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| SERIOUS SEX
THE DOCTORS ARE IN
Liam Neeson (right) as sex-research pioneer Alfred Kinsey with fellow researchers Wardell Pomeroy (Chris O’Donnell), Paul Gebhard (Timothy Hutton) and Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard).
kinsey
SIX YEARS AFTER THE OSCAR-WINNING GODS AND MONSTERS (AND THREE YEARS ON FROM WRITING THE SCRIPT FOR CHICAGO), WRITER/DIRECTOR BILL CONDON TACKLES ANOTHER AMERICAN ICON. IN KINSEY, REPORTS MAX LEVANT, HE CHARTS THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE FIRST AMERICAN TO TALK AND WRITE SERIOUSLY ABOUT SEX.
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Both Dublin and Edinburgh have genteel suburbs (Rathmines and Morningside respectively) where the polite accent softens or distorts certain vowel sounds, including the ‘a’ in ‘sacks’, making it sound more like an ‘e’. “Sex,” it is thus jokingly said of the prim and proper inhabitants of Rathmines (and Morningside), “is what they put their coal in.”
When University of Indiana professor Alfred Kinsey first started exploring the sexual behaviour of the American male in the forties - at a time and in a place which made Rathmines (and Morningside) seem positively swinging - coal may not have been much used, but sex was even less discussed. Which made Kinsey’s life-story all but irresistible to director Bill Condon.
Condon won an Oscar in 1998 for his screenplay for Gods and Monsters, the story of homosexual director James Whale in thirties Hollywood, where gayness was tolerated but never mentioned. He was first approached to make a film about Kinsey, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and its companion volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), by producer Gail Mutrux (Nurse Betty, Quiz Show).
Like most people, Condon knew roughly who Kinsey was without knowing much about the details of his career. What he found out, through six years of research, was that Kinsey was a pioneer in the field of research into human sexuality, after discovering during discussions with his students at the University of Indiana (where he taught zoology) that no systematic work had been done in the field.
His discoveries, published in the book on male behaviour, were described by one contemporary as having an effect on America roughly equivalent to that of an atom bomb. Using information gathered from a series of interviews involving techniques developed over a 10-year period with a team of researchers, Kinsey found that between 67 and 98 percent of men had sex before they were married (depending on social class); that 50 percent of husbands had extramarital affairs; that 92 percent of men admitted to masturbating; and that 37 percent of American males had had at least one homosexual experience.
Although Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was an academic study, its initial 1948 print-run of 25,000 copies sold out in days. Perhaps pruriently, perhaps anticipating the sexual revolution which was still two decades away, America was fascinated by the subject.
But the mood had changed by the time the Female version of the book came out seven years later. Now deep in the McCarthy era, America did not want to know that 62 percent of its wives and mothers masturbated; that half of them had engaged in premarital sex; and that 26 percent of them acknowledged having extramarital affairs. Pressure began to be put on Kinsey’s funders by Congressional investigators; the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its grant the following year; and, two years after that - on August 25, 1956 - Kinsey died of a heart attack at the age of 62.
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