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Home > Movies > Reviews > 2004 |  
Kinsey
| posted 11/12/2004



He also analyzes the problems with the movie, which he says are "too vast to itemize." He calls it "propaganda" and says, "The film completely glosses over the immoral and damaging methods Kinsey and his associates used in the course of their research. [The book] Sexual Behavior in the Human Male … contains studies about the sexual response of infants, toddlers and other children. (Kinsey's assistant Wardell Pomeroy has basically admitted that the studies involving children were derived from Kinsey's own experiments.)" He also points out that Kinsey and his wife were "serial adulterers," while the film only acknowledges single affairs. And he concludes that the worldview of the film is "insidious. It says 'science' (as defined by its practitioners) is the only way to know truth; all else is mere opinion and superstition."

Morality in Media President Robert Peters (Christian Spotlight) says, "In Kinsey's mind, man was merely an animal with a high degree of intelligence; and at the end of the film, in the midst of the credits, we are treated to scene after scene of animals having sex. In Kinsey's mind, apparently no sex was abnormal; and among the types of sex that Kinsey is shown engaging in or endorsing in the film are adultery, bisexuality, homosexuality, group sex, pornography, sadomasochism, and swinging."

He adds, "In the film Kinsey interviews a man who molested hundreds of children, but there is no other indication (unless I missed something) that Kinsey's data about child sexuality came from pedophiles."

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, "Defenders will view the picture as a sober portrait of the man credited with emancipating sex from the shackles of Puritanism. Conversely, critics will question not only the movie's accuracy, but the appropriateness of celebrating a man who many blame for jump-starting the sexual revolution by redefining societal mores and jettisoning inhibition and traditional morality to the relic heap of Victorian prudery."

from Film Forum, 11/24/04

Peter T. Chattaway (Christianity Today Movies) says, "The problem with Kinsey's studies, at least as they are portrayed here, runs much deeper than mere morality; one thing that is completely missing from Kinsey's life and work, or at least from this film's depiction of them, is any sense of the fact that human sexuality has a fundamentally sacred component and cannot be reduced to the breeding instincts of wasps and rodents. Kinsey the man may have challenged the sexual and scientific orthodoxies of his day, but Kinsey the film is a hagiographic tribute to the man who helped make possible the emerging do-whatever-you-want orthodoxy of our own times. Condon may think Kinsey lifted certain people up, but in doing so, he brings humanity as a whole down a notch or two."

from Film Forum, 12/09/04

John Zmirak (Godspy) says Bill Condon's film "leaves out the fact that after this single affair, both Dr. and Mrs. Kinsey became serial adulterers, using their image as a happily married couple as little more than a public relations ploy to help Kinsey's conclusions gain broader acceptance. The film also omits Kinsey's lifelong obsession with erotic self-torture. But the film does hint at Kinsey's bizarre stunt of circumcising himself at home in the bathtub. Watching Kinsey was not just unsexy—it was anti-sexy. Attempting to strip the erotic of all its mystery, modesty, emotional content—even its shame—is self-defeating, in the end. Looking at men and women as merely animals renders human flesh finally meat, and replaces the tender touch of one lover's hand upon another with the scalpel of a doctor doingthe autopsy on Cupid's cadaver."

from Film Forum, 01/27/05

Steven D. Greydanus (Decent Films) says, "One of the film's most important lines comes in the following rationale by Kinsey of his work: 'One of the aims of science is to simplify. The only way to study sex with any scientific accuracy is to strip away everything but the physiological.' As a methodological approach to what can and can't be measured in human behavior, this might be a defensible assessment. But Kinsey and his colleagues didn't just try to 'strip away everything but the physiological' analytically, but actually. They tried to live as if sex were nothing but physiological, and their published arguments assume the same point of view. How utterly wearying."




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