This article was published in the May 1992 edition of the Catholic Medical Quarterly

Return to May 1992 edition of the CMQ

FRAUD OF THE CENTURY?

J.Gordon Muir and John H. Court

In recent years there has been a flurry of publicity surrounding some important cases of science fraud. But the names Baltimore in the United States, Benveniste in France, McBride in Australia, to list but a few - are quickly forgotten because, despite the breach of public trust involved, few would claim there has been a major adverse effect on individuals or society. However, what about a massive scientific research project that had succeeded in its purpose of using fraudulent data to radically alter perceptions of normal human behaviour? What if, in addition, this "research" had attempted to substantiate an unproven and potentially dangerous theory of child development with data from abusive and unethical sexual experiments conducted by paedophiles on infants and children, needless to say, without consent? And what if the results of this research were still uncritically taught as fact in academia and formed the foundation of current sex education philosophy? Would evidence of such a subterfuge, especially if it had been successfully covered up for 40 years, be of concern to the scientific community and the public at large? Would such a scheme qualify as the scientific fraud of the century? You be the judge.

THE RESEARCH

This is not a hypothetical question, as will become very clear. What follows is a review of a simple expose of one of the most famous and most ballyhooed research projects of the 20th century. Establishing that fraud took place in this research is not particularly difficult. The trick is to try and explain how this major piece of deception was passed off as valid science for more than 40 years. However, the answer to this puzzle is becoming more obvious through, ironically, the efforts of those now rallying to the defence of the original project and its authors. There is an identifiable ideological tie binding this phony science's defenders and true believers. In 1948 a Harvard-trained zoologist, who had gained a reputation classifying gall wasps, suddenly became an international scientific celebrity - perhaps the first truly media-manufactured science icon of the 20th century. His name was Alfred Kinsey. His springboard to fame was the publication of his first landmark work on human sexuality, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male.1 This was followed five years later by Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female.2 These two tomes (known subsequently as Kinsey's Male and Female Reports) altered Western society's view of how people behaved sexually and forced a sea change in what was considered "normal" sexual behaviour. Today the findings of Kinsey (who died in 1956) and his team (still surviving) continue to provide us with what the authoritative news weekly U.S. News and World Report (January 9,1989, p. 54) describes as "the cornerstone of almost everything known about human sexuality," and the philosophy emanating from their research has become the foundation of modem sex education.

The Kinsey team's 1948 and 1953 books shocked society with a picture of what citizens were supposedly doing sexually. "Statistically common behaviour"3 was deduced from a sample of just over 5,000 men and almost 6,000 women and was presented by newspapers and magazines across the United States (and several other countries) as a scientific exposition of "normal" sexual mores. Premarital, extramarital and same-gender sex were found to be more common than anyone had dreamed. Kinsey's books became best sellers (though few were actually read) and Kinsey came to be (and still is) regarded as "the world's foremost sex researcher."4(p23)

In the wake of the startling revelations, sexual practices were gradually revised to conform with perceived reality. This became the Sexual Revolution. Kinsey's research, claimed to be an "objective" study of facts "without moral interpretations,"1(p5) demonstrated that socially accepted behaviour was "rationalisation"while socially condemned behaviour was usually "normal" or "normal in the human animal."1(p327) Traditional morality was suddenly "unscientific." Real science would now free society from the Judeo-Christian myth of the value of monogamy and fidelity and the view of heterosexuality as a behavioural norm.

Albert Deutsch, writing in Harper's magazine (December 1947, p. 494) said & research "explodes traditional concepts of what is normal and abnormal, natural and unnatural in sex behaviour." Look magazine (December 9,1947, p. 106) said the Kinsey team had produced a "social atom bomb" that "may have a tremendous effect on the future social history of mankind. For they are presenting facts. They are revealing not what should be, but what is." Even today the conventional wisdom on Kinsey is that while his research had flaws it was, and remains, a valid informational source on human behaviour. A special 1990 issue of Life magazine, in which Kinsey was named as one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century, repeats the view that Kinsey's "raw facts" were "a mirror held up to [the] nation."

