Kinsey Unzipped

What I admire most about the new movie "Kinsey" is its re-creation of a world in which Victorian attitudes enshroud human sexuality in taboos, ignorance and repression. It shows how badly mid-20th century Americans really needed Alfred C. Kinsey.

No scientist has polarized Americans more than this pioneer sex researcher. Nearly 50 years after his death, critics revile him as a charlatan and a fraud, while his many admirers lionize him as the architect of the sexual revolution, the patron saint of gay liberation and the archetype of a new postmodern American icon: the scientist as cultural hero.

Kinsey's findings on Americans' sexual behavior signaled "the end of 'hush and pretend,' " to use the words of a contemporary. In "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," both national bestsellers, he revealed the jarring gap between official morality and what Americans actually did in their private lives.

Before Kinsey, sex between a man and a woman within the institution of marriage was the only sexual act sanctioned by society. Based on face-to-face interviews with more than 18,000 people, Kinsey disclosed that Americans of both sexes -- and in substantial numbers -- masturbated, engaged in premarital and extramarital sex, had homosexual sex and, most shocking of all, had had sex with animals.

Many stunned and disbelieving Americans demanded to know more about Kinsey's science and the reliability of his data. Beginning with the publication of his first book in 1948 and continuing today, he and his team, along with their findings and methodology, have been finely dissected and scrutinized. During his lifetime, Kinsey's research was the subject of more than 500 academic symposiums at which high-powered scholars analyzed every detail in his books, especially those data that bore directly on sexual mores, sex education and sex-offender codes.

But most of the discussions centered on three issues: Kinsey's research methods, the representativeness of his sample and his penchant for editorializing.

Face-to-face interviews were the essence of Kinsey's methodology, but critics questioned whether interviews were the best instrument for cutting to the truth of people's sex lives. This concern was misplaced. Kinsey and his associates were remarkably skillful interviewers; the information they collected was trustworthy and complete. In short, you can take Kinsey's data to the bank.