Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, by Alfred Kinsey

Preconceptions: What can possibly be wrong with books that encourage sex?

Reaction:Whew! It's a good thing uptight busybodies aren't interfering with our private lives anymore like they did in the forties and fifties when this book was written.

Oh, wait.

Quoth the Human Events Online website: "The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy."

I suppose I should lay my cards on the table and confess publicly that I am very much in favor of both promiscuity and deviancy, as long as all involved enjoy them.

The problem, of course, is defining "promiscuity" and "deviancy."

Until Kinsey's work, they were defined for society by its moral superiors, men who declared from the pulpit what was and was not acceptable in the privacy of the bedroom. They shrouded their own prejudices in Biblical quotations and stern pronouncements about mental hygeine. Men and women should not dance together. Horseback riding arouses unhealthy passions. A "vaginal" orgasm is more more pure than a clitoral one.

These prejudices of the righteous are hardly an adequate statistical sample on which to base concepts of normalcy, and Kinsey's reports attempted to describe without that prejudice the actual sexual activities human beings admitted to performing.

Kinsey and his colleagues were simply interested in what really goes on between human beings, in "an accumulation of scientific fact completely divorced from questions of moral value and social custom."

He discovered shocking things. Pre-marital sex, masturbation, homosexuality, bisexuality, and even beastiality were more common than suspected. Many initial sexual encounters for American males were with prostitutes. Many befuddled ideas about how pregnancy and veneral disease occur were rampant.

The reports showed the chasm between what religion commanded society to do and what society actually did.

Maybe that's why these books seem so harmful. They illustrate just how disconnected religion is from humanity. Why would a perfect God design our bodies to enjoy something that is immoral?

Kinsey doesn't really care about the answer. What matters is what we can measure and study, though some legitimate criticisms can be made about the methods and sampling. The initial study of 5300 white males largely from the midwest and northeast was still a pioneering attempt to better understand our sexual behavior, one meant to be improved and refined over time. Other researchers have by now surpassed much of Kinsey's work, building upon it for an even greater understanding of what we do instead of what others wish we did.

These books are, indeed, the most quintessentially American on this list: they are Declarations of Independence from other people's preconceptions and pronouncements, and they helped free Americans from ignorance and fear.

Unfortunately there are still people in America interested in maintaining that ignorance and fear. That must be why this book of dry tables and charts is so "harmful" to the 20th century.

Verdict: I don't see how any honest assessment of what human beings actually do can be itself good or evil. Even if you believe the activities measured by the study are immoral, wouldn't you want to know the full extent of society's depravity?

Any book that attempts to dissuade people of their fears and misconceptions cannot be harmful except to those who need unchallenged fears and misconceptions.

For what it's worth, I'm sure there are far more copies of Penthouse wedged between the mattresses of the Christian Right than they'd ever admit. The only difference between them and the rest of us, of course, is that they hate themselves for it.

If weeping with bitter guilt while masturbating is their turn-on, how fortunate they are to live in a society that allows them to enjoy it.

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