It was Kinsey's research that provided the inspiration for the sexual philosophy of Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine. Hefner wrote in the first issue, "We believe ... we are filling a publishing need only slightly less important than one just taken care of by the Kinsey Report." Another Kinsey legacy is the active and prominent Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction - located on the Indiana University campus. This Institute has received millions of U.S. government dollars for a variety of projects, is a source of syndicated sex advice columns and has provided extensive sex information resources on an international scale.

Less well known is the role of Kinsey's research in support of the proliferating paedophile movement. According to Tom O'Carroll, chairperson of the international organization PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange), the Kinsey team's science demonstrates the capacity for children to have harmless sexual interaction with adults. This is a correct representation of one of Kinsey's conclusions. (See, O'Carroll's 1980 book Pedophilia: The Radical Case6). Those who follow these matters will be aware that moves are afoot in sexological circles to have paedophilia regarded as an "orientation." Sound familiar?

With so much resting on the general validity of the Kinsey team's work, it will be no surprise that the appearance of the book Kinsey, Sex and Fraud 7 (of which we are editors and contributors) in 1990 was greeted with less than enthusiasm in some quarters. This work alleges that the Kinsey team's human sexuality research is so demonstrably fraudulent in so many respects that as science it is virtually worthless.

Kinsey, Sex and Fraud pulls together a mountain of documentation that the image in Kinsey's mirror was a deliberate distortion. Here's a profile of Kinsey and team's male sample used to picture normal sexual behaviour in American men: 25% were prisoners or ex-cons; a further abnormal percentage were sex offenders (Kinsey had the histories of over 1400); many were recruited from sex lectures, where they had gone to get the answer to sex problems, some were obtained through paid contact men, including underworld figures and leaders of homosexual groups; the group was wholly unrepresentative in terms of marital status, church attendance and educational level. In addition, Kinsey had a minimum of 200 male prostitutes among his histories. That could have been, at the very least, 7% of the total (2,719) in his sample's occupational classes!1(pp618,622) Kinsey's readers and the media got a different explanation of what was happening. An advertising circular for this survey said it was conducted "with full regard for the latest refinements in public opinion polling methods" and Kinsey's own text presented it as "a carefully planned population survey."1(pp618,622) (There is not space to discuss the female sample, it, too, was wholly unconventional.)

Already we have a description of fraud (using the intention-to-deceive definition). But it gets worse. In a 1941 paper Kinsey told the readers of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology that attempts to determine the prevalence of homosexuality in society were compromised by the use of prison populations. His own study would avoid that pitfall and provide the first credible statistics on the subject! His article was submitted in November 1940. Several months before, according to biographer Christenson,9(p115) Kinsey had already begun to recruit what became a large prisoner group in his survey sample.

Kinsey's homosexuality statistics were clearly inflated Thus, epidemiologist David Forman, after a careful survey of a much more representative population, was forced to say in his 1989, British Medical Journal article that "frequently cited figures such as [Kinsey's] 10% of men being more or less exclusively homosexual cannot be regarded as applicable to the general population." Other surveys support this view (eg, Tom Smith's 1989 study for the National Opinion Research Center11). But today, in the United States, Kinsey's original figures have become ingrained givens. You will read in Time magazine (July 10, 1989, p. 56 [U.S. edition]), for example, that "about 25 million Americans are gay." It has become politically correct so to believe.

The Kinsey team's statistical manipulations of their homosexual data, when examined in some detail, can have had only one purpose: to achieve as high an apparent prevalence figure as possible. For example, the Kinsey tearn claimed that 37% of the male population had some homosexual experience "between adolescence, and old age."1(p650) What they omitted to point out was that 32% had occurred by age 16 and the full 37% by age 19 (see Table 139, p.624 of the Male Report). And the statistic they misleadingly represent as adult homosexuality was, in fact, principally homosexual play among heterosexual preadolescents and adolescents. Moreover, the Kinsey authors represent this activity, which may have occurred only once in adolescence, as occurring throughout adult life.

