How Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sex Studies Have Harmed Women and Children

Indiana University zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey shocked the nation in 1948 with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male 1, followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, 2 whose 50th anniversary is being celebrated this year by the Kinsey Institute. Compiling thousands of interviews, Kinsey reported that American women were either sexually repressed (married) or highly promiscuous. 

Kinsey’s studies have had an enormous impact on the law and the culture, despite later evidence that the research was fatally flawed and even involved cover-ups of child rape. In Kinsey, Sex and Fraud (1990), 3 Dr. Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel unmasked the Kinsey studies as a massive hoax. The medical journal The Lancet reviewed their findings and said: 

“[T]he important allegations from the scientific viewpoint are imperfections in the (Kinsey) sample and unethical, possibly criminal, observations on children. … Dr. Judith A. Reisman and her colleagues demolish the foundations of the two (Kinsey) reports.”4 

Here are some ways the Kinsey reports distorted reality: Denigrating motherhood “The Kinsey team allegedly recorded the sexual conduct of a total of 7,789 women in their sample, but the only births recorded were from single women … and children born through adulterous unions. … Kinsey gave no data on normal marital birth, no data on normal mothers.”5 

Misrepresenting the “married” sample Kinsey’s team had difficulty persuading married women to talk about their most intimate experiences, so he inflated the numbers of “married” women by including “untold numbers of sexually unconventional women as ‘married.’”6 

According to Kinsey, “They were identified as married if they were living with their spouses either informally consummated legal marriages or in common-law relationships which had lasted for at least a year.”7 

As Dr. Reisman writes, “Since the Kinsey team did not insist that ‘married’ women be exclusive with one man, their definition of ‘married’ could include the large population of prostitutes the team interviewed if they lived with their pimps.”8 Defining American husbands and fathers as sex offenders Kinsey falsely portrayed American men as awash in sexual experimentation and said that 95 percent of men committed sexual crimes such as rape, sodomy, incest, homosexuality, adultery, public exposure, fornication or other offenses. 

If most men were sexual criminals of one sort or another, Kinsey reasoned, then society should redefine what is “normal” and reduce penalties for sex offenses.9 Sanitizing child sexual abuse Kinsey also based his liberal view of child rape on research tabulated in Graph Tables 31- 34 in the male volume, which chronicled systematic sexual abuse of boys aged 2 months to 15 years old. Kinsey concluded that the boys, despite violent reactions and crying, enjoyed being manually and orally stimulated by pedophiles. To Kinsey, what most people thought was rape was mere “sex play” with children, which was essentially harmless, particularly if the child gave “consent.”10 

He also included this chilling observation: “Orgasm is in our records for a female babe of 4 months.”11 The Kinsey Institute, situated on Indiana University’s campus, continues to refuse to open the records of the Kinsey child sex data to public scrutiny. Kinsey’s fraudulent research painted a sanitized picture of sexual abuse. Of 4,441 females interviewed, 1,075 reported being “sexually approached” as a girl by an adult male. 

But Kinsey dismissed emotional and even physical harm. A comment: “[We] have only one clear-cut case of serious injury done to the child, and a very few instances of vaginal bleeding which, however, did not appear to do any appreciable damage.”12 Letting off child molesters With his benign view of child sexual abuse, Kinsey became an activist on behalf of child molesters. 

In 1949, for example, he testified before the California General Assembly’s Subcommittee on Sex Crimes, urging them to liberalize sex offense statutes. He argued specifically for granting immediate paroles to suspected child molesters and warned that societal “hysteria” does more harm to children than the actual molestations.13

Kinsey wrote: “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 persons or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts.”14 Going easy on rapists Over the years, law review articles and court opinions cited the Kinsey studies thousands of times. 

Kinsey worked with Columbia University law professor Herbert Wechsler to promote the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code (1955). Most states cited the code, which is largely based on Kinsey’s findings, as the blueprint to ease penalties for sex offenses, resulting in less protection for women and children from sexual predators.15 

As researchers Linda Jeffrey and Ronald Ray write, “Fifty years ago, 33 percent of the states in the union had no statute of limitations for reports of rape. Eighteen states provided the death penalty for rape of an adult woman.”16 All states dropped the death penalty for rape, and many now follow the Model Penal Code’s suggestion to impose a statute of limitations and to require proof that a rape victim physically resisted her attacker. 

Under the liberalized laws, rape cases took off. From 1962 to 1990, even with a more narrow definition, “forcible” rape increased by 366 percent.17 The Kinsey team seemed particularly insensitive to rape victims. In a 1965 book, several of them wrote of “the female desire to be forced,” and that, “As Dr. Kinsey often said, the difference between a ‘good time’ and a ‘rape’ may hinge on whether the girl’s parents were awake when she finally arrived home.”18 

Conclusion Alfred C. Kinsey’s studies have had a profoundly negative impact on American women and children, weakening legal protection from sexual abuse and falsely portraying “sexual liberation” as an unalloyed good, despite astronomic increases in divorce, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases and physical abuse of women and children. Instead of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Kinsey’s female volume, Indiana University – and Congress – should investigate Kinsey’s junk science and criminal cover-up. Robert H. Knight is director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. 

He wrote and directed the Family Research Council video documentary about Alfred Kinsey, titled The Children of Table 34, as well as a booklet, Dr. Kinsey and The Children of Table 34, which accompanies the video. Mr. Knight is indebted to Dr. Judith A. Reisman, who continues to shine a light on the Kinsey studies and their consequences.

 Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company), 1948. 

2 Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company), 1953. 

3 Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D., Edward W. Eichel, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People, (Lafayette, Louisiana: Lochinvar-Huntington House), 1990. 

4 The Lancet, Vol. 337, March 2, 1991, p. 547. 

5 Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D., Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences (Arlington, Virginia: Institute for Media Education), 1998, p. 111. 

6 Ibid, p. 114

7 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 53. 

8 Reisman, p. 114. 

9 Testimony before California Legislative Assembly Subcommittee on Sex Crimes, 1949, cited in Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences, p. 213. 

10 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, pp. 157-192. 

11 Ibid, p. 178. 

12 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 122, as cited in Reisman, p. 112. 

13 Testimony, op cit., cited in Kinsey, Crime & Consequences, p. 213, and Kinsey’s female volume, p. 121.

14 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 121. 

15 Linda Jeffrey, Ed.D, Col. Ronald D. Ray, J.D., A History of the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code: The Kinsey Reports’ Influence on Science-based Legal Reform 1923-2002, (Crestwood, Kentucky: First Principles Press, 2003). 

16 Ibid, p. 16. 

17 Ibid, p. 32, based on annual Statistical Abstracts of the United States. 

18 Paul Gebhard, John Gagnon, Wardell Pomeroy, et al., Sex Offenders (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 178, as cited in Jeffrey and Ray, p. 16.