Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things; A Biography. - Review - book review

Journal of Sex Research, August, 1999 by Vern L. Bullough

Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things; A Biography. By Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998, 514 pp. illus. Cloth, 20 [pounds sterling].

What a difference a biographer makes. Gathorne-Hardy is sympathetic to Kinsey and what he was trying to do; thus, although he includes much the same data as James Jones (1997) does, Kinsey appears as an almost entirely different person. Gathorne-Hardy, who only found out that Jones was working on a biography after he had started his, probably found his task somewhat easier because of Jones' work. Certainly he did not feel the need to devote the more than 25 years that Jones did to the subject. He does retrace much the same path taken by Jones who, to his credit, deposited much of his source material in the library of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University. Interestingly, Gathorne-Hardy found that individuals who had been somewhat careful in talking to him before the Jones book was published were more eager to do so afterwards. Mostly, he attributes this greater willingness to share confidences with him to their desire to correct what they believe to be the misinterpretations and alleged biases which they felt they found in the Jones book. This is not to imply that Gathorne-Hardy did not do his homework; he did, and his interview list is almost as comprehensive as that of Jones.

The result is a more sympathetic portrayal of Kinsey and, in spite of the fact that Jones is a historian, a better setting of the man in historical perspective. Because Jones' comprehensive work appeared first, Gathorne-Hardy can also be more selective in where he puts his emphasis. Thus, Kinsey's childhood and early career receive far less space than Jones gives them, but the essentials are covered.

Kinsey was a sickly boy, raised by a demanding and dominating father and a somewhat cowed mother, in a very fundamentalist Methodist household where the dangers of sin were emphasized. As he approached his teens, his health improved, and he found refuge in music (he played the piano well enough to consider it as a professional career) and hiking. Scouting was also important to him and he was one of the first Eagle scouts. He rebelled against his father by choosing to leave home and go to Bowdoin College instead of attending the nearby engineering institution where his father was employed. He blossomed at Bowdoin, graduated magna cum laude, and went on to Harvard to get his Ph.D. in zoology, spending much of his spare time and summers in Boy Scout work and summer camps for boys. From Harvard, he joined the faculty at Indiana and remained there for the rest of his life, first studying gall wasps and then sex.

The outline of the career is the same in both biographies, but Jones is far more detailed about the early years and less analytical about the later than Gathorne-Hardy. One of the major differences between the two is that Gathorne-Hardy is much more comfortable dealing with sexual issues than Jones, who appears to have real hangups about such issues as masturbation and homosexuality. This enables Gathorne-Hardy to better place Kinsey in the context of his times. What does appear in both biographies is that Kinsey was more of a crusader for sexual liberties than he himself would admit, and that his reports and graphs of sexual activity were influenced by what he chose to include or exclude. Though most of us knew this intuitively, it is documented particularly well by Gathorne-Hardy.

Both biographers imply that Kinsey was getting bored by gall wasps, and that he wanted to leave a more important mark on the pages of history than having some species of gall wasps named after him. Both emphasize that Kinsey had always been interested in sex, but it was only after he had weaned himself away from the strict religious prohibitions of his youth that he felt able to seriously study it. Jones makes much of a Bunsen burner and brush handle minus the bristles which he found in a hole covered by a piece of tin in the room Kinsey had occupied as a teenager. Although others have lived in the house over the fifty years since the family left, Jones felt that this was Kinsey's hiding place and that the brush was inserted into his urethra as part of a masturbatory activity which involved pain and punishment for his sinful activities. This unsupported speculation became a central pillar of Jones' interpretation of Kinsey, and from it, Jones claims that he had strong masochist tendencies. But the brush handle found with the Bunsen burner could have been used to stir solutions being heated on the burner. While there is evidence that Kinsey did, as an older adult, insert items into his urethra, none of them are the size of the brush handle found by Jones. Moreover Kinsey, who was fairy open about his sexual activity to his colleagues, never defined himself as a masochist.

This claim of the youthful masochistic Kinsey, which Gathorne-Hardy dismisses out of hand as psychologizing without data, is one of the key points of Jones' analysis of Kinsey. Similarly Jones' emphasis on Kinsey's nudity and the Kinsey family's nudity is played up by Jones as a kind of voyeuristic homosexuality, but such a view fails to deal with the role of nudism in America in the 1930s. In fact, the insistence on swimming in the nude by the managers of YMCA pools and, for that matter, in university segregated swimming sessions was standard practice in the United States, if only to cut down possible contamination in the pools. Kinsey's youthful homosexuality, repressed or not, is one of the key points in the Jones biography. To demonstrate, Jones has to imply that Kinsey's interest in Boy Scout and youth camps satisfied his homoerotic leanings. This is also a claim which Gathorne-Hardy is unwilling to credit.