Friday 26 January 2018

Alfred Charles Kinsey (Part two)



The sexual psychopath
 Journal of criminal law

Dr. Benjamin Karpman

'It is as if the man had consecrated his life to sex, which has become his consuming interest'






This was one of the books that influenced Kinsey. Many copies are still available
at the Kinsey Institute.





This profile of a sexual psychopath describes Alfred Kinsey's
life and behaviours perfectly.
Kinsey was born into a highly religious background of devout Christians, where sex was prohibited (outside of marriage) and a highly oppressive tool that ignited fear into children. Kinsey's father imposed strict rules on the household, including mandating Sunday as a day of prayer and little else. His adolescent explorations of sexuality left him deeply troubled, obsessed with masochism and unsure of his own sexual orientation. He suppressed his darkest sexual thoughts and continued to excel in his studies at school and as a boy scout. As an adult, he became one of the most influential founding fathers of 'sexology' Unfortunately and ironically, throughout his life, Kinsey's sexual 'knowledge' 'freedom' and obsession had consumed him to the point where he hurt many other people and ultimately destroyed himself. He had become so desensitised to all forms of sexual behaviours and experiences, that he ended up damaging his very psyche, his own sexual organs and inevitably, became impotent. The problem is that his legacy lives on and continues to be one of the most detrimental effects on society today.

 The following excerpts are from 'American experience- Kinsey'

During the course of his first fall in Indiana, he became acquainted with Clara Bracken McMillan, a junior majoring in chemistry whom he had met briefly during his visit to Bloomington the previous May, when he had interviewed for his job. In November, 1920 they went on their first real date. In January, Alfred proposed and Clara accepted. He was still grappling with his repressed childhood, he had never once been on a date with a woman or had sexual intercourse. Like Alfred, Clara had little experience dating and no experience with sex. They did not consummate their marriage until a year after the honeymoon.
Clara Bracken McMillan

This did nothing to mitigate Kinsey's long-standing doubts about sex, and it cannot have been much better for inexperienced Clara. The couple probably consulted one or more of the "marriage manuals" then in common circulation, but in the 1920s most such books preached self-control over the pursuit of uninhibited sexual pleasure. Eventually Alfred and Clara went to see a local doctor, who determined that Clara had an "adherent clitoris" and undertook the necessary corrective surgery. As the couple became more experienced and adventuresome, they began dispensing sexual advice to Indiana University students, who had no official source of such information. Clara herself became known as something of an expert on sex, and when the time came to "have a talk" with their daughters, many of the women in the neighbourhood turned to Clara for advice. Alfred and Clara had four children together.
At first, Alfred put considerable time into helping Clara with the children, but as they grew older he put more and more of himself into his work and less, inevitably, into his family. By that time, Kinsey had all but abandoned entomology to focus on sex research, and despite Alfred and Clara's sexually open relationship his new field of interest created friction. Longing to participate in his professional life, Clara immersed herself in his work, helping him entertain students and participants in his research, transcribing diaries and other materials that people had contributed to the project, and even participating in the filming of sexual intercourse among members of the research team.
 From the beginning of his formal sex research in 1938, Alfred Kinsey was fortunate to have a strong supporting cast of research assistants, people who shared his missionary fire along with the burden of interviewing subjects, analysing data, and drawing charts and graphs. Foremost among them were Clyde Martin, Wardell Pomeroy, and Paul Gebhard; to this list can be added Ralph Voris, Kinsey's favourite graduate student of the late 1920s, who though never a part of the institute profoundly influenced Kinsey's thinking about sex. Kinsey held sway over this group as a master over acolytes, driving them like hounds and encouraging, in the name of research, sexual relationships among the staff and their wives that would have meant the end of the project had they become publicly known.


