60 years ago: Good riddance to Alfred Kinsey

Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. I Corinthians 6:18

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; II Peter 2:11

On August 25, 1956, U.S. sexologist Dr. Kinsey died of a reported heart ailment and pneumonia at the age of 62. Dr. Kinsey, a biologist by training, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947. He published the reports Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which created the impression that the American people were far more liberal in their sexual behaviour than they actually were, or were willing to admit. Dr. Kinsey was reported to be bisexual, and he devised a scale of sexuality in which bisexuality rather than heterosexuality was the norm, and this passed for "science." It wasn't until many years after the publication of his reports that it was revealed that a disproportionate number of Dr. Kinsey's subjects in his research on male sexuality were convicted sex offenders, and a disproportionate number of his female subjects were prostitutes--not exactly representative of the majority of the American people. For further reading, I recommend the books of Dr. Judith Reisman, who has spent many years exposing the frauds and crimes of Dr. Kinsey.

Dr. Kinsey has been credited with creating the modern sexual revolution, and gets this blogger's vote as the most influential person in Western culture in the last half of the 20th century. One of the aspects of the sexual revolution that Dr. Kinsey was indirectly responsible for was the modern pornography industry, which is generally acknowledged to descend from Playboy magazine, founded in 1954 by Hugh Hefner. Mr. Hefner, like Dr. Kinsey, received a straitlaced Methodist upbringing, but went to university in Illinois and read Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which led him to conclude that everyone except Hugh Hefner was having fun. Mr. Hefner thus set about to rectify this lack in his life, and created Playboy and its subsequent business empire. Whether the modern plague of pornography would have come about eventually anyway is a matter for debate, but it seems certain that no Kinsey=no Hefner.

Alfred Kinsey was a pervert and a fraudulent scholar, and his vast influence in Western society has been overwhelmingly evil. And, as Woody Allen would say, I say that with all due respect.