Alfred Kinsey – Sexual behavior in children (empirical sexology)

https://kinseyinstitute.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kinsey
Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute have caused the direct and indirect abuse of thousands of children since the publishing of his first books on human sexuality. Kinsey experimented with 2-month-old babies. In addition, a 4-year-old child reportedly had 26 orgasms in 24 hours. This is an all day, all night experiment involving sexual experimentation/torture on children. Kinsey received many awards and even appeared on the cover of Time magazine when the second book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was published was published in 1953. The media coverage was unprecedented for a book (Gathorne-Hardy, 1998) and has probably only been surpassed in modern times by J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Over the decades, Kinsey’s books, his his sexual study, his research team, his Institute for Sexual Research and and more recently the film about his life, have all been the subject of considerable controversy, admiration and anger.

“If a child were not culturally conditioned, it is doubtful if it would be disturbed by sexual approaches…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 person, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts”
~ Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 120-22

“There are, of course, instances of adults who have done physical damage to children with whom they have attempted sexual contacts…But these cases are in the minority, and the public should learn to distinguish such serious contacts from other adult contacts which are not likely to do the child any appreciable harm if the child’s parents do not become disturbed.
~ Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 120-22

Chapter 5 of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male (1948) is entitled “Early Sexual Growth and Activity”. Included within it are the details of sexual experiments involving between 317 and 1,7461 male children 2, 5 months to 14 years old.
2. These experiments involved “manual and oral stimulation” of the children’s genitals by adults. In a detailed table entitled “Examples of Multiple Orgasms in Pre-Adolescent Males” [Table 34], Kinsey detailed the time taken by the babies and children to achieve “multiple orgasms”. The timings were made with a stopwatch.

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See also: Tate, T. (Producer). (1998). Secret History: Kinsey’s Paedophiles [Television series episode]. Yorkshire Television.

Abstract: Following on from the discussion on ‘making sense’ of paedophilia through historical, cross-cultural and cross-species examples, this chapter now turns to one specific body of data and analysis developed by the biologist Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues at Indiana University and set out in a key text published in 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Since its first publication, Kinsey’s work has been the focus of controversy and misinterpretation and it is therefore essential to return to this famous but little-read original source-material for analysis. The impact that this work has had on modern Western society has been profound, and the extraordinary fame of Kinsey’s study on sexual behaviour has recently been revived in the popular imagination by the Hollywood biopic Kinsey (2004), written and directed by Bill Condon and starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney. The unique data from Kinsey’s survey of sexual behaviour — and the manner in which they were published and discussed both in Kinsey’s original book and in Condon’s film almost sixty years later — not only provide us with a lens through which to examine changes in attitude to the idea of adult-child sexual contact but also show us how such changes in attitude were effected.

Goode, S. D.. (2011). ‘Early Sexual Growth and Activity’: The Influence of Kinsey. In Paedophiles in Society (pp. 86–125). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1057/9780230306745_4
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Further References

Escoffier, J.. (2020). Kinsey, psychoanalysis and the theory of sexuality. Sexologies

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.sexol.2020.03.005
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“In this paper, i will take up questions about the historical epistemology of sex research and the theory of sexuality, and about the impact of kinsey’s epistemological break with sexology and the freudian theory of sexuality — and of the damaging results for both freudian theory and kinsey’s research program. the kinsey reports challenged the cognitive order of the field of research on sexuality in general and as a ‘discipline’. such a state, according to thomas kuhn, often marks the start of a scientific revolution and leads to a process of rebuilding and the formulation of dramatically new theoretical and empirical approaches, thus issuing in a new dominant paradigm. this did not take place in the wake of the kinsey reports. original psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality virtually stopped, and while kinsey was seen as the successor of ‘empirical sexology’ a la havelock ellis, few if any of his analytical innovations (such as the measurable concept of sexual outlet, the ‘kinsey’ interview, and the kinsey scale) were adopted by his successors. the kinsey approach not only failed to replace freudian theory with any sophisticated theory of its own, but it also failed to establish a viable research tradition or a more robust empirical account of the individual’s sexual behavior. the encounter between the freudian paradigm and the kinsey research program had severely damaged both sides. neither side seemed to recognize that the basic incommensurability of the two approaches was the real scientific challenge.”
Bullough, V. L.. (1998). Alfred kinsey and the kinsey report: Historical overview and lasting contributions. Journal of Sex Research

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/00224499809551925
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“The modem study of sexuality was dominated by the medical perspective before 1940. kinsey, a biologist, brought to the study of sexual expression a taxonomic approach-that is, an interest in classification and description. his initial efforts were supported by an exploratory grant in 1941 and by the administration at indiana university. kinsey developed his interview methodology and conducted over 8,000 interviews himself. his results challenged many widely held beliefs about sexuality, including the belief that women were not sexual. his work contributed to both the feminist and the gay/lesbian liberation movements. he was determined to make the study of sex a science, and in large part he succeeded.”
Fairyington, S.. (2008). Kinsey, bisexuality, and the case against Dualism. Journal of Bisexuality

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/15299710802501876
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“Reprinted from the gay & lesbian review/worldwide, july-august 2005, this article examines bisexuality primarily in terms of alfred kinsey’s sex research. changing cultural and clinical definitions of bisexuality stand in stark contrast with the reality of bisexuals’ lived experience. bisexuality, despite its prevalence as reported in the kinsey report, is an existence that does not necessarily include bisexual identity. obstacles to conducting accurate research on bisexuality include lack of a clear standard of bisexuality, a disconnect between bisexual behavior and identity, and underfunding of research. © the haworth press.”
Drucker, D. J.. (2010). Male sexuality and Alfred Kinsey’s 0-6 scale: Toward “a sound understanding of the realities of sex”. Journal of Homosexuality

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2010.508314
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“Using a 0-6 scale, alfred kinsey demonstrated that the complexity of human sexuality could best be represented on a continuum rather than as a binary. kinsey developed the scale from models created by his predecessors in human sex research. a primary intention of the scale was to eradicate sexual identity categories altogether in order to eliminate sexual identity-based persecutions and to promote equal rights. as proponents and opponents of homosexual rights both depended on constructions of sexual identity to advance their agendas, kinsey’s ideal was never realized. the scale nonetheless continues to challenge postmodern associations of identity and sexuality. © taylor & francis group, llc.”