 1950s Portrait of Dr Alfred C Kinsey and his original assistants Dr Wardell B Pomeroy Dr Paul H Gebhard and Dr Clyde E Martin



 The team expands and includes wives

(See excerpts from the Kinsey biography by James.H.Jones below)

  Ralph Voris - Kinsey appreciated Voris' love of and aptitude for fieldwork, and their relationship grew into a deep and lasting friendship. After Voris left Bloomington, the two exchanged letters of confidence about the intimate details of their marriages. By many accounts, Kinsey fell in love with the handsome young zoologist, but his desires were frustrated by society's condemnation of homosexuality. For if Kinsey's friendship with Voris did much to bring the homosexual side of his sexual persona to the surface, Voris was happily married to his college sweetheart, Geraldine, and showed little inclination to reciprocate. Nonetheless, they remained in touch, and as Voris lay dying in May of 1940, it was Kinsey whom Geraldine summoned to be with them in his last hours. Kinsey, of course, went, but Voris died before he got there.

 Clyde Martin - Entered Indiana University in the fall of 1937. Troubled by sexual angst, the young student sought out Kinsey and, in December 1938, gave him his sexual history. Recalling similar episodes in his own childhood, Kinsey could easily comprehend what Martin was going through, even breaking his longtime rule against telling interviewees about his own sexual history. But it wasn't only sex that was troubling Martin -- he was also suffering from a lack of funds. After the interview, Kinsey offered him a part-time job. The two would toil side by side in Kinsey's garden, stripped to the waist and yarning about sex. By the spring of 1939, Kinsey trusted Martin enough to ask him to help with the tabulation of Kinsey's sexual history survey results, and in 1941 Martin officially started as Kinsey's first research assistant, his salary paid by a grant from the Committee on Research in Problems of Sex.
 From the beginning, Kinsey found himself attracted to Martin, and as their relationship deepened Kinsey began trying to seduce the younger man, using his authority as professor and employer to persuade Martin to enter into an affair. Martin soon discovered that he was more heterosexual than homosexual, but Kinsey's sway over the student made it difficult for him to break free. As their affair progressed, Martin approached his employer about asking Kinsey's wife, Clara, to have sex with him. At first taken back, Kinsey quickly saw that Martin was asking no more of him than Kinsey was asking of the world. Kinsey gave Martin his blessing -- as did Clara -- and Martin and Clara entered into a sexual relationship. In May 1942, Martin married his girlfriend, Alice, in a simple ceremony in the same garden next to the Kinseys' house where he had first gone to work three years earlier. Martin remained a member of Kinsey's research team until the end, proving himself essential in adding up the numbers for both of Kinsey's famous books, compiling tables, and drawing charts.


Wardell Pomeroy - Kinsey met Wardell Pomeroy in 1941 in South Bend, Indiana, where Kinsey had gone to lecture about his favourite subject and drum up recruits for the survey. Pomeroy, then employed as a prison psychologist for the state of Indiana, approached Kinsey after the talk to ask questions. After chatting for a little while, Kinsey invited Pomeroy to give his sexual history, and Pomeroy said yes. When Pomeroy arrived at Kinsey's hotel the next morning, he found Kinsey in his room -- standing naked in front of the mirror, shaving, with Clyde Martin in attendance. After taking Pomeroy's history, Kinsey asked him to serve as his "contact man" in South Bend, one of an army of people around the country who, like a journalist's fixer, would put his employer in touch with friends, acquaintances, and in Pomeroy's case prisoners convicted of sex crimes.
The two men stayed in touch the following year, and in February 1943 Pomeroy went to work full time for Kinsey. If Martin was the numbers man, Pomeroy turned out to have a gift for interviewing. Almost as much as Kinsey himself, he could relate to anyone -- and convince them to open up to him with their deepest secrets. Though Pomeroy was married, Kinsey would eventually lure him into a brief affair.

