AFY describes the nation’s sex education debate as being between ideology and science. They think they’re on the side of science.
It would be easy to dismiss the unnerving “advice” provided by one Heather Corinna, a dyed-in-the-wool radical “feminist activist,” who “lives in Seattle with her partner and cat,” and—in between online chats with confused teens—brings erotica to the web. She’s just one person. But she has support from eminent organizations, supposedly dedicated to the health and well being of young people. They actually endorse Heather Corinna’s anything-goes, agenda-driven website, despite the fact that she promotes a lifestyle that most medical providers—to say nothing of parents—would find alarming.
Over 90 percent of parents want their kids to delay sexual behavior. So why do authorities on the government payroll usher teens to websites16 where high risk behavior is assumed, and deviant behavior normalized? Why don’t they encourage the smartest, healthiest message, and forget all the politics and kinky stuff?
I look forward to an opportunity to pose these questions publicly. In the meantime, I’ve been to the library. I learned how sex ed—originally called “social hygiene” and “family life education”—was first taught in the last century; about Alfred Kinsey, who introduced a new model of human sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s; and about the institutionalization of this model through SIECUS in the 1960s. I studied the books written for parents and teens, and read biographies, interviews, op-eds, court testimony, and obituaries.
You need to know what I discovered.
The Kinsey Scale of Human Sexuality
To understand how an individual such as Heather Corinna became a recognized teen sexuality instructor, you must understand Alfred Kinsey.
Well, maybe not understand him—that would require a team of seasoned psychiatrists. So let’s just say, you must be familiar with him. Dr. Kinsey was to sex education what Henry Ford was to the automobile. He was the master architect of a new model of human sexuality—a model based on his conviction that in modern society, traditional morality is irrelevant and destructive. Judeo-Christian teachings have it all wrong. “Sexuality is not an appetite to be curbed,” he insisted. He believed that monogamy is unnatural; rather, the “human animal”—a term Kinsey liked to use—is pansexual .
Pansexual? Kinsey’s authoritative biographer, James Jones, explains the professor’s meaning. Kinsey believed that in our natural state—that is, free from social constraints—we humans would become sexually active early in life, enjoy intercourse with both sexes, indulge in a variety of behaviors, and eschew fidelity. Kinsey applauded practically every kind of sexual activity, Jones writes, and he disapproved of sexual abstinence .17
So, who exactly was Alfred Kinsey, and how did he reach his conclusions about human sexuality? Kinsey was not a student of human biology or psychology. His training was in the classification of insects. Prior to his scrutiny of human sexual behavior, he collected and classified wasps. Lots of wasps. Like over eight million.18
There’s more, but I must warn readers that disturbing material lies ahead. In moments you’ll wish for a “brain-bleach” to blot out what you have absorbed.
Alfred Kinsey was a bona fide mental case. The American Psychiatric Association will disapprove of my choice of words, but really, what other term adequately describes a man who, throughout his life, experienced pleasure by inserting foreign objects—straws, pipe cleaners, pencils, and toothbrushes—into his penis?19 Who climbed into a bathtub and removed his foreskin with a pocketknife?20 Who suspended himself in the air by a rope tied around his scrotum ?21
“Masochist” falls short, don’t you think? Kinsey’s pathology went beyond the pursuit of pain and humiliation—his biography describes a man consumed by a grotesque, debilitating, dangerous obsession with sex. The man was a slave—to his insatiable appetite and to his compulsive, self-destructive needs. Through the years, in spite of his professional success and international fame, his self-inflicted brutality only increased: near the end of his life, Kinsey landed in the hospital after traumatizing his genitals, taking months to recover.
“Kinsey had become a secret reformer in pursuit of the great cause of his life,” writes his biographer. “Sex research had given him a way to conduct a public crusade for private reasons, a way to join his outer and inner identities.”
—James Jones
Here are some Kinseyian highlights (maybe lowlights would be more accurate):• He set up a recording studio in his attic to film sexual encounters with his wife and among members of his “inner circle”—staff members, graduate students, and their wives.
• His primary interest was in male sadomasochistic behavior,22 for which “outsiders” were invited to star in his attic performances.
• He was a sexual exhibitionist: “Kinsey seldom passed up an opportunity to show off his genitals and demonstrate his various masturbatory techniques to staff members.”23
• Kinsey was all in favor of adult-child sexual contact—what we think of as child molestation—and considered adults who engaged in it “much maligned.”
• For his “research,” he interviewed jailed pedophiles and sex offenders and trolled the seedier parts of Chicago and New York City, befriending male prostitutes, transvestites, sadists, and masochists.
Why is this macabre tale important to tell? Because modern sex education derives from the personal philosophy of this man—a man enslaved to the urges of a warped mind, who in all probability did not know even one day of healthy sexuality in all his sixty-two miserable years.24
He set out to prove to the world, and probably himself, that there really wasn’t anything wrong with him; and lo and behold, it turned out that his research on human sexuality did just that. In order to get there, Kinsey and his disciples reduced sexual behavior to a physiological act: emotionless, without context, meaning, or consequences. That’s freedom, they said—freedom from judgment, laws, moral restrictions, and religious doctrine. They embraced freedom to be a “human animal.”