Other hallmarks of fraud abound in the Kinsey team's human sexuality research. Kinsey chose his research staff for their bias - his coauthor Pomeroy noted he was hired, in part, because of his freedom from the "taboos," "inhibitions" and "guilts" that his colleagues had (panel discussion, Eastern Regional Conference, Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Philadelphia, April 17, 1983). A candidate for the research staff, Pomeroy also tells us, was rejected for believing "extramarital intercourse harmful to marriage, homosexuality abnormal, and animal contacts ludicrous."12 In the midst of his project Kinsey rejected valid criticism that his methods favoured overrepresentation of the sexually unconventional. When given expert advice to this effect, he simply ignored the expert(Abraham Maslow), refused to deal with him further and lied about the information in his published work.7(p181)

Sweeping generalizations characterise Kinsey's work. Important statements of fact, without supporting data (in some cases contrary to the data), are common. Another fraudulent act was Kinsey's deception of Indiana University authorities about his filming of human sexual activities.4(p174) And Kinsey coauthors Gebhard and Pomeroy compound their credibility problems by subsequently describing Kinsey's samples as "random" and a "cross section of the population" - patently false descriptions (Penthouse, December 1977, p. 118; Variations, 1977, p. 84). Other examples of deception, such as obfuscation of research methods and inaccurate claims of statistical validations, would take too long to describe and are, in any case, redundant, given what we know already.

Frivolity with facts was a Kinsey modus operandi, as exemplified by one long-standing Kinsey invention recently laid to rest by Fidelity (U.S. catholic magazine) editor Michael Jones: that the Vatican had one of the three biggest pornography collections in the world - the others being Kinsey's and the British Museum's (Fidelity, April 1989, p. 22). This myth is treated as fact throughout Pomeroy's biography of Kinsey.4

From this point on, the story content becomes somewhat sordid and a suspension of disbelief has to be practised to get to the end of our review. Kinsey and team provided a body of experimental evidence demonstrating that children are "orgasmic" and capable of sexual pleasure - not just affection - from infancy. Apart from fuelling the aspirations of the growing paedophile movement, this finding now is taught as "scientific" fact in academic sexology.

Creating an awareness of this knowledge also has become one of the principal educational goals of SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. - a leading force in the field of sex education in the United States), according to SIECUS co-founder and former Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Calderone. Known as the "High Priestess" of sex education, Calderone wrote in a SIECUS publication in 1983 that children's sexual capacities should be "developed in the same way as the child's inborn human capacity to talk or to walk and that [the parents'] role should relate only to teaching the child the appropriateness of privacy, place, and person - in a word socialization" (SIECUS Report, May-July 1983, p. 9). In the same vein and a little more explicit - if the previous quote seemed a bit ambiguous - Calderone's SIECUS colleague Dr. Lester Kirkendall (emeritus professor in the Department of Family Life(yes family life) at Oregon State University) has written in a 1985 issue of the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy " that sex education programmes of the future will probe sexual expression across generational lines, particularly as our sense of guilt about these things diminishes.

Extending the Kinsey findings even further - to their logical long-term conclusion - James Ramey, visiting professor in a medical school psychiatry department, in an unusually candid piece in the May 1979 SIECUS Report, wrote, "We are in roughly the same position today with regard to incest as we were a hundred years ago with respect to our fear of masturbation" (p. 1). In a series of remarkable experiments, the Kinsey team provided the scientific base for these progressive developments.

Several hundred children, 2 months and older, were manually and orally masturbated by "partners" in "orgasm" experiments, in some cases over periods of 24 hours. The performance of at least 188 children was timed with a stopwatch (see tables). Particulars of physiological reactions, such as the presence of anal contractions, were carefully recorded. Kinsey has assured us that "technically trained" individuals were involved in this experimentation and that some of the children were followed over a period of years to make sure that true orgasms were occurring.1(p177) These data are unique in the scientific literature, but no satisfactory explanation has ever been given of how they were obtained.

Kinsey disingenuously has maintained that in the course of interviewing people about their sex lives he just happened to come across a technically trained few (who trained them?) with identical stopwatch measurements on hand from which to piece together the most remarkable and precise tables on infant and childhood sexual (orgasmic) response ever obtained. No other surveys before or since have been able to achieve this feat - for obvious reasons. Pressed by Fidelity's Michael Jones to explain the precise measurements in so many children (Fidelity, April 1989, p. 32), Kinsey associate Paul Gebhard naively replied, "One parent used a stopwatch"! (The implication is that some of the information came from parents!) Kinsey photographer C.A. Tripp, apparently oblivious to the enormity of what he was saying, told one of us (JGM) after a television show that the experiments did indeed take place (we have speculated the data may have been invention), that they were harmless, that the children enjoyed the activity and there was no need for parental consent!

