The Martin Duberman Reader (31 page)

Isn't it obvious that if Kinsey must be labeled, then bisexual or
pansexual is more appropriate than homosexual? For some unfathomable reason, Jones has chosen to ignore Kinsey's own famous 0–6 scale (0 = exclusive heterosexuality; 6 = exclusive homosexuality). By using that scale, the simplistic category
“a
homosexual” would be reserved for individuals whose sexual behavior was exclusively confined to their own gender. Or if not their behavior, then their fantasy life. Perhaps Jones meant to argue that Kinsey
self
-identified as a homosexual on the basis of his erotic fantasies, discarding as irrelevant his ability (and desire) to perform bisexually.
If
that's what Jones means, he's forgotten to provide the evidence or make the argument.

Insiders at the Kinsey Institute place Kinsey between a 1 and a 2—more “straight” than “gay”—when younger, then shifting increasingly to the “gay” side of the scale as he aged, but never becoming an exclusive 6. In other words, whether the yardstick be behavior, fantasy, or self-definition, Kinsey considered his sexuality malleable (and long before queer theory reified fluidity as the signifier of sexual, indeed personal, authenticity).

Astonishingly, Jones doesn't get it. He not only persists throughout in referring to Kinsey as “a homosexual,” but he tries to force Alfred and Clara's relationship into the canned mold of “homosexual man seeks cover in a heterosexual marriage.” Along with vitiating all that was special and brave about the couple, Jones can't even manage a complicated version of the gay man/straight woman arrangement, presenting instead a tired stereotype of lost souls (which he bases on a few outdated articles from twenty to twenty-five years ago that he nervily refers to as “recent studies”).

The other slot Jones drops Kinsey into is “masochist.” It is one of many terms—“voyeurism,” “exhibitionism,” “prurience,” “pathology,” “perversion”—Jones slings around, never pausing for close definition. Judging from his footnotes, Jones's guiding experts on “masochism” have been Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Theodor Reik, now partly or wholly superseded by recent scholarship. None of the vast literature on sadomasochism that has accumulated over the past two decades is cited, let alone argued with or theorized.

Still,
Alfred C. Kinsey
does contain a considerable amount of new information. Thanks to Jones's prodigious labors, we are now privy to aspects of Kinsey's sexual life previously known only to his family and a closed circle of associates and co-experimenters. Kinsey, it seems, found that tugging on his testicles provided pleasurable/painful sensations; later in life, the stimulus had to be increased to maintain the desired effect and he took to tugging on them with a length of rope. Kinsey also discovered that the urethra was, for him, an erogenous zone, and over time he teased and plied it with various instruments, culminating in the use of a toothbrush. Later in life, he was also drawn to watching various S/M performances, but he preferred looking to participating.

These were occasional practices, not exclusive, narrowly focused fetishes. Kinsey utilized many other more conventional outlets for sexual pleasure. How we evaluate his more “extreme” (unconventional) practices will very much depend on our own sexual histories and our willingness to explore our own fantasies. In the process, we would do well to remain modest about our inevitable subjectivity and our limited imaginations.

James Jones is limited, but not modest. He is very sure what Kinsey's behavior means, and is very quick to characterize and denigrate it—usually with heavy-handed psychologizing. Kinsey's “inner demons” are given vast explanatory powers; catchall references to his “confusion,” “anger,” and “guilt” are made to substitute for any sustained, persuasive analysis of the inner man. A few samples: “By late adolescence, if not before, Kinsey's behavior was clearly pathological, satisfying every criterion of sexual perversion” (the “criteria” are not provided); he was “an exhibitionist extraordinaire”; an “aloof loner”; headstrong, stubborn, highly opinionated, gruff and arrogant; a man of “iron will,” whom few liked; an unpopular teacher (who somehow attracted droves of students), a thin-skinned, manipulative elitist; a self-styled martyr and would-be messiah.

