Kinsey, Sex and Fraud

Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People by Judith Reisman and Edward W. Eichel (authors); J. H. Court and J. Gordon Muir (editors), Huttington House Publishers, 1990. 

Agenda-Driven Research

This is a book about a scientific fraud named Alfred C. Kinsey, who greatly exaggerated the actual incidence of uncommon sexual practices among the American public. Kinsey engaged in junk science in order to advance his political agenda of making sexual perversion both legal and socially acceptable. 

Heartless Hedonism

Kinsey’s studies emphasized the physical, rather than the emotional aspects of sex. When he talked about the possible harms of sex, including adults having sex with children, he considered mainly the possibility of physical harm, rather than emotional harm. He concluded that since the incidence of physical harm of adult-on-child sex was low, then the incidence of harm was low. When he did admit to children suffering emotionally after sex with an adult, he blamed not the pedophile, but society, for making the child feel bad about the experience.

Volunteer Sampling Bias

The well-respected statisticians Cochran, Mosteller and Tukey were very critical of Kinsey’s work. Kinsey’s sampling techniques showed a bias favoring (a) college educated, (b) widowed or divorced, (c) non-church goers. Kinsey sought a way to avoid accusations of volunteer bias in his sampling. If he visited a group of people, and only some of them volunteered to recite their sexual histories to Kinsey’s team, then his survey would be slanted towards the kind of people who were more willing to be open about their sexuality.

100-Percent Groups

Kinsey thought that the solution was to find groups of people where all members would be willing to give their sexual histories, so that there would be no volunteer bias. Kinsey called these groups “100 percent groups.”  Kinsey’s approach did not solve the general problem of bias, because the 100 percent groups were not representative of the American people as a whole. Perhaps there was no self-selection of volunteers from within a group, but Kinsey was still selecting the groups themselves from the American population. And this latter selection was not random, because he obtained his 100 percent groups mainly among more sexually adventuresome segments of society. Kinsey had merely kicked his bias upstairs, to a higher level in the survey hierarchy. 

Lewis Terman

The problem with volunteer bias and 100 percent groups was noted at the time the study was published. Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman criticized Kinsey’s study for volunteer bias. In response, Kinsey-supporter Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy dismissed Terman’s position, calling it inherently unlikely, without explaining why it was inherently unlikely.

Abraham Maslow

Psychologist Abraham Maslow also pointed out that there was volunteer bias in Kinsey’s study. Maslow even conducted a study where he asked his students to go to Kinsey for a sex interview, and mainly the more self-confident, assertive students showed up. Maslow had already shown than more dominant people tend to have more sex. In his own reports, Kinsey refused to even mention Maslow’s criticisms. 

Conflating Occasional with Habitual

Sociologists Albert H. Hobbs and Richard D. Lambert of the University of Pennsylvania accused Kinsey of manipulating the Institute’s data to exaggerate the prevalence of homosexuality. In particular, they accused Kinsey of conflated individuals who had only a few homosexual experiences, and even then only in adolescence, with individuals who were predominantly homosexual over their lifetime.