![]() Kinsey had started investigating American sexuality the year before Reich arrived in the country, and ideas about liberation which fermented in Europe took on a new aspect. In researching a book about the intellectual origins of the sexual revolution, a phrase coined by the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s, I found that Kinsey and Reich had corresponded. ![]() Although a Gallup poll conducted at the time found that three-quarters of the public approved of Kinsey’s work, the Kinsey report was compared to the atom bomb when it came out one abstinence-education organisation has recently compared its original publication to 9/11, accusing it of ushering in ‘fifty years of cultural terrorism’. ![]() Following a carefully orchestrated campaign of complaints, some TV stations have refused to show trailers for it. Conservative Christian groups are denouncing the film as a Hollywood whitewash which elevates a man they consider responsible for everything from Aids to child abuse into a hero. The release of Kinsey has reignited an old controversy in the US. The film within a film is studiedly unerotic ( Kinsey is rated ‘R’, the equivalent of a 15): a re-creation of a scene which one first-hand observer described as ‘Wardell going like crazy but far, far behind his partner and her effortless flow of orgasms’, and apart from a post-credit sequence of copulating porcupines, chimps and farm animals (original footage from the Institute’s archive), it is the only reference to Kinsey’s home movies. The woman in question is Dr Alice Spears, a gynaecologist who had her first orgasm aged 40 Kinsey shot a number of films in which she featured he and Paul Gebhard also slept with her (the latter apparently found her machine-like response distracting). We cut to the sex researchers watching the footage of the multiorgasmic granny having intercourse with Pomeroy, played by Chris O’Donnell. His colleagues jostle for position until she appears, very wrinkly, from behind a curtain like a vanitas image (she is described in the screenplay as a ‘typical grandmother’). Kinsey briefs them about the next subject who, he tells them, can have 15 to 20 orgasms in 20 minutes, the first one two to five seconds after entry. There is a scene in which he and his three helpers – Pomeroy, the psychologist, Paul Gebhard, an anthropologist, and the statistician Clyde Martin – assemble in the attic studio to make a film. 2 Liam Neeson plays the bow-tied, gall-wasp collecting scientist as a forceful, lonely, socially awkward stickler for detail with a disarming smile. Now the scientist cum film-maker is the subject of a new biopic, Kinsey, directed by Bill Condon. He acquired copies of all Kinsey’s home movies after his death in 1956, along with 8000 other erotic films in Kinsey’s collection, in return for a generous grant to the Institute for Sex Research which was foundering without its leader. One of the chosen few was Hugh Hefner, who was inspired to launch Playboy in 1953 after reading the Kinsey reports. 1 Until then they had been kept under lock and key in a fireproof safe in Kinsey’s archive and only a select few had been allowed to watch them. ![]() Often he would star in his productions himself.Īlfred Kinsey’s cinematic oeuvre first came to light in 1972 when Wardell Pomeroy, who worked for Kinsey and had taken down 8000 of the 18,000 sex histories Kinsey amassed, mentioned the films in a biography of his former boss. He would whisper instructions to his cameraman, and offer subtle direction to his actors (‘If you would just come now,’ he once said calmly when a camera was threatening to overheat). Sometimes the director would disappear into the shadows so that the performers would forget he was there at other times, according to one biographer, he would observe the action ‘inches removed from the couple’s genitals, close enough to smell body odours and hear the squish of juices’. In a simple attic room, with only a mattress on the pine floor, two people would have sex in a cone of light. I am Dr Kinsey from Indiana University, and I’m making a study of sex behaviour.
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