When the sexually tormented entomologist turned from insects to humans, he wanted to know one thing: what Americans did behind closed doors. Assisted by two colleagues, he interviewed thousands of volunteers about their personal lives. They were asked question such as: Do you masturbate? Engage in homosexuality? Adultery? Bestiality? Then he catalogued their responses, crunched the numbers, and filled two tomes (a report on men in 1948, and one on women in 1953) with statistics, diagrams, and charts. His conclusions: most Americans engaged in some prohibited type25 of behavior and were living a life of lies; the average mom and dad—think Leave It to Beaver sort of folks—were practicing a variety of forbidden sexual activities; no one is truly heterosexual or homosexual; heterosexuality is only “a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern.”
Kinsey’s findings spawned a revolution and transformed western culture.
The problem is, Kinsey’s “research” was fundamentally flawed. His research and findings were questioned at the time by everyone from Time magazine,26 to the distinguished anthropologist Margaret Mead, to one of the country’s leading psychiatrists, Lawrence Kubie. Kinsey’s samples were too small and the demography was badly skewed. He excluded some populations and focused on others—most notably, imprisoned felons. His subjects were pre-selected, since he relied on volunteers for his data.
When Kinsey’s work was published, Margaret Mead said it reduced sexuality “to the category of a simple act of elimination”27 and “suggests no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep.”
Kubie charged that Kinsey’s report contained “inaccurate data, wholly unwarranted implications, distortions, errors, exaggerations, errors in sampling, interviewing and treatment of statistics . . . ideas that are patently absurd.”
“[I]t is incorrect and misleading to assume,” the Yale professor wrote, “that because something is widespread in human behavior it must therefore be regarded as ‘normal’... th
is is demonstrably fallacious. In times of epidemic the common cold may afflict more than 50% of the population. This, however, does not make colds normal.”28
Maybe it made Kinsey feel better about himself to find safety in numbers and to conclude that if everyone was doing it, it must be normal. The problem is, it just isn’t true that a behavior or activity can be considered “normal” if it is “common.” The time has come to stop talking about normal and abnormal and think about behaviors in terms of whether they promote health or disease.
However normal or abnormal we think Kinsey’s views are, in the end, they prevailed. The criticism of his methods just didn’t seem to matter. The popular press accepted his conclusions without question, and printing presses ran constantly to keep up with demand for his first book—a three pound, 804-page volume. “Not since Gone with the Wind had booksellers seen anything like it,” noted TIME magazine.29
“In father-daughter incest, the daughter’s age makes all the difference in the world. The older she is, the likelier it is that the experience will be a positive one. The best sort of incest of all, surprisingly enough, is that between a son and a mother who is really educating him sexually, and who then encourages him to go out with girls.”62
—Kinsey associate and former SIECUS president Wardell Pomeroy.
Despite the strong and serious objections to his theories and methodology from people who knew what they were talking about, his theories and conclusions took root. Today’s sexual mores, sex offender laws, and “safer sex” curricula are founded on his ideology and research.
Scratch the surface of SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, and other groups, and you’ll discover that they are essentially mouthpieces for his views. In the upside down world of sex education, the ideology of Alfred Kinsey has been enshrined. Here’s how it happened.
Following Kinsey’s death in 1956, members of his inner circle—you know, his “close” associates—continued his mission. Paul Gebhard took over the helm at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. Wardell Pomeroy,30 who regularly participated, along with his wife, in Kinsey’s attic get-togethers—founded the Advanced Institute of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, where thousands have been awarded degrees in “sexology,” or become certified to become your child’s sex educators. And in the early 1960s, the Kinsey worldview31 was institutionalized when Mary Calderone established the country’s first modern sex education organization, giving it the authoritative-sounding name, Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS.
Calderone, who had been director of Planned Parenthood prior to the creation of SIECUS, was a medical doctor. But the focus of her newly launched organization, which was, by the way, founded with seed money from Hugh Hefner32 of Playboy fame,33 was not to treat or prevent disease. Like Kinsey, she was crusading for social reform. Her book for parents reads like a primer for his views, and quite a few Kinsey disciples had eminent positions with SIECUS. Calderone—known for her liberal use of four letter words in lectures34—believed there was an urgent need to break from traditional ideas about sex, especially the way it was taught to young people. She found fault with the model used in school-based programs because they focused on preventing pregnancy and venereal diseases—as sexually transmitted diseases were called. Calderone believed that when the negativity of sex educators is added to society’s repressive morality, the result is too many no’s.
They decided it was time for a different approach—one based on yes’s. They believed sex must be affirmed as positive, natural, and healthy.35 The time was right: thanks to antibiotics, the most common venereal diseases—gonorrhea and syphilis—were being obliterated.36 “We have basically wiped out infection in the United States,” the surgeon general declared in 1967.37 Birth control pills had become widely available. With hazardous infections easily cured,38 and pregnancy preventable, the only obstacles to replacing the no’s with yes’s were middle class morality and convention.
