Sex fiction.(Scan)(critique of Kinsey's methods)

Both the February PBS documentary about "sex researcher" Alfred Kinsey and the November theatrical movie about the same man (a bomb, with a bit more than $10 million in revenue) presented fawning portraits. Neither set of filmmakers bothered to let ordinary viewers know what professionals have known for a long time: most of Kinsey's findings are hopelessly flawed.

The most definitive debunking of Kinsey's work was done in a dispassionate University of Chicago study by Edward Laumann, John Gagnon, Robert Michael, and Stuart Michaels published in the 1990s. You wouldn't think a book about sex would be sleep-inducing, but leave it to academics with a big flat research grant--this study is so dull it can produce academic coma. It is careful in its science, however, and has harsh words for Kinsey's "pioneering" investigations. Kinsey's pool of study subjects, for instance, "tailed to meet even the most elementary requirements for drawing a truly representative sample of the population at large." It turns out the professor drew his interview subjects from groups of people especially likely to have had deviant sexual experiences. He recruited from prisons and reform schools, including men locked up for sex offenses, and homosexual bars and acquaintance networks, thus inflating the prevalence of exotic sexual practices far above levels prevailing in a more representative population.

Kinsey's method of collecting his data did not follow social science standards. He did not, for instance, ask a fixed set of questions of all the participants in his survey. Instead, he and a small handful of colleagues took a lifetime "sex history" on each subject. They pressed people extensively not only on behavior, but also on fantasy, and often challenged respondents. In a courtroom, this would ...