All You Need to Know about Alfred Kinsey

In three passages, all courtesy of Joseph Epstein:

“The man I came to know,” Jones writes in his preface, “bore no resemblance to the canonical Kinsey.” Instead of a cool scientist, Jones discovered a man of missionary zeal, “a crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual mores . . . of the United States” and who was perfectly willing to bend the canons of science to that purpose. More: while traveling under the flag of a disinterested researcher, Kinsey himself led a secret life as a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a homosexual, and a masochist.

As a number of critics pointed out at the time, and as James T. Jones's biography now makes definitively clear, Kinsey's “interpretations” rested less on the findings of biology, or on science of any kind, than on his own social-sexual agenda. Joseph Epstein

Alfred Kinsey was a moral revolutionary in scientist's clothing. The science was bad, even bogus; the man himself may now be forgotten; but the revolution came to stay, with a vengeance. Kinsey's message–fornicate early, fornicate often, fornicate in every possible way–became the mantra of a sex-ridden age, our age, now desperate for a reformation of its own.