Maybe the children benefited. Here are Kinsey and colleagues' descriptions of the orgasm-inducing experiments: 1(p161) "Extreme tension with violent convulsion"... "mouth distorted ....... tongue protruding" ... "eyes staring"... "violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears (especially among younger children)". . . "extreme trembling, collapse, loss of color, and sometimes fainting of subject" . . . "excruciating pain and may scream if movement is continued" . . . "will fight away from the partner." Use of the neutral term ‘partner’ is interesting in this context.

This is the only example in Western scientific literature where data from the sexual abuse of infants and children are used to substantiate currently taught theories of human development - in this case normal sexual development. A further remarkable fact is that data from these experiments were actually published as valid "science" shortly after the trial of 20 Third Reich doctors at Nuremberg for, in some cases, lesser degrees of human abuse. And the book in which these results were tabulated was hailed in the American media as a great work of science, sweeping away embedded myths and delusions. In the December 1947 Harper's, for example, the "methods goals and findings" were said to have been "checked and rechecked by outstanding investigators" (p. 490). Nota wordappeared anywhere about the illegality and abusiveness of the child sex experiments. The public, getting its information second hand from the press, believed a great scientific and cultural milestone had been passed. This was to be the enlightenment whereby society would be educated away from its burden of Judeo-Christian superstition. Regarding sex education, Kinsey wrote to a colleague: "I shall aim to distinguish the scientific data in this field from the moralistic claptrap which has invaded our schoolroom."9(p118)

The authors and editors of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud are calling for an investigation into the entire Kinsey research effort and the full scope of its effects. It would seem appropriate to gain access to original material (if it is not destroyed) to help understand even the motivation behind what has been done. In the case of the child sex studies, who were the children, who were the experimenters, who gave them their scientific training, who wrote the protocols (there is a remarkable consistency of method) and, most importantly, what happened to the children in later life? Many would now be in their 40s and 50s and should be privately evaluated for possible damage and treatment. A Lancet reviewer, looking at the evidence now assembled in Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, has concluded that it "demolishes the foundations of the two [Kinsey] reports" and leaves "his former co-workers some explaining to do"14 That would be a start. But even a passing concern for integrity in science would make an investigation and accounting of the Kinsey team's research obligatory. (It is noteworthy that Kinsey's co-workers remain silent.)

THE ETHICS

By whatever means Kinsey's child sex research was accomplished, it was the work of sex offenders capable of criminal acts - possibly offenders with an interest in science since such meticulous care in recording results was evident (table excerpts below). On the other hand, scientists are capable of criminal thoughts and acts, and the Kinsey team, according to one of their number, may have fallen into this category.

In the 1977 book Ethical Issues in Sex Therapy and Research,15 Kinsey coauthor (of the Female Report) Dr. Paul Gebhard makes some very frank statements about how the Kinsey team dealt with some of the ethical issues they confronted. Gebhard's comments go some way toward clarifying the entire Kinsey research philosophy.

It was Gebhard's view that "Each researcher must establish his or her own ethical hierarchy and decide as problems present themselves whether the ultimate good resulting from the research or therapy supersedes a particular ethic"15(p14). Concerning the nature and sources of information for the Kinsey Reports, Gebhard had this to say:

We have always insisted on maintaining confidentiality, even at the cost of thereby becoming amoral at best and criminal at worst. Examples of amorality are our refusal to inform a wife that her husband has just confessed to us he has an active venereal disease, and our refusal to tell parents that their child is involved in seriously deviant behaviour [emphasis added].15(P13)

The matter of the husband and wife, though certainly not the child, would possibly be handled the same way by some researchers today. But Gebhard went on to give an example of outright "criminality":

An example of criminality [in the Kinsey research] is our refusal to cooperate with authorities in apprehending a paedophile we had interviewed who was being sought for a sex murder [emphasis added.15(P13)

It is assumed that the murder victim in this case was a child. It is not impossible that before he/she died, information of a sexual nature was obtained by the killer that subsequently appeared as part of Kinsey's child sexuality tables depicting "normal" sexual response.

