a weakness for the obvious: Among the startling findings reported there are that college students who view porn in a psychology laboratory are likely to have sex when they go home, and that "attractive" women in various cultures use "attractiveness-enhancing tactics" (such as wearing makeup or flirtatiously touching men) more often than their less comely sisters.
Yet researchers are also looking at the causes of risky and compulsive sex, charting changes in attitudes toward homosexuality, and -- a hot topic -- looking for the causes of and cures for female sexual dysfunction. John Bancroft, the former director of the Kinsey center, reports an odd, potentially useful discovery about self-described sex addicts: They report high sexual arousal when depressed, unlike almost everyone else.
And Marca Sipski, an M.D. at the University of Miami, has demonstrated over the last few years that women with severe spinal-cord injuries can still experience orgasms. Not only does that discovery offer new clues about the biophysiology of the orgasm, says Rutgers's Whipple, who has also published on this topic. It offers reassurance to paralyzed women who have been telling skeptical doctors this for years. "My whole research program," says Whipple, "has been to validate the sexual response of women who have been told their responses differ from what is 'normal.'
"Redefining what's normal, you might say, is a guiding principle of sex researchers -- and one reason they take so much heat. Whatever comes next -- female Viagra? -- the Kinsey project is still alive.
Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net.
I want your sex (history)
By Christopher Shea October 10, 2004
"GENIUS OR PERV?" That was the rather indelicate headline atop a story in a Toronto newspaper about "Kinsey," a new film starring Liam Neeson set to open next month. The movie portrays the taboo-flouting scientific zeal that drove pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to take down the sexual histories of thousands of Americans -- demonstrating for the first time just how far actual American sex departed from the missionary-position, husband-and-wife ideal. Yet it also shows him cheating on his wife with a man, circumcising himself, and -- worst of all -- failing to tell police that one of his subjects claimed to have sexually molested hundreds of children.
Kinsey is currently enjoying a cultural revival of sorts. The film is winning plaudits at film festivals, T.C. Boyle's Kinsey-inspired novel "The Inner Circle" is climbing the best-seller lists, and a documentary is slated to run on PBS in February. Today's sex researchers -- who include everyone from reconstructive surgeons to biomedical types studying the female orgasm to Kinsey-style survey-takers -- are also enjoying a momentary spotlight.
Yet sex research remains somewhat of an orphan in American academia, falling through disciplinary cracks, says Vern Bullough, an emeritus professor of history at California State University in Northridge and author of "Science in the Bedroom" (Basic), a history of the field. "Most universities have a course in human sexuality, but departments fight over whether it should be in psychology or biology or sociology or nursing or what," he notes.
Bullough traces the roots of sex research in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria, where empiricists like Magnus Hirschfeld conducted surveys about homosexuality and Freud proposed more abstract theories about sexuality. That tradition, Bullough says, was basically "destroyed in Europe by Hitler and picked up in the United States," where it joined with America's own tradition of "hygiene commissions" set up by city governments and charitable foundations to combat venereal disease.
Kinsey began his own career as an entomologist studying gull wasps before he shifted toward his famous inquiry into human sexuality. In interviews he and his staff at Indiana University conducted, he documented the sexual histories of some 18,000 Americans, discussing everything from masturbation to same-sex experimentation to premarital sex. In 1948, the famous "Kinsey Report" on male sexuality notoriously found that 37 percent of men surveyed had had at least one homosexual encounter. In 1953, his follow-up on female sexuality reported the even more shocking fact that 64 percent of married women had had an orgasm before their wedding night through a scandalous variety of means.
The study still infuriates some social conservatives today. "Kinsey's `Male' book libeled our World War II grandfathers and fathers. His `Female' book libeled our grandmothers and mothers," the independent scholar and longtime Kinsey critic Judith Reisman wrote last year. Sex researchers expect a backlash against the movie. "People who don't want to know more about sexuality [are] concerned that the film will somewhat make sex research more respectable," says Julia Heiman, a psychologist who took over as the new director of Indiana Kinsey Institute in June.
Even more sympathetic observers acknowledge that Kinsey's work suffered from a lack of scientific sampling methods. Still, his reports provided the richest information on American sexuality for four decades -- at least until a team of University of Chicago sociologists published a more statistically sophisticated study in 1994. That study lowered the incidence of homosexuality to about three percent and generally highlighted the mundane, seven-times-a-month-for-married-couples quality of American sex. But some scholars think Kinsey's work has some advantages -- that his long, ingratiating interviews may have elicited more frankness than the just-the-facts-ma'am approach of the volunteers who went door-to-door for the Chicago sociologists.
In "Science in the Bedroom," Bullough says sex researchers break down into camps: the "Sex is good, and let me convince you" crew, as he puts it, and more buttoned-down types who declare, "Sex is an important topic to investigate, and I'm doing it scientifically." That division is evident in the program for next month's annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, which is set to draw 400 scholars and sex therapists to Orlando, Fla. Turn your head from the list of sober talks on STDs and erectile dysfunction to gaze on ads for Natural Contours vibrators (pitchwoman Candida Royalle, a feminist-porn director, will put in an appearance in Orlando) as well as videotapes with such titles as "A Lover's Guide to Self-Pleasuring" and "Enjoying Guilty Pleasures."
But don't be fooled by the "Floridian Poolside Fantasy" party scheduled for Saturday night. "It is like any scientific meeting," observes Beverly Whipple, an emerita professor of nursing at Rutgers, past president of the Society, and coiner of the term "G-spot," who will be receiving an award at the session. "It is not a carnival."
So what will the actual science be like? To judge from some recent issues of the Journal of Sex Research, some sex specialists have a weakness for the obvious: Among the startling findings reported there are that college students who view porn in a psychology laboratory are likely to have sex when they go home, and that "attractive" women in various cultures use "attractiveness-enhancing tactics" (such as wearing makeup or flirtatiously touching men) more often than their less comely sisters.
Yet researchers are also looking at the causes of risky and compulsive sex, charting changes in attitudes toward homosexuality, and -- a hot topic -- looking for the causes of and cures for female sexual dysfunction. John Bancroft, the former director of the Kinsey center, reports an odd, potentially useful discovery about self-described sex addicts: They report high sexual arousal when depressed, unlike almost everyone else.
And Marca Sipski, an M.D. at the University of Miami, has demonstrated over the last few years that women with severe spinal-cord injuries can still experience orgasms. Not only does that discovery offer new clues about the biophysiology of the orgasm, says Rutgers's Whipple, who has also published on this topic. It offers reassurance to paralyzed women who have been telling skeptical doctors this for years. "My whole research program," says Whipple, "has been to validate the sexual response of women who have been told their responses differ from what is 'normal.'
"Redefining what's normal, you might say, is a guiding principle of sex researchers -- and one reason they take so much heat. Whatever comes next -- female Viagra? -- the Kinsey project is still alive.
Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net.
