Currents

“It is incomprehensible that we should know so little about such an important subject as sex, unless you realize the multiplicity of forces which have operated to dissuade the scientist, to intimidate the scientist, and to force him to cease research in these areas.”

— Alfred Kinsey, 1956

Bill Maher once joked that Republicans say sex is bad because with them, it always is. In the era of consent forms, the “toxic male gaze”, and new conceptions of sexual misconduct and harassment expanded to include bad dates and awkwardly asking someone out, they have some stiff competition from across the political aisle. But at the end of the day, when it comes to sheer prudishness, Republicans, as Bertie Wooster might have put it, stand alone. They don’t like sex, they don’t want anyone enjoying it, and they certainly don’t want it studied. Such was the consensus among Indiana House Republicans when they voted to strip Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction of state funding in February of 2023. To anyone who follows the US culture wars even peripherally, they already know the pretext for this move. It’s the same pretext for every culturally conservative stance on matters of sex and sexuality since Constantine the Great fatefully traded Jupiter for Christ some 1,700 years ago: The Children!

In the case of Kinsey — both the institute and the man — the accusations go further than standard charges of corrupting the youth. Indiana Republicans, echoing generations of similar canards, have alleged that Alfred Kinsey, the enormously influential sex researcher who died in 1956, was a sexual abuser and exploiter of children. What’s more, they assert that the institute he founded in 1947 to study human sexuality continues his alleged perversions behind closed doors. While these accusations are troubling, false, and deserving of rebuttal, there is a deeper issue at play here. People right-of-center have long criticized the anti-intellectualism of “social justice warriors” who denigrate or even attempt to shut down legitimate lines of inquiry, such as the study of behavioral genetics, human intelligence, evolutionary psychology, or autogynephilia, on the grounds that such research is “harmful.” In going to war against perhaps the single largest sex research organization in the world, the cultural right succumbs to the same anti-intellectualism they accuse their opponents of. The simple truth is that seeking a more accurate understanding of the world virtually always ends up redounding to our benefit, a fact that’s easy to lose sight of when contorting oneself into a horseshoe.

The effort to block state funding to the Kinsey Institute began in the Indiana legislature with Rep. Lorissa Sweet, a Republican, who referred to Alfred Kinsey, without evidence, as a “sexual predator.” She went on to say “Who knows what they [the Kinsey Institute] are still hiding? Could they be hiding child predators?” before concluding, again without evidence, “By limiting the funding to Kinsey Institute through Indiana University’s tax dollars, we can be assured that we are not funding ongoing research committed by crimes.” Her proposal passed with a mostly party-line 53-34 House vote, and the budget subsequently passed the Indiana Senate and was signed into law by Governor Eric Holcomb in May. The new budget will take effect on July 1st.

The hostility the Kinsey Institute is facing is nothing new. From the purity movements of the 18th century to the Lavender Scare to the modern “groomer” panic, anti-sex and anti-LGBT bigots have long sought to suppress everything outside of matrimonial, heterosexual, missionary position sex as a threat to the youth. Their Overton window is as narrow as a phallic hole cut into a bedsheet, and anyone who falls outside of its confines — gay and bisexual men, sex researchers, trans people, and more — are cast as sexual deviants or worse.

The Kinsey Institute, however, will be fine. The state does not directly bankroll the institute. Rather, Indiana University receives a lump sum from Indianapolis, which they can allocate as they see fit within certain parameters. As the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported, “Sweet’s amendment bars any state funding to the Kinsey Institute for its physical location, maintenance of facilities, equipment, utilities, programming and more”, although it’s unclear how this mandate could be practically followed or enforced. Regardless, state funds comprise only one-third of their total budget, and the institute enjoys worldwide name recognition as well as the staunch support of Indiana University. The move to defund them is, in the final analysis, mostly symbolic — but what it symbolizes is a dark and persistent bias, against Kinsey, his field, and all queer people.

Alfred Kinsey revolutionized the landscape of sex research and the perception of sex and sexuality with his groundbreaking books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), known collectively as the Kinsey Reports. These books allowed the public their first glimpse at data-driven insights into the sexual characteristics and proclivities of their neighbors. Perhaps his most indispensable contribution to sexual thought was in his invention of the Kinsey scale, a conceptual spectrum ranging from 0 to 6, where 0 represents complete heterosexuality, and 6 represents complete homosexuality — with everything in between representing bisexuality. This framework has allowed for an infinitely more robust and nuanced understanding of human sexuality that captures the true scope of bisexuality, so often overlooked. The psychologist Fritz Klein, whose American Institute of Bisexuality birthed Queer Majority, built on Kinsey’s scale to form the Klein grid, which includes aspects of sexuality such as past experiences and future desires to illustrate the ways in which an individual’s sexual orientation might shift over time — also known as “sexual fluidity.”

