Surprisingly I came to this conclusion while viewing the movie with 300 Sexologists attending the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. The audience was filled with sex educators, therapists, and researchers who have spent most of their life, as did Kinsey, studying human sexuality. So how can a movie about Alfred Kinsey, an individual that transformed how the world looks at human sexuality, not be about sex?

Kinsey wasn’t a trained sexual scientist. He started his professional life as a biology professor at Indiana University. He specialized in entomology and studied a small bug (about the size of a fruit fly) called the Gall Wasps. There are about three thousand species of gall wasps. The prevailing belief at the time was that all the individuals in a species were identical. Kinsey was not sure this was correct so he began collecting gall wasps. For each individual wasp he took twenty-eight different measurements, then glued it to a pinhead, and labeled it with species name, date and location of collection. His total collection numbers five million. He proved that indiviual wasps even if they were members of the same species show an infinite number of variations.

In 1938, while teaching a "marriage class" he realized that the students sexual experiences were far more varied than society recognized and that their desire for information was great. Many of their questions were unanswerable because there was no scientific literature about human sexual behavior. The data simply did not exist. Unlike the study of Gall Wasps, no one had researched human sexual behavior. He decided to study human sexual behavior in the same scientific manner, this time collecting histories and behaviors rather than specimens.

Once again his hypothesis that there would be an infinite variety within the species was clearly demonstrated in the Kinsey's studies, published in 1948 and 1953. The world view of sexuality was changed forever.

The Kinsey movie is really about the role of science in society. To quote one of the great living Sexologists of our time Dr. Vern L. Bullough; “He believed in the methods of science and the ability of science to reveal reality. He felt that all he needed to do was present the real data and they would be accepted. This was his primary motivation for studying sexual activity, something to which there was an answer based in reality, not what individuals thought about sex, or imagined while they were having sex, or how they described themselves. “

Kinsey may not have expected this revealed reality to be so controversial. He eventually lost his research funding due to the political storm created by his work.

Dr. Bullough and hundreds of other sexual scientists at the SSSS national meeting know how sexuality research can cause controversy. They know how difficult it is to replace assumptions and beliefs with reality. Many of them have been professionally and personally attacked for just conducting scientific research. In my own work of presenting my seminars and writing my five books I have had many tell me how important this information is to their lives and that I needed to keep doing it people everywhere need and want this information.

I am proud to be a sexual scientist and to be part of a group who continues to scientifically study all areas of human sexuality. Kinsey would have loved to be a member of this organization. It would have given him the support of colleagues “en masse” that he never experienced.

News Bulletin: The new Kinsey film is not history it is about modern day America!

And if you are interested the Kinsey Institute website is www.kinseyinstitute.org , or you can call
812-855-7686 for more information.

Warmly,