Washington Post Book World Editor Ron Charles does a marvelous free weekly newsletter, Book Club, that I highly recommend. The most recent edition notes that this month marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey and his research associates at Indiana University, Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin. As Charles notes, "serious questions have been raised about how truly representative and reliable Kinsey's data was. ... But in the aftermath of World War II and the advent of the atomic age, Kinsey's explosive research was referred to as 'the K-Bomb.' When it blew away the covers, Americans suddenly knew more about what Mr. and Mrs. America were up to--and it turned out that Mr. America was sleeping with other Mr. Americas a lot more frequently than anybody knew."
Charles goes on to observe: "The book-banning craze raging across America is, in some ways, a continuation of the fight over Kinsey's 75-year-old claims about the varieties of sexual experience. About 40% of the titles condemned today by conservatives feature main characters who are LGBTQ+. There is a concerted effort to repress such representation on the grounds that it's fundamentally inappropriate or corrupting." Yet, as Kinsey wrote, "There is an abundance of evidence that most human sexual activities would become comprehensible to most individuals, if they could know the background of each other individual's behavior."
No comments:
Post a Comment