Scanning through the columnist page on Canoe (the Sun Media website), and I found Ted Byfield's latest article. The topic du jour - possibly one of the most incoherent rants I've ever seen unleashed from the Byfields (either Ted or Link), aimed squarely at the recently released movie about Alfred Kinsey.
First of all, I must confess, I had no idea that someone had made a movie about Alfred Kinsey. Second, I'm actually a little baffled as to why someone would do that - the man was an intellectual and an academic - not exactly someone whose life story typically makes for gripping big-screen drama.
However, perhaps more surprising and a little perplexing is the vehemence of Byfield's attack on the movie, and then the man.
Given also that (a) the movie was made before the election, (b) a great phalanx of Hollywood luminaries publicly castigated Bush, and (c) sexual libertinism has been the Hollywood way of life ever since there's been a Hollywood, what's so odd about it?Ah yes, Hollywood - the land of the debauched (or so some would have us believe); the land whose many minions had the unmitigated gall to speak against GWB during this past US presidential election. The first part of Mr. Byfield's sense of rancor becomes clearer - Kinsey was talking about a taboo subject - sex - or more correctly sexuality.
He then goes on to obliquely attack Kinsey's methods of gathering information as follows:
Thus Hollywood's version of the Scopes case was in fact legendary and we can expect its take on Kinsey will be the same.
Will it disclose, for instance, that Kinsey was not a psychologist, nor a medical doctor, but an entomologist; he studied bugs.
That is, he had no professional background to study sex.
Another prof at the University of Chicago recalls Kinsey's memo, recruiting students to participate in his sex survey.
He passed the memo to his own students, and later asked how many of them had agreed to do this. He found that none had.
So he wondered whose sexual conduct Kinsey had actually surveyed.
He discovered that Kinsey's subjects consisted almost entirely of prison inmates, prostitutes and homosexuals.
No one else would talk to him.
I won't even begin to get into an analysis of Kinsey's methods - I'm not sure I could make any terribly useful observations that others haven't made before me. As for qualifications, Kinsey's first work came out only a few short years (with a war in between) after Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung redefined psychology in the first place - I don't think you could say that there were a plethora of qualified Psychologists/Psychiatrists running around in those days. (There were some, but the discipline as we know it today was quite immature). Besides, as is often the case with inspired people, they are just outside of the area where they make their biggest contributions. (Einstein was a Patent Clerk when he developed the first parts of what became Relativity Theory - what made him qualified to work in the area of Physics???)
So what if Kinsey's subjects were prison inmates, prostitutes and homosexuals? Does that invalidate much of what he found? Not really. The fact is that the Kinsey Institute today continues to engage in valid, and useful research - long after Mr. Kinsey himself has died. (On an aside - I would point out that bugs have sex too - so why would being an entomologist disqualify Kinsey from studying human sexuality is beyond my meagre ability to understand.)
But that gets back to a root point - Kinsey was mucking about in an area that Ted Byfield and his ilk consider to be 'taboo' - sexuality. Just as much of Freud's theoretical models of psychological conditions were long ago dismantled and invalidated (what woman truly suffers from "penis envy"???), that doesn't invalidate the valuable purpose that the study served. Kinsey's work provoked thought, conversation and research in the area of sexuality. Is that a bad thing? Is understanding humanity in its infinite diversity something "evil"? I don't think so.
The vehemence of Byfield's attack on a mere movie about Alfred Kinsey suggests to me that a nerve has been touched - and not one that is truly offended by the problems in Kinsey's early works, but rather one that has yet to figure out that sooner or later the world was going to move beyond the moral strictures of Victorian era thought. Kinsey served a purpose far more valuable than any one of his research findings - he made people talk and think about a subject that is far too often pushed into a corner and ignored.
2 comments:
Dear Grog,
I was absolutely appalled to learn that Einstein was only a patent clerk. Clearly his work in science was a fraudulent attempt to develop patents of his own.
Since Einstein was clearly unqualified to do work in Physics, I reject the theory of relativity and all work in both science and physics that rest on that epoch. Further, I demand that there is an immediate investigation into all of science, so that we can determine what base theories we should reject!
For example, was Edison qualified to do experimentation with Electricity? No????!? Well then, I demand that we immediately turn off all of the lights until we have determined that electric light is safe and based on sound Scientific judgement under controlled conditions by those who have the appropriate qualifications
We must protect ourselves at all costs!
-The Peepul
Old Ted wants to poison the well so to speak. He doesn't make his point explicitely, but this is actually a fairly subtle attack against the growing acceptance of homosexuality in western society. Consider this:
1) Kinsey's test subjects consisted of "prison inmates, prostitutes and homosexuals" (I'm not sure I buy this. How many people would publically acknowledge being in a sex survey - to the person marking their papers, and in the middle of an auditorium full of their peers - in the fifties?)
2) Therefore Kinsey's data is flawed.
3) Specifically the apocryphal assertion that ten percent of the population is gay is flawed.
4) If a lot less then ten percent of people are gay, then we're not dealing with a major chunk of society - we're dealing with a handful of deviants that we are perfectly justifyed in "fixing".
Obviously you can punch holes in each one of these points, but Ted isn't debating the likes of us, he's preaching to his target audience. They know all the code words.
It's like when Bush talks about "The Enemy". Most people assume he means Osama, or terrorists in general, or "terrorism". To Evangelical Americans it's a code word for Satan. Ted's article is really about how the trigger event for the modern gay rights movement (the original Kinsey report) is wrong, and therefore everything that follows from it is wrong too.
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