New Kinsey Info?

[Franklin]

Why is it slanted? Because the author works for the Heritage Foundation? While that may mean a certain bias, it does not mean there is automatically no validity to the article or that what she says is not true. If they pedophile part of the article is true then the article is damning in the extreme.

Also, there is no point in over-glamorizing this man's "achievements." Open sexuality isn't a good thing when it isn't tied to morality, it leads directly to hedonism which is what is all around us today. America's puritanism during the 1950's is as much of a myth then as it would have been in the 1750's. Puritans only existed in one colony of the country and only for a relatively short period in power, their morality is long since dead, and certainly played no role in 1950's America, so please do not, in the future, hyperbolize. That is not to say that religion (which does not mean Puritanism, which refers to a specific set of ideas) did not play a large role in how people generally viewed sex in the 50's. But to attack an supplant an irrational view of human nature with one equally if not more pernicious is not an achievement and certainly not something to celebrate in film.

As to the rest of the points erandror makes I will address them separately:

Anyone who can look at today's view of sex, which is often base and cheap, and say that this is healthy has an odd definition for that word. Open is certainly is, but I don't see that as a good in and of itself.

I'm not sure the extent that this happened at all, and I doubt that it could ever work, but lets assume it was widespread. I would agree that it is good parents don't do this (at least most parents as I'm sure there are some throwbacks out there) anymore, but replacing it with a nonchalant attitude towards sex is a mistake as well.

They aren't? Excommunicated from what? The Catholic Church? That would seem a blessing to me. From society? They still are because their behavior is antithetical to species survival (because if everyone was gay the species would die off) and therefore strikes most people as odd.

Oh come on now, I think you've been watching too much Leave it to Beaver, female orgasms have been a widely known fact for millenia, just read some bawdy fiction from a few hundred years ago to show that this "revelation" at least predates Dr. Kinsey. Just because people don't talk about things openly, does not mean common sensical things are entirely unknown.

This falls under the same heading as the last one. Just because parents may have told children certain things to keep them from having sex too young doesn't mean that all parents actually accepted every myth and old wives tale they were selling. Just a quick reading of De Sade or any number of books from the 1600s on will tell you that people, adults that is, did not view sex, on the whole, in this way. Granted, religion changed much of this, especially the revivalism and awakenings that hit America in the 19th century. However, I doubt in most bedrooms in the 1950's or any era between husbands and wives in love, they thought oral sex was dangerous, religion can only go so far before people find it ridiculous, and the bedroom is a prime place for people to rebel, for no one, aside from the participants, will ever know.

Appreciate it why? The things that even made it possible, like the birth control pill, he had nothing to do with. His whole contribution was to make sex something non-spiritual (of course not in a religious sense, but in the Atlas Shurgged sense) and lower it on the planes with the other animals, which is not what human sex is about at all, we aren't insects, dogs, or rats. Scientifically studying human sexuality can only go so far and tell so much, it cannot do what it does for the sexuality of the other species because our brains our so much beyond theirs that the nature of sex entirely shifted when man first walked the earth. But leaving this aside and focusing back on this Dr. Kinsey, I don't see why we should applaud him at all, he's merely the other side of the same irrational coin your 1950's puritans are on. The article attempts to show why, and notice that the writer didn't say the views Dr. Kinsey was challenging were the correct views, only that the movie paints a misleading picture of Dr. Kinsey, who was in fact a not so honorable man.

Why is it slanted? Because the author writes for Pravda? Your statement is about as reasonable as this one. Or, if you want a more reasonable analogy, "Why is it slanted? Just because it was drafted by the DNC?

The fact that the author writes for the Heritage Foundation is a good reason to suspect a slant and not to take this context into consideration is ridiculous. I guess you---on similar grounds---might disapprove of racial profiling because being an Arab does not necessitate being a terrorist.

Once again, I am in awe of your astoundingly mediocre intellect. The designers of IQ tests should stop with their involved statistical norming and simply test you.

Your argument---to the extent one exists---seems to rest on the assumption that hedonism as it exists today is worse than religiously motivated morality. That is hardly the truth. I can't seem to recall the last time a group of hedonists stoned a woman to death for getting raped (happens amongst the Muhammedens all the time). When was the last time a bunch of hedonists bombed a medical clinic? When I consider the relative harms of hedonism and of religion, I firmly---while still holding it in disdain---come down on the side of hedonism. Pleasure is, in fact, a value. Faith is a destroyer of values.

Edited January 22, 2007 by Franklin