'Kinsey' Somewhere Between 0 and 6?

Thanks to writer/director Bill Condon for "Kinsey," now in theatres and nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor in the Golden Globes. Liam Neeson is deserving of Best Actor, and the film itself tackles a subject more important than most people probably appreciate, especially difficult to pull off in dry historical and academic contexts.

For those with an interest in the cultural history of the U.S. over the course of the 20th century, this movie marks an indispensable inflection point. It took someone with the academic detachment of Alfred Kinsey to tackle with a thorough, scientific approach one of the toughest subject matters of all, sex, with all the myths and moral taboos that surrounded it, and in many cases, still do.

As presented in the movie, Kinsey broke from an excessively repressive childhood to pursue a career in scientific research, at odds with his father's wishes. He catalogued hundreds of thousands of one variety of a certain moth, and his findings served as a useful metaphor, or parallel, for what he later found using a similar methodology to study human sexual behavior.

In his own way, using a strictly empiricist methodology, Kinsey made a profound discovery about the natural ordering of things that is stunning in its scientific, epistemological, moral and theological implications. It was simply this: both in his moths and in human sexual behavior, Kinsey discovered diversity to be the norm for nature, not uniformity or conformity.

Kinsey was amazed and fascinated to discover this fundamental truth about his beloved variety of moth. Hardly any one was like any other. This fascination drove his research and his desire to acquire more and more samples from all over the continent. When he turned his attention to human sexual behavior, he found a similar result, and certainly one that shocked the 1948 world when the results of his research were first published in a book that became an overnight best seller.

Kinsey was motivated to get into sex research by the frustration of being unable to offer scientifically-backed explanations to dash common myths, even laughable ones, about sex.

How could he scientifically prove certain sexual activities would not make one go blind, develop warts or grow hair on the palms of one's hand? It is hard to imagine that there were simply no scientific studies on such matters in the 1930s, but that's the world Kinsey found himself in. He convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to fund his research, and set out to devise an objective interview form and interviewing technique that he taught a phalanx of young researchers who subsequently spread out across the land and talked to tens of thousands of Americans of all ages, sizes and situations. Ensuring anonymity and rehearsing ways to help subjects feel at ease and "tell all" were key.

When was the first time, for this, for that? How many times, for this, for that? Per week, per month? And so forth and so on. Once tabulated, the results were stunning. Among other things, Kinsey learned the high instance of individuals who were traumatized in their youths by angry denunciations of the most common types of sexual experimentation, especially masturbation. He later learned that his own angry and morally-bombastic father, himself, suffered from a publicly humiliating form of such repression as a 10 year old.

"A crime that is committed by everyone is no crime," Kinsey intoned against those who would impose often crippling guilt and even the threat of damnation for the most common and virtually universal behaviors.

Kinsey also found the high instance of cases of men diagnosed with impotence or women with frigidity based solely on a complete lack of a basic knowledge of the facts of sexual arousal.

Kinsey learned that about one third of males engage at least once in a knowingly homosexual experience. As a result of his research, he determined that human sexual orientation runs a scale from "0" to "6," some who are a "0" being exclusively heterosexual and some, as a "6," being exclusively homosexual. Most, he concluded, are somewhere in between, and even likely to slide up or down the scale over a lifetime.

In a society in which no "manly-man" would ever admit publicly to being anything but a "0," this was a very radical notion to introduce. Even classifying one's self as a "1" would raise more questions or doubts than any "macho" man could probably cope with. But the scale was based on Kinsey's exhaustive scientific research.

By the early 1950s, Kinsey's research ran into the buzz saw of McCarthy Era reaction. In congressional hearing witch hunts his work was lumped in with laundry lists of ulterior motives aided and abetted by the hateful Communists. The Rockefeller Foundation got cold feet and cut Kinsey's funding. His ability to complete the half-dozen or so volumes he envisioned for his project was severely constrained.

The film ends with Kinsey and his loyal spouse, played by Laura Linney, inspired by moments spent in a mighty Sequoia forest, to carry on. And then comes the testimony of the countless numbers, symbolized by one poignant scene in the movie, liberated by Kinsey's work from the deep personal frustration, anguish and dread imposed by groundless religious taboos and ignorance.

In all the noise of the Cold War that escalated, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the emergence of the counterculture, disco, Reagan and the rise of the neo-conservatives, the seminal work of Alfred Kinsey, even while the volumes sat on bookshelves gathering dust, infused itself into modern culture, framing the terms over which the future has been and will be fought, the voices of repression and imposed uniformity versus the voices of actualization and natural diversity.

This movie is designed to remind us of just that fact.