Kinsey’s critics have always hated that his work exposed the public to sexual matters they consider perverse, and allegedly helped spread liberal attitudes toward bisexuality, homosexuality, masturbation, and pornography. For as long as mainstream culture was aligned with their biases, they attacked Kinsey and those who continued his work on these grounds explicitly. When that approach was no longer viable, they leaned into unfounded claims that Kinsey sexually abused or experimented on children to derive parts of his research.

The genesis of these allegations stems from a single willful misunderstanding. Kinsey and his team interviewed or surveyed more than 18,000 people. At least one of these participants was a pedophile named Rex King, whose accounts made their way into Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. If Kinsey can be blamed for anything, it is for not reporting King to the police upon collecting his data. That, certainly, was a major ethical oversight. But an artifice of lies has been built from this one interview subject, from Judith Reisman’s defamatory anti-Kinsey screeds of the 1990s, to Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman? (2022), which repeated Reisman’s fabrications to over 185 million viewers on Twitter alone, to the above-mentioned rhetoric of Congresswoman Lorissa Sweet. As Kinsey himself once said, “We are the recorders and reporters of facts — not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” Indiana Rep. Matt Pierce, who represents Indiana University’s district, described such falsehoods as “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back”, “based on old unproven allegations of conspiracies that did not exist.”

These same claims long ago carried over to the Kinsey Institute, which has stood baselessly accused of abusing children or harboring predators. The institute has endured decades of threats, harassment, disruptions, and defunding, despite having committed none of the deeds it has been charged with. But its researchers do something that enflames right-wing culture warriors almost as much: they do not exempt pedophilia as a topic of study, including how to prevent child sexual abuse from happening in the first place. Cue the cries of “degeneracy” from the balcony. But studying human behavior to better understand, mitigate, and prevent sexual abuse is not degeneracy — standing in the way of these efforts is. If the cultural right truly cared about protecting children, they would want scientists to glean as much insight as possible into the causes and mechanisms that lead to child sexual abuse so as to better prevent it before it occurs. It’s curious that these self-proclaimed defenders of children seem uninterested in gaining the knowledge needed to better protect our children.

Upon reflection, a more informed and intelligent approach to such grisly matters would deprive many troglodytes of a cherished outlet for righteous indignation. A society where child sexual abuse could be, to any appreciable degree, prevented before it occurs, would rob many a reply guy and gal of the opportunity to gleefully proclaim, as they are wont to do on social media, that sex offenders should be fed feet-first into wood chippers. One almost gets the sense that, in their eyes, a few young sacrificial lambs are worth the cost of justifying the most medieval impulses their amygdalae can pump out.

Of course, to attribute such forethought to these lawmakers and their fellow travelers is to give them too much credit. They aren’t playing 4D chess so much as they're playing the only card they have left. No serious person believes that the Kinsey Institute is harboring child rapists or conducting experiments on kids, but such accusations, even when false, are powerful. This is simply old-fashioned bigotry of the kind that the Kinsey Institute in particular, sex research in general, and the LGBT community as a whole have faced for generations.

All of this renders the right-leaning critique of leftist anti-intellectualism when it comes to human intelligence, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, or autogynephilia more than a little comical. “Facts don’t care about your feelings” doesn’t have quite the same ring on the heels of decades of puritanical attacks on and depraved lies about sex research. The fact remains that these are all worthy subjects of inquiry. The existence of racist pseudoscience around human intelligence doesn’t negate the usefulness of studying IQ. The fact that some people misuse them to argue for racial essentialism doesn’t cancel the truths uncovered by evolutionary psychologists or behavioral geneticists. The existence of transphobia doesn’t erase autogynephilia. And the incredible diversity of human sexual behavior — the good, the bad, and the ugly — does not make it any less valuable to study, but more so, if anything.

Kinsey’s contributions have reshaped the way we think and talk about human sexuality, regardless of anything his most fervent haters might say. And the institute that bears his name and lives on through his legacy will continue the kind of insightful, informative, and trailblazing research he did — with or without state funds. The future cannot be stopped. Short of the annihilation of the human race, or some calamity that sets us back to the Stone Age, the growth of knowledge will not be denied. What is most disturbing, aside from the ignorance, illiberalism, and bigotry of this episode, is the deeply misguided belief that the attempt to block knowledge is a noble thing.

Physicist David Deutsch, in his 2011 book, The Beginning of Infinity, observes that “The harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite; the good can be unlimited.” Knowledge begets knowledge in ways we can’t even begin to predict. Knowledge solves problems, opens minds, bridges divides, educates, informs, leads to breakthroughs, and sometimes collects dust for many years until it’s rediscovered and appreciated. This is not to say that knowledge cannot be gained unethically, or by hurting others. It can, and that’s wrong. But that’s not what Kinsey did, and it’s not what his institute has ever done. Notions of forbidden or dangerous knowledge are tropes science fiction writers use to sell books or screenplays. Here in the real world, history is nothing if not a cautionary tale of the cost in human life and misery of not possessing enough knowledge — not too much.

Published Jun 21, 2023
Updated Sep 15, 2023