Word: kinseyisms
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...those innocent postwar years, when instead of funny books on politics, the best-seller lists were headed by deadly serious books on sex. The 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and its 1953 sequel on female sexuality turned their author, Alfred Kinsey, into a star and a scandal magnet. But in a distant, Olympian way. Those were the days before TV up-close-and-personalized, and upended and trivialized, every newsmaker. Back then, the name Kinsey was a metaphor for the kicking down of America's bedroom doors and the cataloging of the dark secrets inside. The man, though...
...Alfred Kinsey (played with a magnificently starchy charisma by Liam Neeson) is a straitlaced Methodist who expands his pedantic passion for insects into a fascination with the eccentricities of human beings. He leaps to fame in the same way Vladimir Nabokov did, as a decorous entomologist who shocked '50s America with a high-IQ book about sex. At Indiana University Kinsey first scandalized the academic community with lectures on sex and then with his books that itemized the frequency of masturbation among teen boys and the, shall we say, animal husbandry of farmhands...
...those textbook close-ups of genitals it offers, and a glimpse of a fully frontal Peter Sarsgaard (as one of Alfred's aides), Kinsey is at heart a comedy of manners. It takes pains to document the midcentury naiveté of the prof and his inner circle. Alfred and his bride Clara (Laura Linney) are both virgins on their awkward wedding night. But he approaches his book project with all the daring of innocence. To get data on homosexuals, he simply goes to gay bars and questions the first guy he meets. He dutifully instructs his canvassers on how to elicit...
Wrangham, whose research links violent human behavior with that of chimpanzees through evolution, admits he has a markedly different approach to his fieldwork than Kinsey. He simply watches “animals that aren’t hiding for you” engage in sexual activity. Kinsey was far more actively involved in his subject matter, experimenting with several behaviors that could have been immensely detrimental to his study...
While touring the country doing research, Kinsey and staff frequented gay bars and other underground venues to find people who would actually sit down and give them a full accounting of their sexual history. Ignoring the professional danger inherent in being at such controversial place, Kinsey’s research team (mostly men) were having sex with each other, each other’s wives and various other partners...