Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things; A Biography.

Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things; A Biography. By Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998, 514 pp. illus. Cloth, 20 [pounds sterling].

What a difference a biographer makes. Gathorne-Hardy is sympathetic to Kinsey and what he was trying to do; thus, although he includes much the same data as James Jones (1997) does, Kinsey appears as an almost entirely different person. Gathorne-Hardy, who only found out that Jones was working on a biography after he had started his, probably found his task somewhat easier because of Jones' work. Certainly he did not feel the need to devote the more than 25 years that Jones did to the subject. He does retrace much the same path taken by Jones who, to his credit, deposited much of his source material in the library of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University. Interestingly, Gathorne-Hardy found that individuals who had been somewhat careful in talking to him before the Jones book was published were more eager to do so afterwards. Mostly, he attributes this greater willingness to share confidences with him to their desire to correct what they believe to be the misinterpretations and alleged biases which they felt they found in the Jones book. This is not to imply that Gathorne-Hardy did not do his homework; he did, and his interview list is almost as comprehensive as that of Jones.

The result is a more sympathetic portrayal of Kinsey and, in spite of the fact that Jones is a historian, a better setting of the man in historical perspective. Because Jones' comprehensive work appeared first, Gathorne-Hardy can also be more selective in where he puts his emphasis. Thus, Kinsey's childhood and early career receive far less space than Jones gives them, but the essentials are covered.

Kinsey was a sickly boy, raised by a demanding and dominating father and a somewhat cowed mother, in a very fundamentalist Methodist household where the dangers of sin were emphasized. As he approached his teens, his health improved, and he found refuge in music (he played the piano well enough to consider it as a professional career) and hiking. Scouting was also important to him and he was one of the first Eagle scouts. He rebelled against his father by choosing to leave home and go to Bowdoin College instead of attending the nearby engineering institution where his father was employed. He blossomed at Bowdoin, graduated magna cum laude, and went on to Harvard to get his Ph.D. in zoology, spending much of his spare time and summers in Boy Scout work and summer camps for boys. From Harvard, he joined the faculty at Indiana and remained there for the rest of his life, first studying gall wasps and then sex.

The outline of the career is the same in both biographies, but Jones is far more detailed about the early years and less analytical about the later than Gathorne-Hardy. One of the major differences between the two is that Gathorne-Hardy is much more comfortable dealing with sexual issues than Jones, who appears to have real hangups about such issues as masturbation and homosexuality. This enables Gathorne-Hardy to better place Kinsey in the context of his times. What does appear in both biographies is that Kinsey was more of a crusader for sexual liberties than he himself would admit, and that his reports and graphs of sexual activity were influenced by what he chose to include or exclude. Though most of us knew this intuitively, it is documented particularly well by Gathorne-Hardy.

Both biographers imply that Kinsey was getting bored by gall wasps, and that he wanted to leave a more important mark on the pages of history than having some species of gall wasps named after him. Both emphasize that Kinsey had always been interested in sex, but it was only after he had weaned himself away from the strict religious prohibitions of his youth that he felt able to seriously study it. Jones makes much of a Bunsen burner and brush handle minus the bristles which he found in a hole covered by a piece of tin in the room Kinsey had occupied as a teenager. Although others have lived in the house over the fifty years since the family left, Jones felt that this was Kinsey's hiding place and that the brush was inserted into his urethra as part of a masturbatory activity which involved pain and punishment for his sinful activities. This unsupported speculation became a central pillar of Jones' interpretation of Kinsey, and from it, Jones claims that he had strong masochist tendencies. But the brush handle found with the Bunsen burner could have been used to stir solutions being heated on the burner. While there is evidence that Kinsey did, as an older adult, insert items into his urethra, none of them are the size of the brush handle found by Jones. Moreover Kinsey, who was fairy open about his sexual activity to his colleagues, never defined himself as a masochist.

This claim of the youthful masochistic Kinsey, which Gathorne-Hardy dismisses out of hand as psychologizing without data, is one of the key points of Jones' analysis of Kinsey. Similarly Jones' emphasis on Kinsey's nudity and the Kinsey family's nudity is played up by Jones as a kind of voyeuristic homosexuality, but such a view fails to deal with the role of nudism in America in the 1930s. In fact, the insistence on swimming in the nude by the managers of YMCA pools and, for that matter, in university segregated swimming sessions was standard practice in the United States, if only to cut down possible contamination in the pools. Kinsey's youthful homosexuality, repressed or not, is one of the key points in the Jones biography. To demonstrate, Jones has to imply that Kinsey's interest in Boy Scout and youth camps satisfied his homoerotic leanings. This is also a claim which Gathorne-Hardy is unwilling to credit.

While Kinsey, increasingly toward the end of his life, would be classed as a bisexual on his own scale, there is little evidence for any such activities earlier in his career. He entered marriage a virgin at 27, and was frustrated at the difficulties he had in consummating it until his wife had a minor surgical procedure to free up her clitoris. Jones makes much of this operation, Gathorne-Hardy emphasizes its triviality.

