Kinsey movie

[Elinor]

A very funny movie most of the time.
In a nut shell we are all different sexually.
Opressed human beings with guilt complexes.

I recommend the picture.


But has anyone read his book?
Does he say anything about crossdressing?
_________________
Call me a Janegirl because a Janegirl is what I am! :)

[donnie123abc1]

What's the name of the movie? And where is it playing? Are we talking BEN KINSEY, the actor? Or am I mistaken?

Dawn Marrie

[Melissa A.]

Hi Donnie,

The name of the movie is "Kinsey", I have only seen the ads in the theatre and did not know it was released yet. (thanks, Elinor)

I don't pretend to be an expert on them, so I may be mistaken:
Mr. Kinsey and his partner, who I believe was his wife (again, I could be totally wrong about that) were psychologists who published a report on human sexuality in either the late 50's or early 6o's. It was titled, appropriately, "Human Sexuality".

It was very long, comprehensive, and highly controversial at the time. Some thought they were just perverts. Others, then and to this day, believe it was ground breaking and invaluable. I do know that public discussion of human sexuality was never the same. So in that sense, it was groundbreaking. It opened doors to discussion and destoyed the taboos about discussing sex in a public forum.

In many ways, this forum one of the many results. As is American society, which is still quite repressed (at least by European and other standards), in terms of being able to open up and discuss sex and sexual behavior in a healthy, adult way.

Of course, if you follow current events, and the current administration's policies on sex ed and other issues, you may take issue with that, depending on where you fall in the political spectrum.

But I think, all in all, the Kinsey report, thogh highly controversial at the time, is regarded as a positive development.

Hugs,

Melissa :)

[DonnaT]

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf=info&id=1808468330

http://sexuality.about.com/od/eroticlit/a/kinseymovie.htm

[donnie123abc1]

I'll have to check out the links DonnaT provided. You said Kinsey and I automaticaly thought of BEN KINGSLEY the actor from "House of Sand and Fog." Which incidently was the right movie at the right time with all the iraq stuff going on in the news.
Got any info about the KINSEY book?


Dawn Marrie

[ToniB]

Melissa's right girls, Kinsey broke all the taboos of his day, but the total content of his report was based on interviews that had been undertaken and experiences he had with the American public. The establishment were horrified to find that Americans were admitting to sexual activities which were not "missionary position with the lights out", and denounced him as a liar, heretic, pornographer, or whatever they could think of to discredit him. But it's difficult to disprove the result of as many interviews as he and his assistants had undertaken! His work is now considered a classic, and very avant garde for the 1950s

I suspect his revelations were tame compared to what we would find if we repeated the interviews today, but it was all new ground at the time! And I don't know if it included any revelations about CD activity.

ToniB

[celeste26]

Americans have this puritanical streak in us that means anything that smacks of real sex is just not spoken of by "polite" society.(we all know that already) Part of the controversy was that the selection of prisoners as interviewees and other socially "underclass" people probably skewed the results. Overloading the expectations towards the "non-normal" side (whatever that is). The church going crowd has completely discounted the ideas presented in Kinsey's work. While the GLBT crowd uses them to make themselves fit into normal group. It all depends upon whose looking at the results I guess.

[Chrissycd]

18,000 people from all different social classes. He had an uncanny ability to get people to discuss their sex lives at a time when it was just not considered proper to do so. He wrote one report (book) about the sex lives of men and later wrote one about women. The first was the talk of the social landscape for years afterwards and was accepted wholly, and anxiously by the public even though its content revealed things that people would have never admitted openly about their relationships in polite company.
The second book was the cause of all the hysteria because it knocked women off of the virgin Mary perch that society had placed them upon. People just could not accept the facts presented in that book because they just did not want to believe that women are sexual creatures with just as many needs as men. The public was in such denial that there were all kinds of investigations launched to discredit the methodology of the research and the interviews. One thing that was made a big deal of was the fact that he interviewed pedophiles as part of the cross section of society. Ooops. That was enough to label him a pervert and a sexual deviant out to push his own agenda. It is true that Kinsey himself had a desire to understand the variety of sexual experiences to be had, and he'd actually engage in many of them, calling it "research". He slept with men, women, his colleagues wives, young women, older women, whatever.
How do I know this and will I ever shutup you ask?
PBS, that liberal fountain of intellect that keeps me sane, actually just aired an two hour documentary about him that I happened to come across and watch a few weeks ago. If you want to know more, go to PBS.ORG and I'm sure you can.
Sadly, Kinsey died only a short time after his second book came out, so he didn't really live long enough to fight his accusers. Plus, his second book came out just as the McCarthy era witch hunts began in the mid fifties. Maybe it is a good thing he passed on when he did. McCarthy and his minions would have probably had him thrown in jail for some ridiculous reason. Much like science is viewed today as questionable theorizing rather than fact, that was a dark era for intellectual progress. Looks like things do work in cycles, doesn't it?
Chrissy

[Rachel Ann]

Well, what Kinsey (and his wife) did accomplish was to legitimize the study sexual behavior as an academic pursuit. The immense body of work by Masters and Johnson ("Human Sexual Response" etc.) would never have been possible without the ground laid by Kinsey's work.

This of course had a profound impact on psychology and on medicine in general. And who knows how much it contributed to the politics of the status of women?

Yes, Chrissy, Kinsey was a terribly flawed individual. His story reminds me of how Leary got himself and Alpert (Ram Dass) thrown off the Harvard faculty for feeding LSD to undergraduates in settings that were clearly parties, not controlled studies!

But the presence of corrupt and wrong-thinking individuals in academia is as old as academia itself. What matters is the education and knowledge that comes from it.

[Julie]

There's a clip of the movie on the link below.

http://eircom.mymovies.net/synopsis/?filmid=4131&sec=np (http://eircom.mymovies.net/synopsis/?filmid=4131&sec=np)

JJ

[Chrissycd]

I didn't intend for anyone to think that I though ill of Kinsey by my previous post. Wow! I thought I was praising him!!! I admire him greatly, in fact.
Chrissy

[Rachel Ann]

I thought I was praising him!!! I admire him greatly, in fact.
I fear it is I who gave you the wrong impression. I admire Kinsey too. Hoever, many people I have admired greatly as scholars, artists, musicians, etc. were nevertheless flawed as individuals ("no man is a hero to his valet"). And I certainly don't think that Kinsey was as bad as Leary, who I hope is burning in hell! But he did have sex with research subjects, which is a no-no.