In another illustration, Gebbard recounted the story of Wardell Pomeroy being told by a prison interviewee that he intended to stab another prison inmate to death with a "file which had been turned into a ten-inch knife." Pomeroy did not know that the prisoners were just testing him. He discussed his dilemma with other members of the Kinsey team. If he told the authorities about the knife, he might save a life. If he said nothing,

... someone might get stabbed. We decided that the man might get stabbed anyway .... We kept perfectly quiet.... [I]n order to facilitate the research, we had to literally gamble with someone's life [emphasis added.15(P18)

This type of philosophy was rationalised by Gebhard as "own[ing] ... allegiance to science ... [and not] to any one society.15(p19) Confidentiality was more important than life itself.

We would keep confidentiality even if life itself were at issue. We simply would not break confidentiality for any reason whatsoever. So, in many ways, we are rather amoral, but we simply set ourselves to one side and say, "We are scientists and observers, and we are not willing to get involved in this thing one way or another.15(p17)

Only the survivors of the Kinsey era at Bloomington can say exactly how the Kinsey research philosophy was applied in practice in the gathering of the child sex experiment data for the Male Report. It is important for society to know in the interests of truth in science and, more importantly, because crimes may have been involved that should be a matter of public record.

 

Speed Of Preadoleseent Orgasm

[From Male Report, Table 32, p. 178]

TIME

CASES TIMED

PERCENT OF POPULATION

Up to 10 sec.

12

6.4

10 sec to 1 min.

46

24.5

1 to 2 min.

40

21.3

2 to 3 min.

23

12.2

3 to 5 min.

33

17.5

5 to 10 min.

3

12.2

Over 10 min.

11

5.9

Total

188

100.0

Mean time to climax 3.02 minutes
Median time to climax 1.91 minutes

 

Examples of Multiple Orgasm In Preadoleseent Males

(Male Report, Table 34. P. 180; abbreviated)

Age No. of Orgasms Time Involved Age No. of Orgasms Time Involved
5 mon 3 ? 7 yr 7 3 hr
11 mon 10 1 hr 8 yr 8 2 hr
11 mon 14 38 min. 9 yr 7 68 min
2 yr 7 9 min. 10 yr 9 52 min
2 yr 11 65 min. 10 yr 14 24 hr
2.5 yr 4 2 min. 11 yr 11 1 hr
4 yr 6 5 min. 11 yr 19 1 hr
4 yr 17 10 hr. 12 yr 7 3 hr
4 yr 26 24 hr. 12 yr 3 3 min

 

THE REACTION

The Kinsey team's work, as is evident from the deliberate effort to manufacture statistics showing a high rate of homosexuality in the male population, was designed with certain goals in mind. Gershon Legman, former bibliographer of Kinsey's erotica collection at the Kinsey Institute, was dismissed as disgruntled when he wrote in The Horn Book that the Kinsey studies were "statistical hokum" designed to "disguise" his "propagandistic" purpose of respectabilizing homosexuality and certain sexual perversions."16 Legman added, "[Kinsey] did not hesitate to extrapolate his utterly inadequate and inconclusive samplings .. . to the whole population of the United States, not to say the world." It turns out Legman was correct. Stanford University historian Paul Robinson, in his 1976 book The Modernization of Sex observed that Kinsey's statistics were designed "to undermine the traditional sexual order."17 Especially threatened was the long-standing societal prohibition on adult-child sexual contact, which helps explain a common tie binding Kinsey's prime defenders.

In the current controversy, Kinsey's few apologists risk self exposure through the connection of their own agendas with the worst elements of Kinsey's. The first defender - in New York's Village Voice (December 11, 1990, pp., 39-41) - was Philip Nobile, a former editorial director of Forum magazine, who is noted for his 1977 article in the well-known science publication Penthouse (December 1977) on the subject of "positive incest." The following year, Nobile was featuring the views of a pro-incest physician in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 15, 1978, p. 21) with the commendation that "despite the utter amorality of her prescription, I believe she has an argument that should be heard. For she wants to save the children too." Nobile's review of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud was principally a personal attack on one of the authors.