At Calderone’s side was fellow activist Lester Kirkendall. With A Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, Kirkendall was described in Alternative Lifestyles as “a pioneer in the study of intimacy...his interest in sexuality has focused on alternative avenues to fulfillment in recent years.”39
Using materials from the Kinsey archives (i.e. films from the attic), a technique called Sexual Attitude Restructuring (SAR) was created. Simply put, this is a multimedia onslaught of pornographic images: films and slides of “a broad range of sexual behavior, with no emotional or relationship elements,” projected on multiple large screens simultaneously, with audio, for hours at a time, over the course of two days. The experience—called F-ck-O-Rama in its early days—is followed by small group discussions. Its objective? “To desensitize members of the audience, so they won’t be shocked by a wide variety of sexual behavior.”63
What was SIECUS’s stance on this pornographic extravaganza? That’s easy: SAR creator Richard Chilgren was on the board in 1972.64 To Wardell Pomeroy, SAR was “therapeutic.” Since its inception, tens of thousands of therapists in training, members of human services professions, and individuals been through SAR. It continues to be offered within the sex ed industry.65
Kirkendall came up with a “bill of sexual rights.” Inspired, no doubt, by the bi-centennial—the year was 1976—the bill declared, among other things, “The boundaries of human sexuality need to be expanded” and “Physical pleasure has worth as a moral value.”40 In keeping with the Kinsey tradition, what made sense to this SIECUS co-founder was pluralism of lifestyles, such as communes, spouse exchanges, and polygamy.
Together, Calderone and Kirkendall set out, through SIECUS, to transform how American children were taught about sex. Openness, tolerance, and joy were in; church lady and horse needles in the tush—injections of antibiotics to treat venereal diseases—were out. They were fired up and confident. Calderone even wrote to the Pope telling him he should not condemn masturbation, because studies had shown it was not harmful. He didn’t answer.41
With or without the Vatican’s blessing, they embarked on a crusade: to inculcate in American youth what were seen by them as eternal, unquestionable truths. Of course in those early years, Kinsey’s personal life, and therefore the depth of his emotional disturbance, was unknown. Still, instead of recognizing that their views were based on the ruminations of one individual, SIECUS promoted—and continues to promote—Kinseyian thinking as if it had been engraved on tablets and revealed while thunder roared and trumpets flared.
“Happy Birthday, Dr. Kinsey.”
It’s June 23, Alfred Kinsey’s birthday. Planned Parenthood’s website marks the occasion with a flattering photo of the professor, and a celebration of his achievements.
“[Dr. Kinsey’s] groundbreaking scientific investigations ... tore through the century-old veils of hypocrisy....” He demonstrated “unheard-of truths,” and made “unique contributions”—one of them a “core belief” they hold “dearly”: Sexuality is an essential, life long aspect of being human and should be celebrated with respect, openness, and mutuality.42
At a teacher-training conference in New Jersey sponsored by the Network for Family Life Education, a workshop began with this warm-up exercise:
“Turn to the person next to you. Make eye contact. Say
‘Hello, penis.’ Shake hands and return the greeting:
‘Hello, vulva.’ ”66
They worship this guy! Now hold on a minute. Isn’t he the same Alfred Kinsey who . . . well, you just read all about him—no need to rehash the gruesome details. Really, how could this depraved individual and his discredited research be the source of anyone’s “core belief,” let alone a worldwide organization claiming to be “America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care”?43
Yet that’s the case. When Heather tells kids that “normal is a pretty arbitrary term” and nearly any sexual behavior can be “healthy and empowering,” she’s spouting his message. When educators encourage kids to question what
they’ve heard at home and church, to be open to the full “range” of sexual expression, and to explore and experiment, they are transmitting Kinsey’s legacy.
So, if Kinsey is the idol of the sex ed religion, here are their indisputable articles of faith, the cornerstones of modern sex education.
1. Sexuality is our entire selves, influences us in every way, and encompasses everything.
This is not just self-actualization gobbledygook. This premise provides the rationale for integrating sex education “across the curriculum.” Translation: it can be introduced to your daughter in English, Math, and Social Studies, without your consent. Why shouldn’t it? It’s not about intercourse, it’s language arts. How can a parent object to that? In a fourth grade 44 English class, for example, sex ed can be tied in with communication skills. Teachers are instructed, in the SIECUS and Planned Parenthood-recommended book Teaching About Sexuality and HIV: Effective communication is a key goal of effective sexuality education—a goal shared with language arts programs. Why not, then, teach the concepts and values of sexuality by employing such methodologies as reading books, writing poetry, talking with others—in short, by building upon the components of language arts programs? .... Viewing sexuality as a part of life allows us to teach elementary sexuality education without concern or trepidation.45
One prominent New Jersey sex educator came up with a creative way to express this article of faith. She put it this way: “You are not just being sexual by having intercourse. You are being sexual when you throw your arms around your grandpa and give him a hug.”46
The problem with these views is once kids believe that sexuality is “who they are,” “their entire selves” from womb to tomb, the idea that it’s an appetite in need of restraint makes little sense. And the notion of waiting years for the right time and person sounds irrational. Why restrain “who you are”? Why wait for “your entire self”? Couldn’t that be unhealthy?
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