Understanding kinsey's erotological artifacts pertaining to women: educating the public beyond the misperception of explicit art simply as "pornography".

Feminine Persuasion: Art and Essays on Sexuality. Edited by Betsy Stirratt and Catherine Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003, 160 pages. Paper, $35.00.

Kinsey worked tirelessly to collect an extremely large body of sexual data that led to a reevaluation of public perceptions of human sexuality through the authentic examination of sexual facts. Beyond his statistical data, another significant contribution to understanding sexual behavior was Kinsey's extensive collection and preservation of erotological art, artifacts, and ephemera. According to Kinsey Institute curator Catherine Johnson, Kinsey did not intend to create a museum of fine art. Instead, Kinsey's desire for scientific discovery led him to assemble a diverse collection of "visual data" for research purposes.

Sexual science has made some valuable progress toward educating the public about the value of preserving, protecting, and learning from these visual records since Kinsey's day; however, too many uneducated individuals continue to conveniently label any artistic depiction of the unclad human form or documented sexual expression that is outside of their own subjective comfort zone as "pornographic" or even as "obscene." Sexuality professionals want the public to share our understanding of the complex diversity of human sexuality and appreciate the value of sexual art in science and education. We face the challenge of finding persuasive resources that describe and exhibit images of sexuality that will inspire the public with new understanding of their value and help them reevaluate the questionable wisdom of using stereotypical dichotomous thinking about sexuality. Viewers who understand images of sexuality from a scientific view are less likely to make simplistic, negative, or moral assumptions about sexual depictions in art. Books with scholarly yet easily grasped explanations of the value of sexual art are needed as vital educational resources.

In 1990, the Kinsey Institute opened an art gallery to display selected items from its archives for visiting scholars, researchers, and university students. Since the inaugural opening, the Institute has periodically published elegantly crafted art exhibition catalogs describing the value of the art and artifacts from its extensive archives. These catalogs promise to help bridge the chasm between public artistic ignorance and understanding of the social and scientific importance of erotological artifacts. The first was published for the gallery opening in 1990 and is titled Selections From the Collections of the Kinsey Institute (Becherer, 1990). It was followed by additional catalogs that appeared for each exhibition (e.g., Bums, Stirratt, Wolin, & Yamashiro, 1997, 1998; Johnson, Stirratt, & Bancroft, 2002).

The most recent offering--Feminine Persuasion: Art and Essays on Sexuality--is an exhibition catalog commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kinsey's landmark book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. In addition to cataloging the exhibition, it also stands alone as a distinctive coffee table book of erotological art with scholarly explanations of the value of each individual image as an essential artistic sexological record. The exhibit and catalog examine the evolution of artistic perceptions of women's sexuality through a variety of media over the past 5 centuries.

Following an explanatory preface by Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft, editors Betsy Stirratt and Catherine Johnson provide an overview of the exhibit and describe the rationale for the selection of the various works. Johnson served as curator of the exhibition and Stirratt is both an artist and the director of the School of Fine Arts Gallery at Indiana University.

Two essays follow. In the first, "Ideal Images and Kinsey's Women," June M. Reinisch, who is the former director of the Kinsey Institute and currently director of the Muse Foundation of the Museum of Sex, makes a detailed survey of how women's fashions reflected cultural meanings of sexuality during the lifetime of the Kinsey cohort. She states that, historically, women have aspired to be desirable. Her investigation of changing fashions over the past 500 years reveals that this objective underlies the goal of presenting oneself as the ideal and alluring female regardless of variations in social mores and their impact on fashion. She points out that today the enhancements and distortions of various body parts previously provided by foundation garments are now being replaced by the fashion of displaying a healthy body acquired through diet and exercise. Reinisch concludes by advising her readers to browse the gallery plates in the book with an awareness that fashion is an ever-changing mirror of what a society decides represents the idealized woman.

Art critic and professor of art history Jean Robertson's essay, "Artistic Behavior in the Human Female," insightfully explores the detailed meanings, associations, and cultural contexts of female imagery produced over the last half century since the publication of Kinsey's female volume. Her lucid references to many of the illustrated works from the exhibition plates that follow help the reader to better understand each artist's personal interpretation of sexuality portrayed through his or her creation of sexual imagery. Robertson argues that artistic explorations of sexuality are closely associated with the wider culture in which sexual identity and body image are constructed. She cautions the reader that although sexuality is also biological and instinctive, one is in danger of losing one's authentic sense of self by surrendering body ownership to cultural conditioning. She observes that until recently the majority of Western artistic works portraying women were created by male artists. Since the late 1960s, however, artistic representations of women's sexuality created by women have surfaced overtly and dramatically in the West. Robertson acknowledges the rich diversity of expression of sexual themes by women since that time and categorizes them into the following four sexual themes: sex and violence, body image and appearance, sexual identity and diversity, and sexual pleasure and desire.

