John Patterson: 'Moral right takes us back to dark ages of sexuality'
Date: Monday, December 06 @ 09:56:31 EST
Topic: The Religious Right
Hypocritical puritans hounded a leading US sex researcher to the grave. Now they're after his movie.
By John Patterson, Sydney Morning Herald
Bill Condon's biopic Kinsey would be an important movie at any time, but right now, with the "moral values" crowd in the ascendant and thirsty for the blood of heretics in the aftermath of George Bush's re-election, it's an absolutely essential movie.
Dr Alfred Kinsey, played by Liam Neeson, was the Harvard-trained entomologist who pioneered research into the sexual habits of Americans. After interviewing tens of thousands of men and women, he collected his findings in two books that changed the way Americans comprehended sex.
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, published in 1948, and its female counterpart (1953), revealed the bedroom (and locker room and barnyard) habits of Americans in a way that blew the lid off puritanism forever. "God, what a gap between social front and reality!" was the conclusion he came to. Kinsey's been dead for nearly half a century and now, thanks to the movie, the religious right want to dig him up and kill him all over again.
Working at the University of Indiana - about as "red" as you could hope to find nowadays, and sponsored by that well-known fifth-column, the Rockefeller Foundation - Kinsey and his team developed as precise an interview formula as was possible in a country still mired in sexual ignorance and fear.
He interviewed single and married straights, gays, lesbians, incarcerated rapists and sex criminals, even those who had sought congress with beasts of the field and farmyard, all without surrendering scientific objectivity or passing moral judgements.
Before he published his work, Americans assumed that sex occurred only after marriage, that homosexuals and lesbians were demonic inverts, and that masturbation led to godless communism, hairy-handedness and imbecilised high-school quarterbacks drooling on college jackets.
Kinsey's two books were bestsellers, but he became entangled in the neuroses of his time. The Rockefeller folk were hounded into dropping their support, and J. Edgar Hoover demanded - but didn't receive - Kinsey's assistance in witch-hunting gays at the US State Department. That Hoover was a cross-dressing, closeted homosexual who lived with his overpromoted pretty-boy assistant, FBI director Clyde Tolson, speaks volumes about the grotesque hypocrisy of public figures in those days. Kinsey's detractors lined up around the block to get their licks in, then as now, and it's possible that their efforts helped speed his early demise in 1956 aged 62.
Condon's movie does a splendid job of recreating the quasi-Victorian sexual politics of a time when people scarcely knew what to do or feel about their ungovernable sex drives. The film shows interview subjects startled to learn that babies do not emerge from the female bellybutton or that there's more than one position for coitus.
Kinsey is one of the inventors of our modern sex lives. He stands with Margaret Sanger, who agitated for birth control and backed research that gave us the pill by 1960 - which in turn gave us the unzipped sexual revolution and the bra-burning women's movement - and with Hugh Hefner, who 'fessed up and said flat out that, yup, he was hornier than a dog with two dicks and didn't care who knew it. If you've ever had a guilt-and-fear-free orgasm, you owe them all big time.
And because of that, the religious right still fear and despise Kinsey and his works. Check out some of the responses to the movie. "Kinsey's proper place is with the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele," says Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America, inadvertently showing us what he thinks of the Holocaust. Robert Peters of Morality in Media: "That's part of Kinsey's legacy: AIDS, abortion, the high divorce rate, pornography."
Focus on the Family's film critic, Tom Neven, calls the movie "rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual agenda". And Judith Reisman, who has waged a long war against Kinsey's memory, refers to "a legacy of massive venereal disease, broken hearts and broken souls". These people are of a piece with new Republican congressmen who have sex on the brain, such as Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who thinks there is an epidemic of lesbianism in Oklahoma schools, and South Carolina's Jim DeMint who wants gays and pregnant single mothers barred from teaching decent, God-fearing folk.
At the dawn of a digitised, globalised millennium, these creeps want the clocks turned back to when the church held sway over our sexuality. They prefer us ignorant and terrified, alone in the dark, the better for them to control us through fear and guilt. Too bad for them that we live in the bright, vivid light of our incandescent dirty dreams.
Copyright 2004. The Sydney Morning Herald.
Reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Moral-right-takes-us-back-to-dark-ages-of-sexuality/2004/12/05/1102182154111.html
The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=18969
