Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this biography, more than twenty-five years in the making, James H. Jones unlocks the long-closed archives of the Kinsey Institute to present a moving and even shocking portrait of the man who pierced the veil of reticence surrounding human sexuality. Drawing on tens of thousands of letters gleaned from more than a dozen archives and libraries and scores of personal interviews (ranging from members of sexual subcultures who demanded anonymity to congressmen, university presidents, prize-winning scientists, and heads of foundations), Jones has written an incisive, psychologically nuanced portrait that truly separates the myth from the man. Jones shows that the public image of disinterested biologist cultivated by Kinsey was in fact a carefully crafted public persona. The Kinsey who emerges in these pages was a social reformer, a zealot, who devoted his every waking hour to the destruction of sexual repression. Drawing upon extensive research on Kinsey's youth, Jones traces the roots of Kinsey's scholarly interest in human sexuality to his troubled upbringing. Weaving back and forth between the sexual tensions of the culture and the repressive atmosphere of Kinsey's devoutly religious family, Jones argues that Kinsey emerged from his childhood with deep psychological wounds, crippled at the core but nevertheless determined to rescue humanity from the emotional scars and sexual repression he had suffered. Tracing his subject's intellectual pilgrimage from religion to science, Jones shows how Kinsey's training in zoology and career as an entomologist provided both the philosophy of science and the methodological tools that later shaped his approach to sex research. Revealing, never-before-disclosed facts about his marriage, family life, and relationships with students and colleagues enrich the portrait of a complicated, driven man who was obsessed with imposing his will on others, even as he transformed the state of public discourse on human sexuality.
SYNOPSIS
Reveals the tortured upbringing of the man who pioneered the realm of sexual disclosure.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
This study of the man often credited with launching the sexual revolution is purported to be a shocker. Jones is a historian at the University of Houston.
Kirkus Reviews
The author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, etc., is portrayed here as homosexual, voyeur, masochist, scientist, and social revolutionary.
The first so-called Kinsey Report (1948) blasted Victorian morality by presenting statistical analyses of searching face-to- face interviews with thousands of American men who revealed sexual behavior that was shocking and liberating at the same time. Most men said they masturbated; many had premarital and extramarital sex; many had homoerotic experiences; and a small percentage had sex with animals. If that information—and the much milder revelations in the 1953 Kinsey Report on women—seems old hat now, it created a furor at the time that led all the way from American church pulpits to Congress (where, as recently as 1995, a bill was introduced calling for an investigation of Kinsey's influence on sex education). Beginning with Kinsey's guilt-ridden childhood in New Jersey and an unhappy relationship with an authoritarian father, Jones (History/Univ. of Houston; Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, 1981) describes the scientist's life in the kind of microscopic detail that would have pleased the man who began his career as an entomologist. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard, Kinsey settled on the faculty of Indiana University. His interest shifted from insects to human sexual behavior because, he said, of his students' questions. Supported for many years by funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, he collected countless sexual histories, including those of homosexuals, pedophiles, prisoners, and prostitutes. Citing many anonymous sources, the author also reports that Kinsey privately practiced what he preached about sexual liberation: increasingly painful masochistic techniques, homosexual encounters, and later, with the staff of the Kinsey Institute, wife- and husband-swapping (episodes that were frequently filmed in the attic of Kinsey's home).
An exhaustive, compelling portrait of a scientist hailed as both a "genius" and a "dirty old man."
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