Alfred Kinsey

The biographical film Kinsey presents the life of the father of sexology, Alfred Kinsey. From the clips shown in class we can gather that Kinsey would be a believer of Seidman’s four ideas of sexology. In a beginning scene Kinsey recites to the class the six stages of the coital sequence: stimulation, lubrication, erection, increased sensitivity, orgasm, and nervous release and follows with huge projections of male and female genitalia. These stages and sexual organs are part of a biological sequence that happens in the human body and can further show support of the first and second ideas of Seidman’s; that we are born with a sexual nature, and it is part of a biological and genetic makeup, and that sex is the core of what it means to be human, that our sexual drive is no less basic then our need to eat or sleep. In the scene where Kinsey is performing his famous sex interviews, Seidman’s third and fourth idea of sexology is presented. During this scene a handful of people are individually asked personal questions about their sex life. Not only did each fast-paced answer share that they indeed engage in marital or pre-marital sexual activity, answers also went deeper into sex acts that are seen as especially abnormal in society (one man admits to have intercourse with a pony). These instances further show that sexuality is a driving force in human behavior and also in a sense contradict the fourth idea of Seidman’s that sexual instinct is by nature heterosexual with the representation of the relationship of the man and the pony.
These interviews along with Kinsey’s taxonomist mindset and sex questionnaires challenged many commonly held ideas about sexuality in a scientific and statistical standpoint. When Kinsey proposes to the representative from the Rockefeller Foundation to fund his project, Kinsey says “The only way to study sex with any scientific accuracy is to strip away everything but the physiological”. This scene and line shows the beginning of Kinsey’s great journey into sexual behavior, and in some ways the beginning of a social threat towards the conservatives presenting data that could shake society’s view of marital sex.