This kind of crude psychologizing (which is really moralizing) is far too formulaic to inspire confidence. Indeed, several of Kinsey's surviving colleagues guffaw at such a reductive view of the complicated
man Kinsey was. “It's nonsense,” says C.A. Tripp (author of
The Homosexual Matrix
and, in my view, the most rigorous and fearless disciple of Kinsey's sexual iconoclasm). “All that guilt and anger Jones keeps talking about—well, you could say that about anybody. Kinsey can't even get interested in gardening without Jones ascribing it to ‘deep tensions' or explaining his scanty clothing while working the soil as a need to ‘shock' people. And how naughty of Kinsey to stand nude in his own bathroom as he shaved!”

Where another biographer might, with justice, have emphasized Kinsey's remarkable capacity for open-minded exploration, Jones persists in negatively labeling nonconventional sexual behavior as “skating on the edge,” or “compulsive” and “addictive” risk taking. He can manage to credit the homophobic sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing as having been prompted “by deeply moral concerns,” but pansexual Kinsey is merely “sex-obsessed.” This is like calling Albert Einstein “physics-obsessed.” And it leaves us wondering what to think about James Jones, who has devoted twenty-seven years to researching Alfred Kinsey's “perverted” life.

Where all this becomes serious is when Jones uses his defamatory portrait of Kinsey, the man, to discredit his work as a sexologist. He does so through a morally slippery ploy: he generously quotes from Kinsey's antagonists (often mistaken), letting them do Jones's talking for him. Now and then, however, Jones's own indignant voice breaks through: “Despite his claim of coolly being disinterested,” Jones hisses, “Kinsey was nothing of the sort . . . enthusiasm for sex was a fundamental tenet of Kinsey's thought, and it rang out loud and clear in his writing.” Enthusiasm for sex? For shame!

Elsewhere, Jones refers to Kinsey's “facade of objectivity”—as if value-free social science has ever existed or been more than approximated as an ideal.
Of course
Kinsey's “personal needs and motivations” influenced his findings; this is primer stuff in social science. Besides, subjectivity cuts both ways: what it often means is that the sensitized investigator is able to see and reveal much that had previously been closed off to less personally engaged scholars.

The bottom-line question is whether Kinsey's personality, and
personal engagement with his material, led to serious distortions in his findings. The two most common accusations against his
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953) relate to the statistical methodology he employed in arriving at his conclusions, and especially at the finding that 37 percent of the adult male population has had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm and that 4 percent of the male population is exclusively homosexual. (Kinsey is often misquoted as saying that 10 percent of males are homosexual, a rating he reserved to males who score 5–6 on his scale
for three years
between ages sixteen and fifty-five.)

Jones repeats most of the long-standing critiques of Kinsey: “For all his posturing and bluster, Kinsey was chronically unsure of himself as a statistician . . . his sample was far from random,” etc. But we are not told that Paul Gebhard (one of Kinsey's co-authors and his successor as director of the Institute for Sex Research), himself reacting to criticism leveled against the two volumes, spent years “cleaning” the Kinsey data of their purported contaminants—removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations.

In 1979, Gebhard, along with Alan Johnson, published
The Kinsey Data,
and—to his own surprise—found that Kinsey's original estimates held: instead of Kinsey's 37 percent, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.3 percent; the 10 percent figure (with prison inmates
excluded
) came to 9.9 percent for white college-educated males and 12.7 percent for those with less education. And as for the call for a “random sample,” a team of statisticians studying Kinsey's procedures had concluded as far back as 1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey's interviewing technique had been “extraordinarily skillful.” They characterized Kinsey's work overall as “a monumental endeavor.”

In his shrewd way, Jones sprinkles his text with periodic praise for Kinsey the master researcher, the brilliant interviewer, the daring pioneer, the debunker of conventional morality. No heavy-handed conservative frontal assault for Jones. We learn that Kinsey was an active, loving parent (perhaps that's why we hear so little
about his four children), a concerned mentor who stayed in touch with many of his students for years, a man of childlike wonder, and one capable of great warmth, gentleness, and generosity. How does this Kinsey fit together with the near-monstrous one Jones more frequently portrays? It doesn't. Jones never manages a coherent portrait (and personality contradictions
can
intelligibly cohere); the pejorative assertions that dominate the book simply overwhelm occasional references to Kinsey's positive qualities.

