Behavior, After Kinsey

In the 15 weeks since its publication, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male has risen nearly to the top of the bestseller list. (The publishing trade calls it "the least-read bestseller.") Its popularity shows that many a U.S. grownup is just as curious about sex as adolescents are. What else does it show? The American Social Hygiene Association (organized 35 years ago to "advocate the highest standards of public and private morals," combat prostitution and venereal disease, promote sex education) wanted to find out. Last week the association spent two whole days of its three-day annual executives' meeting in Manhattan talking about the Kinsey book.

Physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists and clergymen testified, argued and contradicted each other. Some felt that Zoologist Kinsey had poached on their professional preserves. Others were just confused.

Helpful. The chief apologists for Kinsey (who was not invited to the meeting, although he was in Manhattan) were medical men. Public health men, said Dr. J. R. Heller of the U.S. Public Health Service, have learned much from the book. The PHS will aim its antivenereal disease campaigns at parts of the population which Kinsey believes to be most sexually active (those with only grade-school education). PHS will also adopt Kinsey's interview techniques in tracking down sources of venereal disease.

Said Columbia Psychiatrist Jules Eisenbud: Kinsey uncovered facts, but his methods did not go deep enough to show whether there is any relation between sexual activity and mental health. Dr. Eisenbud added darkly that some sexual events are so deeply buried that they are dug up only under psychiatric treatment. As for Kinsey's hint that there are no such things as normality or abnormality in sex: "nonsense."

Kinsey is just a stuffy Puritan, and a dangerous one at that, according to the American Museum of Natural History's tart-tongued Cultural Anthropologist Margaret Mead. By using the word "outlet" for sex activity, Kinsey upheld the Puritan tradition that the body should not be used for pleasure. Said Dr. Mead: he "confused sex with excretion." He missed completely the emotional, spiritual and ethical sides of sex, and seemed to overlook society's need for a sex pattern. Patterns, Dr. Mead said, are necessary, and are found in every society "apparently to reward men for staying home at night, which doesn't seem to be biologically necessary." There is a danger that people may regard Kinsey as a sort of Emily Post of sex; his book "may increase the number of young men who indulge in 'outlets' with a sense of hygienic self-righteousness."

Harmful? If a "Dr. Binsey" made a scientific survey to prove that 99 out of 100 boys steal, said Father Harold Gardiner, S.J., an editor of America, parents would not demand a change in the larceny laws. Demanding a change in laws regulating sex on the basis of Kinsey's findings is just as senseless, he said; moral laws are unchangeable. The book may do harm Father Gardiner thought, because "indiscriminate knowledge improperly acquired and applied is an incentive to a lack of virtue. . . ." It would be far better, said he, if the Kinsey report were in the hand: only of doctors, penal authorities, judges social workers, the clergy.

The Rev. Otis Rice, professor of pastoral theology at Manhattan's General Theological Seminary (Episcopal), was more hopeful. The book will not change the basic tenets of moral theology, he said, but will help clergymen to see "the realities of sex." Professor Rice was not sorry that the book has stirred up huge interest in religious circles; he happily reported that two copies have already disappeared from the seminary's shelves.

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