Both biographies emphasize Kinsey's work ethic, dedication, and total commitment to any project in which he became involved. The man was a workaholic with a passion for collecting, and the man who collected more varieties and numbers of gall wasps than anyone else approached his sex interviews in the same way. Kinsey was also controlling, did not tolerate much disagreement, and dominated his staff. His recreation was listening to music, giving musicals, gardening, and hiking. In his monthly musicals he selected the records, commented on them, and played them to a group of friends (as well as to his captive assistants) and he was the authority. Gardening allowed him to relax, but even here he was compulsive in the flowers and bulbs he planted and collected. In the faculty, he did his share of scut work early in his career but was not particularly popular with most of his colleagues--he was too dominating. But when he wanted to do so, he could be surprisingly helpful and friendly.

The essential difference between Kinsey and most of his American contemporaries who touched upon sex in hygiene classes is that Kinsey thought that sex was good, one of the joys of life. It was this belief which led him to challenge the hygiene establishment which had control of the teaching of sex, and to begin to offer classes on sex to undergraduates independent of the hygiene classes. Others must have felt Kinsey offered a breath of fresh air because faculty members and their spouses also attended his special lectures, and although the Dean of Women and the professor of hygiene continually fought him, he had the backing of the university president, Herman B. Wells, which ultimately was all that mattered.

Kinsey threw himself into sex, not only in sex theory but in observing sexual activities and even participating in them, especially homosexual ones, justifying it as necessary in order to ingratiate himself with his subjects. This becomes a controversial part of Jones' biography, but less so in Gathorne-Hardy's book. He also insisted that his staff view and participate in as wide a variety of sexual activities as they felt comfortable with: Gebhard, for example, refused to participate in any same-sex activity. Kinsey held that only by such activities could his interviewers be alert to every nuance of their subject's response, and if they could do this without actual participation then it was okay with him. Jones implies that Kinsey distorted his studies by including interviews from a disproportionate number of gay men. As Gebhard later demonstrated in a rerun of the Kinsey data, excluding prisoners and any data which seemed to be derived from a totally gay sample, this was not the case. Certainly, he did interview a disproportionate number of gays, but it might well have been an attempt by Kinsey to understand homosexuality since he felt it was so stigmatized by society.

Gathorne-Hardy excels in recounting the publicity and reaction of the media and the public to the publication of the two volumes which reached print while Kinsey was still alive. The media demands were exhausting, and overnight Kinsey became both one of the most celebrated and most despised men in America. No academic event before or since has matched it. All that was missing was the television coverage only available to a later generation. The hostility toward Kinsey increased among religious conservatives, and many of the establishment types who had supported him began to distance themselves. Though his royalties mounted, his funding was threatened, and an overworked and exhausted Kinsey continued to try to solicit funds, lecturing everywhere. By the early 1940s he had adopted an exhausting schedule, traveling weekends for interviews, returning to Bloomington, and then leaving again almost immediately. His wife grew used to being alone but continued to support him and do everything she could to ease the burden. He took no real vacations after he began studying sex in earnest, compulsively pushing himself to do more and more interviews, speeches, and presentations, even rising from his sickbed to do so, until his heart gave out. He died a bitter man, feeling he had been betrayed and abandoned although he had supporters everywhere.

In a personal assessment of Kinsey, Gathorne-Hardy writes that his contributions were seminal but often ignored because society itself has changed. Many of the things he tried to bring about have become part of the climate, conventions, and good sense now surrounding most sexual activities. Like most of those who have been deceased for any length of time, many have never heard of him. Some of the changes brought about in recent years were probably inevitable, but if any one individual can be said to have contributed the most to the change, that individual would be Kinsey. Gathorne-Hardy says he challenged the psychoanalytic model of sex and replaced it, at least in part, with a biological and a social science model. Gathorne-Hardy believes that the Kinsey team was one of the major, if not the decisive factor, in challenging traditional ideas about homosexuality. He gave sex research a new direction and a strong foundation. Most of his failings were personal. Gathorne-Hardy feels he did not share some aspects of his sex life with his family and that by he and Jones bringing it into the open, some of the family members have been deeply hurt.

But how will he stand in history? Paul Robinson (1989) felt he did not belong in the company of Darwin or Freud, but times have changed; while Kinsey, in Gathorne-Hardy's mind, cannot match Darwin, he has certainly challenged Freud and might now be on par with him. People who achieve as Kinsey did are not usually the pleasant, genial persons that many of us would like to be. They are often driven, irascible, dogmatic, and domineering. Kinsey was domineering and compulsively driven, and not easy to get along with. Once he had made up his mind, it was difficult to change. Perhaps this is what it took to challenge so many ideas in human sexuality. After all, Darwin retreated from his battlefield, leaving Huxley and others to fight his battles for him. Freud had his coterie of disciples, and those who did not fully believe as he did were often excommunicated. Kinsey had to fight his own battles, strong in his belief that his data would vindicate him. Gathorne-Hardy makes an excellent case for Kinsey, which I believe will grow stronger over the years. His biography is a good antidote to Jones, and the differences between the two biographers emphasize the complexity of Kinsey the man.

REFERENCES

Jones, J. H. (1997). Alfred C. Kinsey: A public/private life. New York: Norton.

Robinson, P. (1989). The modernization of sex. New York: Cornell University Press.

Reviewed by Vern L. Bullough, Department of Nursing, University of Southern California, Center for Health Professions, 1540 East Alcazar St., Los Angeles, CA 90033; e-mail: [e-mail].