April 2016 Pulse
In its ‘FAQs on Sexuality’, the Health Promotion Board (HPB) of Singapore seems to base its understanding of human sexuality substantially, although not exclusively, on the studies conducted by Alfred Kinsey in the middle of the last century. HPB not only appears to accept Kinsey’s portrayal of sexuality as orthodox; it also seems disturbingly oblivious to the serious criticisms that these studies have come under.
Alfred C. Kinsey, a zoologist from Indiana University, has been dubbed the ‘father of the sexual revolution’ because of his provocative studies on human sexuality: Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953). These reports were allegedly responsible for turning conservative middle-class values upside-down in American society in the mid-20th century.
Here are some of the shocking findings in the Kinsey Reports: 85 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women had premarital sex; 50 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women had been unfaithful in marriage; 69 per cent of men had been with prostitutes; and 17 per cent of farm boys had sex with animals.
However, the Kinsey studies were seriously flawed, making their findings dangerously misleading.
For example, most of the 5,000 men surveyed were prison inmates, many of whom were sex offenders. The participants were mainly volunteers who were sexually adventurous and therefore out of the mainstream. Other participants were recruited via organisations and magazines that promoted homosexuality.
Stanton Jones and Mark Yardhouse point out that “this is obviously not the type of methodology a person would implement if he or she were trying to get a representative outlook on the sexual behaviour of the general population”.
Some writers opine that no other person in the 20th century has done more to bring homosexuality into the public forum than Kinsey.
Kinsey tried to normalise homosexuality in society by devising the Kinsey Scale and by insisting that 10 per cent of men between ages of 16 and 55 were homosexual. Ronald Bayer has perceptively observed that at the time, “for homosexuals who were just beginning their efforts at organisation and the struggle for social acceptance and legal rights, the findings were emboldening”.
But Kinsey’s findings are wide off the mark!
According to the nationwide studies conducted by the Battelle Human Affairs Research Centres in Seattle, only 1 per cent of the population was homosexual. In 1993, Time magazine reported that “recent surveys from France, Britain, Canada, Norway and Denmark all point to numbers lower than 10 per cent and tend to come out in the 1 to 4 per cent range”.
Kinsey’s materialistic philosophy of sex also profoundly skewed his studies. Sex, for Kinsey, was simply an animal response to physical stimuli and has nothing to do with love or procreation. According to anthropologist Margaret Mead, Kinsey was a radical sexual relativist for whom there is no difference between a man having sex with a woman and an animal.
Kinsey also attempted to normalise paedophilia and child abuse. (The Reports were obsessed with homosexuality and paedophilia.) In his 1948 book, Kinsey chillingly insisted that what most people would consider child rape was in fact “sex play” with children, which was harmless, especially when consent was given by the child.
In his 1953 work on female sexuality, Kinsey wrote: “It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts.”
In 1990, Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel exposed the Kinsey Reports as malicious deception in their book, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud. In a review, The Lancet states: “The important allegations from the scientific viewpoint are imperfections in the (Kinsey) sample and unethical, possibly criminal, observations on children … Dr Judith Reisman and her colleagues demolish the foundations of the two (Kinsey) reports.”
The Kinsey Reports are in reality propaganda for libertine pansexuality masquerading as a work of science.
Nevertheless, because they promote tolerance and sexual liberation, the Kinseyan myths continue to mesmerise the masses. Their influence in America over the decades is disturbingly evident in the legal system, education, psychiatry and culture.
But bad or bogus science is never good for society!
“Demythologising the Kinsey Reports,” insists Christian ethicist Sister Reneé Mirkes, “is absolutely essential” if we are to “stem the humanly destructive tide of sexual revolution”.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor of Christian Doctrine at Trinity Theological College and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.