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The sex life of Alfred C. Kinsey revealed!
By
Michael Bronski
Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life
James H. Jones
W.W. Norton
How to order
In a way, researcher Alfred C. Kinsey invented sex for the modern world. Not that sex didn't exist before, but Kinsey's ground-breaking studies of
Human Sexual Response in the human male and female blew the lid off of
the secrecy that had surrounded sexual activity for centuries. But Kinsey's work also caused an enormous uproar. When
Human Sexual Response in the Human Male was published in 1948, the outcry was tremendous, not
only from conservatives, the religious establishment, and educators, but from some liberals and middle-roaders as well. His documentation of sexual experience- much higher for "normal" sex than most people thought, and
much, much higher for homosexual experiences then even homosexuals thought- caused social distress.
What Kinsey did- and it was a radical move- was put to work his entomological smarts (his first contributions to human knowledge were his studies of gall wasps) in order to view sexual behavior from
a scientific, not a moralistic, vantage point.
James H. Jones's new biography Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private
Life (W. W. Norton cloth, 916 pages,
$39.95) tells us everything we wanted to know about Kinsey but were afraid to
ask. Detailing the scientist's bisexuality, his masochism, and his very active sexual life, Jones attempts to find new, and in his view often troubling, connections between the man and his work. Some liberal critics have sought
to discount Jones's book by claiming that the details of Kinsey's sexual life would undercut his reputation. But Jones's biography only reinforces Kinsey's own work that human sexuality is varied, complex, and
endlessly fascinating. Exhaustively researched and succinctly written, this is, for the time being, the authoritative biography on the man and the scientist.
| Author Profile: Michael Bronski |
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Michael Bronski is the author of
Culture Clash: The Making of Gay
Sensibility and The Pleasure
Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the
Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes
frequently on sex, books, movies, and
culture, and lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. |
| Email: |
mabronski@aol.com |
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