 Paul Gebhard - Was born in 1917 in the tiny town of Rocky Ford, Colorado, and received both his B.S. and his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. In May 1946, on the recommendation of Harvard anthropology professor Clyde Kluckhohn, Kinsey wrote to Gebhard to see if he would be interested in joining his research team. Gebhard wrote back assuring Kinsey that he was not "afraid of sex," and even asserting, "Abnormal sexual behavior does not repel me... In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that our concept of the norm is too restricted when applied to actuality." Kinsey met Gebhard the following month in New York, offered him a job, and Gebhard went to work for Kinsey in Bloomington that August. Despite his marriage to Radcliffe alumna Agnes West, Gebhard soon entered into an affair with Alice Martin, Clyde's wife. While, in Gebhard's words, "Kinsey had no objection to interstaff sex," his relationship with Alice began to affect the Martins' marriage, and at Kinsey's behest the two called it off. Kinsey also tried to persuade him to dabble in homosexuality, but Gebhard soon discovered that it "wasn't his cup of tea." Of all of Kinsey's research assistants, Paul Gebhard endured longest at the institute, becoming its director upon Kinsey's death in 1956 and continuing in that role until his retirement in 1982.

 Alfred Kinsey grew up in a world where sex education, such as it was, focused on abstention. Masturbation was held to be sinful, a sickness with the power to erode one's physical health and moral rectitude. People were occasionally committed to mental institutions for excessive masturbation, or even, on rare occasions, castrated. Homosexuality was regarded with more than mere disgust, for "sodomy" was in most states a felony punishable by imprisonment. Between the two world wars, some junior high schools and high schools started offering sex education, either as part of required biology classes or under euphemisms like "mental health" or "social hygiene." Even then, these classes focused on sexual temperance and the hazards of losing control, including the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
 Hoping to save others from the sexual turmoil that had plagued his childhood, Kinsey argued for a different brand of sex education, one that would head off the guilt so often spawned by the Victorian system. He believed that parents should take the lead in providing their young with information about sex, and he and his wife Clara began educating their own children at an early age. Furthermore, he insisted that sex education should go beyond biology and seek to instill in children healthy attitudes about sex. As with everything he interested himself in, Kinsey tore into sex education with missionary fervor. Alfred and Clara started advising students at Indiana University informally about sex, having undergraduates over to their house for tea and sex talk. They even lent their car to at least one secretly married couple so that they could enjoy a little privacy away from the dormitories, and eventually neighborhood parents were consulting the Kinseys about what to tell their own children.
 The Institute for Sex Research was incorporated in 1947, only a year before Sexual Behavior in the Human Male appeared in bookstores, but Alfred Kinsey's sex research had begun two decades earlier, during entomological expeditions with favored graduate students. Out in the wild, his former students recalled, after a gruelling day traipsing through the woods in search of gall wasps, Kinsey would somehow always twist the campfire talk to sex, talking about his relationship with his wife, Clara, and asking them about their own sex lives. By the mid-1930s, Kinsey was making it known that any Indiana University student who had questions about sex could come to see him, but he formally inaugurated his research with the debut of the marriage course in 1938. Starting that fall, he began asking students in the course to complete a questionnaire on their sexual histories, and by the end of the semester he had collected sixty-two surveys.
 Kinsey's fascination with sex extended beyond monogamous, heterosexual intercourse. Seeking to probe every facet of human sexual experience, he began diversifying his sample, including first prison inmates -- drifters, imprisoned homosexuals, and hardened criminals alike -- and then homosexuals in the gay bars on Chicago's Rush Street. By all accounts, Kinsey's trips to Chicago influenced him deeply, for it was there that his own sexual attraction to men began to bubble to the surface. Faced with such temptation, Kinsey did not stop at gathering volunteers' sexual histories, but, at least for a short time, had sex with men he met.
 Enthralled by the incredible diversity of behavior he was discovering, which soon confirmed his hunch that natural variation applied as much to human sexual behavior as to gall wasp morphology, Kinsey began to envision a mammoth nine-volume series thoroughly documenting American sexuality. He would start with males and females, then go on to African Americans, sex offenders, homosexuals, prison inmates, prostitutes, and such topics as marriage and sex education. Kinsey decided that to realize such an ambitious undertaking he would have to take tens -- or even hundreds -- of thousands of interviews, of people from all walks of life, and for that he would need money.
 With his first grant under his belt, and more to come, Kinsey set out to recruit research assistants, people he could train to conduct interviews and trust not to betray confidences. In addition, because of they material they would be handling, they could not be sex-shy: "We can not use," Kinsey wrote, "anyone who is afraid of sex." First came Clyde Martin, an Indiana University undergraduate who started as Kinsey's assistant in 1941; Wardell Pomeroy, a prison psychologist with the state of Indiana, joined the staff in 1943; and Paul Gebhard, a Harvard-trained anthropologist, began in 1946. As each of these men joined his staff, Kinsey made him memorize the entire interview, in all of its possible permutations, as well as the code for recording the results. Then they would hit the road, travelling from city to city giving lectures and conducting as many as 300 interviews per week.