The essays guide the reader through scholarly examination of the meaning of images portraying sexuality and then turn the reader loose to experience the images of the exhibition subjectively with limited explanatory text. The reader may browse the volume's 45 full-page color and duotone plates of art, carefully selected from the exhibit. These plates are divided into three sections titled "Women Artists in the Kinsey Institute Collection," "The Male Perspective," and "Contemporary Women's Sexualities."

A prime example of the diversity of the imagery is found in Plate 1. It is a black and white gelatin silver photograph from 1977 by Mariette Pathy Allen that graphically depicts the human elation and drama of birth. The image juxtaposes the American taboo of the public exposure of the vulva with the positive social value and tender spiritual meaning of such exposure. It immediately engages the viewer with his or her own subjective experience of humanity and personal interpretation of female nudity. Four individuals appear in the image. It powerfully documents all four individual human experiences: the child's, the mother's, the medical practitioner's, and the father's. A fifth point of view is the artistic interpretation of the photographer who chose the moment to record the scene. The viewer is left to interpret the meaning of the newborn child's expression as its tiny body is emerging from its mother's stretched vulva, along with the intense emotional reactions of the parents and birth assistant. The photographer makes her own subjective statement by titling the work "Last Gender Free Moment." The image is rich with visual data. The social and scientific value of the sexuality portrayed in this image powerfully confronts the skeptic who may question the value of erotology.

Plate 6, another gelatin silver photograph, is by Vivienne Maricevic (1986). On initial examination, the image appears to be one of a very attractive nude young woman who also has a penis rather than a vulva. She appears to be gazing thoughtfully at her own image in a mirror just off camera while holding a thin wisp of fully transparent fabric up to her body. The gesture is one of a woman trying on a new outfit. The photograph documents the unquestionable feminine beauty of a male-to-female transsexual while revealing her genital masculinity. The visual confrontation of stereotypical gender assumptions in this image is initially surprising to the viewer and draws him or her to the descriptive text that offers scholarly social and scientific insight into gender identity and transgender experience.

These images are only a small sampling of the diversity of insights into sexuality portrayed throughout the collection. They underscore Robertson's argument in her essay that artistic explorations of sexuality are closely connected to culture and sexual politics.

A full exhibition checklist detailing attributes of each work, a selected bibliography, and a biographical sketch of each of the vohime's contributors complete the book.

A large part of the appeal of the Kinsey exhibition catalogs are that they are geared toward educating the general public and yet they do much more than just satisfy the readers' curiosity about sexual imagery. They briefly explain why the image is valuable as visual data in the accompanying text; they succinctly educate. Although they are not intended as a comprehensive resource, they can serve as both a useful introduction to erotology and an aid to the scholar by documenting valuable erotological imagery.

A more fully comprehensive and scholarly survey of erotology may be found in Peter Webb's (1983) excellent literary survey, The Erotic Arts. An introductory statement from that volume also applies to the imagery documented in Feminine Persuasion: "It is about art, but also about sociology, history, and law. It is about events and about people. It is essentially about attitudes--a record of the attitudes of various people at various times and in various places to the uses of sexual imagery, whether in paintings, sculpture, films, plays, novels or music" (Webb, 1983, p. xxi).

I expect that Dr. Kinsey would be pleased that the public now has educational access to his enlightening collection of art. Feminine Persuasion offers the reader an insightful sampling of the artistic portrayals of women in the Kinsey archives. It serves as both an erotological record of visual data and an insightful catalyst to developing a greater understanding of human sexual behavior. Each artistic image not only collects "data" about the creator's psyche, but may also act as a sort of personal Rorschach inkblot to understanding the complexities of our own.

REFERENCES

Becherer. J. P. (1990). Selections from the collections of the Kinsey Institute. Bloomington, IN: The Kinsey Institute.

Bums, S., Stirratt, B., Wolin, J. A., & Yamashiro, J. P. (Eds.). (1997). The art of desire: Erotic treasures from the Kinsey Institute. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bums, S., Stirratt, B., Wolin, J. A., & Yamashiro, J. P. (Eds.). (1998). The kiss: Selections from the Kinsey Institute. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Johnson, C., Stirratt, B., & Bancroft, J. (Eds.). (2002). Sex and humor: Selections from the Kinsey Institute. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Webb, P. (1983). The erotic arts (2nd ed.). New York: Farrar, Stratus & Giroux.

Reviewed by Mark Kim Malan, Ph.D., M.P.H., 208 Ogden Canyon, Ogden, UT 84401; e-mail: [e-mail].