Another true believer to surface is Vem Bullough, whose review of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud in the journal Free Inquiry (Spring 1991, pp. 50-1) artlessly mocks the writers for getting upset about Kinsey's findings on the harmlessness of adult-child sex. The Kinsey view is "probably true," says Bullough of the case of men with young girls, that "if penetration is excluded" the result of societal overreaction. Bullough has written in a foreword to Dutch paedophile Edward Brongersma's book Loving Boys: A Multidisciplinary Study of Sexual Relations Between Adult and Minor Males (Volume 1) that paedophilia is "a subject that too often has been ignored or subject to hysterical statements."18 He recently has been quoted in a NAMBLA Bulletin advertisement (March 1991) recommending the Dutch Journal of paedophilia. (NAMBLA is the acronym for the North American Man/Boy Love Association).

A fascinating review by former Kinsey Institute staffer Dr William Simon has just appeared in the February 1992 issue of Archives of Sexual Behaviour.19 For the first time ever (as far as we can determine) a Kinsey disciple agonizes about the ethical dilemma of using data from the illegal experiments described above. However, Simon will only admit that the experiments were "possibly abusive." He assumes, moreover, that data from children can illustrate normal sexual development, and expresses concern that we "must ... be alert to tendencies to overidentify with the subjects of our research." We're not making this up! Simon believes our allegations are politically motivated and ideologically driven paranoia. This reaction might have been expected. In 1970, Simon and former Kinsey Institute colleague John Gagnon authored a SIECUS Study Guide (No. 11) declaring that in cases of adult-child sexual contact "the scarring is more likely to come from various adult reactions to the event itself" (p. 23). Interestingly, it was John Gagnon who, knowing the prisoner and sex offender bias among Kinsey's male interviewees,20 misrepresented the sample problems in a 1989 Science article as too many people from groups such as college faculties and Parent Teachers Asssciations and too heavily drawn from the Mid- West!"

One would have expected some official reaction from the Kinsey Institute to the allegations in Kinsey, Sex and Fraud. The response has been silence and repeated refusal to debate the issue in public forums on the grounds that to do so would dignify the baseless charges. One clue to the sensitivity of these charges, however, has been the attempt by Kinsey Institute director Dr. June Reinisch to prevent public discussion of the book on radio talk shows. In the case of radio station WNDE, Indianapolis (Kinsey home turf, this was successfully achieved by implied threat of a law-suit. Another clue is Dr. Reinisch's response to National Institutes of Health scientist Walter Stewart's call (on the jacket of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud) for the scientific community to thoroughly and openly debate "disturbing questions" about the Kinsey research. (Stewart is well-known in the United States, and abroad, as perhaps the leading expert on science fraud. He was intimately involved in the Baltimore and Benveniste cases.) Reinisch wrote to the National Institutes of Health that "If such a scientist [Stewart] does exist and is on the staff of NIH, I thought you would like to know that he is making these kind of statements" (letter to Dr. Wyngaarden, November 8, 1990). We, like Stewart, interpret this as a crude attempt to discourage his interest.

A particularly benighted review of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud in the October 15, 1991 Canadian Medical Association Journal 22 considered the pointing out of the above (and other) facts about the Kinsey team and their research a "diatribe." However, we wish to thank this reviewer for incorrectly accusing one of us (in a letter exchange) of quoting Walter Stewart out of context.23 A response to the journal from Stewart calls for an investigation of the Kinsey research.24

Since the American media of the 1940s and 50s created Kinsey, how do their successors handle his fraud exposure? Columnist Patrick Buchanan, now running a presidential campaign, got the point right away and fearlessly ran a syndicated column titled "Sex, Lies and Dr. Kinsey" (New York Post, October 20,1990, p. 13) and radio talk shows tackled the subject head on, but print journalists have difficulty with this scandal. Unlike Britain, the "mainstream" press in the U.S. is liberal-left, and, of course, Kinsey has been a God in that group's pantheon. One of the greatest journalistic fears (and perhaps dangers) is to be too far out of politically correct orbit. Nationally respected columnist John Leo of U.S. News and World Report, recounted (in a conversation with JGM) a sticky situation in a previous life at Time magazine when he mocked the pro adult-child sex coterie of academics, including Mary Calderone (q.v.) (Time, April 14, 1982, p. 72). "A complaint came in," said Leo. "I believe Henry Grunwald [then editor-in-chief] made an apology behind my back." Leo said he thought hisjob was at risk. Now he is uncharacteristically silent about the shocking expos� of the related research his new publication thinks is a "cornerstone" of sexual knowledge. Print journalists might get on board when it's politically safer.