The Institute for Sex Research opened its doors in 1947, a private, non profit organization located on the second floor of Indiana University's Biology Hall, a few steps from the office Kinsey had occupied since his arrival in Bloomington in 1920. There, within its narrow confines, were housed thousands of interview records and the other fruits of his many field trips. By 1948, no longer satisfied with merely collecting other people's histories, Kinsey started encouraging his research staff to experiment sexually with each other. A series of liaisons followed among Kinsey, his staff, their wives, and invited guests. In 1949, he hired William Dellenback to film and photograph these people engaged in masturbation or intercourse. He collected a library of diverse items of erotica from around the world. He imported what he could not find at home, eventually attracting the attention of the FBI and the U.S. Customs Service and sparking a lawsuit that remained unsettled when he died in 1956, leaving a legacy of controversy and an undeniable impact on American society.

FBI- Alfred Kinsey files
 








Ongoing Research
The institute survived the lawsuit, the publication of Kinsey's two books about male and female sexual behavior, accusations of Communist activities, and the subsequent loss of its funding -- and exists today as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
 Alfred Kinsey finally started writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in the summer of 1945, almost seven years after taking his first sexual histories from students in the marriage course he taught at Indiana University. As in the marriage course, Kinsey proclaimed himself an impartial scientist: "This is first of all a report on what people do," he wrote famously, "which raises no question of what they should do." But despite his protestations, Kinsey constructed the entire work as a covert piece of advocacy, and what he was advocating was nothing short of a revolution in Americans' attitudes toward sex.

 The book's contents were nothing if not sensational. Among other statistics, Kinsey reported that more than 90% of American males masturbated, 85% had had premarital intercourse, 70% had patronized a prostitute at least once in their lives, almost 60% had had oral sex, and 30% to 45% had had extramarital intercourse. But most shocking was the revelation that some 37% of American males had had at least one homosexual encounter in their lives. Based on this observation, Kinsey argued that it did not make sense to divide people into two exclusive categories, heterosexual and homosexual; instead he argued for a six-point scale representing gradations of behavior from purely heterosexual to purely homosexual, and allowing for a range of possible combinations in between. In one fell swoop, Kinsey had blown the lid off the Victorian fiction that Americans simply did not have sex except within the bounds of marriage, and that to do anything differently was abnormal and wrong.

 As scholarly reviews started to trickle in, it became clear that there were problems with Kinsey's work. Reviewers complained that he ignored love, emotion, and the complexities of culture. But the most damaging critiques focused on his sampling method, questioning whether the enormous number of people he interviewed -- his pride and joy -- were representative of the American population. Indeed this was not an idle question, given Kinsey's predilection for recruiting college students, prostitutes, and prison inmates to participate in the study.
 Like the first volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was organized into three parts: (1) "History and Method," in which he sought to answer much of the criticism of the male book; (2) "Types of Sexual Activity Among Females," in which he discussed female sexual development from childhood through puberty, along with sex dreams, masturbation, and intercourse; and (3) "Comparisons of Female and Male." According to Kinsey's statistics, more than 90% of females had indulged in sexual petting, 66% had dreamt about sex, 62% had engaged in masturbation, 50% had had premarital sex, and 26% had had extramarital sexual encounters. Kinsey used these numbers to argue forcefully that women were no less sexual than men, and had as much right to seek out and expect sexual satisfaction. He further asserted that a satisfying, libidinous sex life was essential to marital bliss, and that women who had had sex before marriage were more likely to have happy, sexually satisfying marriages than those who had not.
 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female came out in September of 1953 to a second massive media blitz, coordinated by Kinsey himself, who was featured on the cover of Time magazine. He received many letters about the book, some critical and others anguished pleas for help, but many simply from women who wanted to thank him for his work. But if Kinsey expected his book to convince the nation that women were just as sexual as men, he was disappointed. Many news outlets did not even report the book's publication. Most of those that did sought to defend the purity and sanctity of American females from what they saw as Kinsey's assault, describing his work in such terms as "an indictment of American womanhood." Furthermore, critics that bothered to read the tables typically pointed out that even Kinsey's data showed that females were not as sexually active as males.