Why this insistent pathologizing of Kinsey the man and, by implication, the devaluing of his work? The moral values that have guided Jones's choice of emphasis come into sharpest focus in the contrasting way he treats two of Kinsey's closest associates, Paul Gebhard and Wardell Pomeroy. Gebhard, who gave Jones four interviews and whose testimony is crucially enlisted against Kinsey at various points, appears to have been the only male staff member unwilling or unable to sleep with men; he is pronounced “a free spirit,” “a very likable man” with “a terrific sense of humor.” Wardell Pomeroy, who distrusted Jones and refused to see him (now, with Alzheimer's, he is unable to defend himself), loved all kinds of sex with all kinds of people; he is dismissed as a “sexual athlete or superstud . . . a randy boy in a man's body,” with “a character of little substance.”

Get it? The exclusively heterosexual Gebhard wins the kudos. (Jones even dares to claim that among his associates “Kinsey probably respected Gebhard the most professionally.”) Pomeroy, a man
by other accounts
of great charm, intelligence, and warmth, is dismissed as a vain creature, “whose taste in partners could be described only as broad, if not indiscriminate.” “He fucks just everybody and it's really disgusting,” says one of Jones's informants, who clearly speaks for Jones.

James Jones has not understood, or does not approve, Kinsey's foundational message: erotic desire is anarchic and will necessarily break free of and engulf all simplistic efforts (like Jones's) to categorize, and thus confine it.

Kinsey's work will survive this book.

—from the
Nation,
November 1997

I
t's been clear for some time now that William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson aren't noted for their conceptual clarity or sophistication. In their first two books,
Human Sexual Response
and
Human Sexual Inadequacy,
their boldly modernist findings on physiology (the multiorgasmic and clitoral nature of female sexuality) were presented in jarring tandem with their highly traditional psychosocial assumptions (monogamous lifetime pair-bonding as the optimal condition for human happiness). But sympathy for the overall daring of their enterprise disarmed some critics, and their Olympian tone and forbidding technical vocabulary intimidated others. Besides, many hoped that Masters and Johnson's reluctance to speculate signaled the kind of stringent self-denial that might one day result in a carefully constructed theoretical synthesis that would subsume the earlier contradictions in their work.

With the publication of Masters and Johnson's
Homosexuality in Perspective,
that hope must be foresworn. If anything, the conceptual fog has thickened, the intellectual evasions and simplicities multiplied. One now fears the problem is less presumption than obtuseness, for the most astonishing aspect of Masters and Johnson's altogether astonishing new study is their inability to distinguish the banal from the noteworthy. They overvalue their more
obvious findings and negate or misconstrue their most original ones.

Just as Masters and Johnson are overemphatic in declaiming the importance of their most obvious findings, they fail to recognize and underscore their most genuinely startling ones. Though its significance seems to have escaped them, they do offer data of immense importance in helping to advance debate on a number of long-standing (and long-stalemated) issues—and particularly the question of bisexuality.

Masters and Johnson present data on sexual fantasies gathered over a twenty-year period, even as they try to muffle the materials' subversive impact. To give but a few samples: homosexuals, according to Masters and Johnson, show “greater psychosexual security” than heterosexuals; all four groups studied—homosexual men and women, heterosexual men and women—express a high level of interest in “forced sexual encounters”; the fantasies of homosexual men contain a greater amount of violence than those of heterosexual men (who envision themselves more frequently as rapees than rapists—as victims of “groups of unidentified women”); lesbian women record the highest incidence of fantasy, and are the only group that includes current partners in their fantasies to any significant degree; the most common fantasy pattern for both heterosexual men and women involves the replacement of their established partners with somebody else.