In the meantime, an awareness of the Kinsey research scandal is gradually spreading through the mainstream scientific (as opposed to sexology) community. An investigation of some kind may be inevitable.- in October 1991 a past president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counsellors and Therapists wrote in the society's newsletter (Contemporary Sexuality, October 1991, p1): "Look how we've used the Kinsey data. We've used it for everything from assessing the stability of marriage to raising children to trying to understand human growth and development - not just sexual but also psychological growth and changes over time." And all this from a pathological model of human behaviour!

J. Gordon Muir, a contributing author and editor of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, is a pharmaceutical company executive and former research physician based at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

John H. Court, an editor of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, is Professor of Psychology, Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena, California.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Gordon Muir, Lochinvar Inc, Suite 123, 1381, Kildane Farm Road, North Carolina 27511, USA.

REFERENCES

  1. Kinsey AC, Pomeroy WB, Martin CE. Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Philadelphia: WB Saunders,1948.
  2. Kinsey AC, Pomeroy WB, Martin CE, Gebhard PH. Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. Philadelphia: WB Saunders, 1953.
  3. Pomeroy W, Schaefer LC. Impact of published surveys and research on public concepts of human sexuality. In: Forleo R, Pasini W, eds. Medical Sexology. Littleton, Mass: PSG Publishing, 1980: 76.
  4. Pomeroy WB. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
  5. Kinsey AC, Porneroy WB, Martin CE, Gebhard PH. Concepts of normality and abnormality in sexual behaviour. In: Hoch PH, Zubin J, eds. Psychosexual Development in Health and Disease. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1949.
  6. O'Carroll T. Pedophilia: The Radical Case. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1980.
  7. Reisinan JA, Eichel EW. Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People. Lafayette, LA: Lochinvar-Huntington House, 1990.
  8. Kinsey AC. Homosexuality. J Clin Endocrinol 1941; 1:424-28.
  9. Christenson CV. Kinsey: A Biography. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1971.
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  11. Smith TW. Adult sexual behaviour in 1989: number of partners, frequency of intercourse and risk of AIDS. Fam Plann Perspect 1991; 23: 102-7.
  12. Pomeroy WB. The Masters-Johnson report and the Kinsey tradition. In: Brecher R, Brecher E, eds. An Analysis of Human Sexual Response. London: Andre Deutsch, 1967: 117.
  13. Kirkendall LA, Libby RW. Sex education in the future. J Sex Ed Ther 1985; 11 (I): 64-7.
  14. Anon. Really Dr. Kinsey? Lancet 1991; 337: 547.
  15. Masters WH, Johnson VE, Kolodnv RC, eds. Ethical Issues in Sex Therapy and research. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.
  16. Legman G. The Horn Book. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964: 125-6.
  17. Robinson P. The Modernization of sex. New York: Harper & Row, 1976: 59.
  18. Brongersma E. Loving Boys (Volume I): A Multidisciplinary Study of Sexual Relations Be- tween Adult and Minor Males. Elmhurst, NY: Global Academic Publishers, 1986.
  19. Simon W. Arch Sex Behav 1992; 21: 91-3.
  20. Gagnon JH. Human Sexualities. Glenview, 11: Scott, Foresman, 1977: 253.
  21. Fay RE, Turner CF, Klassen AD, Gagnon JH. Prevalence and patterns of same-gender sexual contact among men. Science 1989; 243: 338-48.
  22. Langford RE. Diatribe cloaked in scientific language. Can Med Assoc J 1991; 145: 989.
  23. Langford RE. Can Med Assoc J 1992; 146:448.
  24. Stewart WW. Can Med Assoc J 1992; 146:818-20.