 Alfred Kinsey's last years were marked by controversy. The Cold War brought with it political crusades and a large measure of fear that American society was being corrupted. In 1953, following the publication of Kinsey's report on female sexuality, a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives chaired by Tennessee congressman B. Carroll Reece started investigating Kinsey and the Rockefeller Foundation for possible ties to the Communist Party. Over medical director Alan Gregg's objections, Dean Rusk, the foundation's newly appointed president (and, later, secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations), terminated Kinsey's funding.
 Kinsey was devastated, and though he spent the next two and one-half years trying to secure funding from alternate sources, he never succeeded. At the same time, his health was declining, as years of stress, long hours, sleeplessness, and ever-advancing congestive heart failure took their toll. In August of 1956, he fell while working in his garden, bruising his leg and causing a fatal embolism; several days later, on August 25, he died.



Excerpts from the Kinsey biography by James.H.Jones

































Kinsey installed sound-proofed rooms to stifle the screams and shrieks of his sexual sadists and masochists filmed in real time. Drunk and hyped, they sexually brutalized one another while Dr. Kinsey, his team and the Mrs. sat and watched it all – filmed in glorious black and white.











Screenshot of one of many 'Stag films' stored in the Kinsey institute


Although Kinsey and the Kinsey institute describe their films as 'erotica' Many of them are hard core and obscene pornography, such as bestiality. This is just a few titles from their collection.




Kinsey also admired the British occultist and sexual psychopath Aleister Crowley. He attempted to obtain Crowley's diaries and visited Crowleys Abbey of Thelema in Sicily with the pornographic film-maker Kenneth Anger.

Kinsey and Anger and image of Crowley







 Excerpts from 'Unleashing the beast'
Aleister Crowley, Tantra and Sex Magic in Late Victorian England
'Crowley deliberately set out to overturn what he saw as the oppressive, hypocritical attitudes of Victorian England, by identifying sex as the most central aspect of the human being and the most profound source of magical power'

'The battle will rage most fiercely around the question of sex….Mankind must learn that  the sexual instinct is…ennobling. The shocking evils which we all deplore are principally due to the perversions produced by suppressions. The feeling that it is shameful and the sense of sin cause concealment, which is ignoble and internal conflict which creates distortion, neurosis, and ends in explosion. We deliberately produce an abscess  and wonder why it is full of pus, why it hurts, why it bursts in stench and corruption.
The Book of the Law solves the sexual problem completely. Each individual has an absolute right to satisfy his sexual instinct as is physiologically proper for him''Now I'll shave and make up my face like the lowest kind of whore and rub on perfume and go after Genesthai [Russell] like a drunken two-bit prick-pit in old New Orleans. He disgusts me sexually, as I him, as I suspect…the dirtier my deed, the dearer my darling will hold me; the grosser the act the greedier my arse to engulph him!'
 Crowley would go to even further extremes of transgression during his years at the Abbey of Thelema.  In his diaries, he claims to have transcended all material distinctions, shattering the boundary between pure and impure, such that even the most defiling substances -- including human excrement -- became for him the pure Body of God. Thus the shit of his Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig, became the "Thelemic Host" in his Gnostic Mass:


Alfred Kinsey Meets with Kenneth Anger at Aleister Crowley Abbey Thelema.

The Kinsey institute hosts both Crowley and Anger biogs,books,documents and films in their library and also played Kenneth Anger films during the opening of their cinema in 2011.

 






The (now derelict) Abbey of Thelema

Kenneth Anger page on wikipedia








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