In article <15446@optilink.COM>      cramer@optilink.COM (Clayton Cramer) writes:  >In article <1993Apr17.093826.5227@nwnexus.WA.COM> >     elf@halcyon.com (Elf Sternberg) writes:  >>    Geez, where have you been, Ryan?  I proposed this theory *months* >> ago.  Let's take it one step further, even.  If, as the surveys show, >> up to 33% of all men have *had* a homosexual encounter, then there must  >Cite a survey, other than the obviously bogus Kinsey studies.     Granted.  Pomeroy, Bell, Weinberg, 1967.  "National Institute of Mental Health Paper 12353, ''Patterns of Adjusment in Deviant Populations.''"  Cited as part of the National Institute of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality.     Pomery concluded, "The Kinsey statistic of 37% is probably higher than is realistic.  According to these estimates, 33% is a more realistic figure."     (I went out and bought LOTS of Bell & Weinberg this weekend... can you tell?)     Also, The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior (Samuel S. Janus, Ph.D. and Cynthia L. Janus, M.D., John Wiley & Sons (pub), 1992) has the following:  Table 3.14 Have you ever had a homosexual experience?           Men.    Women. N=        1,335   1,384 Yes       22%      17% No        78%      83%  Table 3.15 How often have you had homosexual contact?                       Men   Women N=                    294     235 a. Once                5%      6% b. Occasionally       56%     67% c. Frequently         13%      6% d. Ongoing            26%     21%  Active (c. + d.)      39%     37%  39% of 22% is 9%.  This number is consistent with Kinsey, Pomery, Gebard (1953), Bell & Weinberg (1967, 1974), and Rice (1987) in the finding that 9% of the male population is actively homosexual, with an further breakdown (Bell & Wienberg, 1978) of 4% exclusively so and 5% self-identifying themselves as "bisexuals."     (pp 69, 70)     As for debunking Kinsey, the following article is an important lesson for everyone to read:  Was Kinsey a Fake and a Pervert? by Philip Nobile       Far out on the grassy knoll of sexology, there is a cult of prochastity researchers who claim that the late Alfred Kinsey was a secret sex criminal, a Hoosier Dr. Mengele, who bent his numbers toward the bisexual and the bizarre in a grand conspiracy to queer the nation and usher in an era of free sex with kids.         But what really riles these critics is Kinsey's towerin~ cultural influence.  His bestselling surveys-- Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)-- tore the sheets off the country's erogenous zones and undermined midcentury morals.  His charts and graphs, based on detailed histories of 12,000 men and women, demonstrated that practices generally considered rare and/or 'abnormal'-- masturbation, extramarital relations, homosexuality, and even barnyard bestiality, were as American as strawberry shortcake.         Yet for a hard core of these heterosexual supremacists, aided and abetted by Pat Buchanan and the religious right, the zoology professor from Indiana University remains the evil genius behind the sex revolution and a target for character assassination.         Judith Reisman, the prosecution's expert witness at the Mapplethorpe trial in Cincinnati, is the leader of the anti- Kinsey revisionists as well as his Inspector Javert.  In 1983, during a radio interview with Pat Buchanan in Washington, Reisman accused Kinsey of having been inolved in "the vicious genital torture of hundreds of children."  She speculated that he kidnapped and drugged ghetto boys in order to carry out clandestine orgasm tests.         Now, seven years later, Reisman has revived her charges in a different book, titled Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, just released by the small and religiously oriented Huntington House in Lafayette, Louisiana.  Her coauthor is Ed Eichel, a Manhattan psychotherapist who has invented a new style of intromission ("the coital alignment technique") that supposedly triggers simultaneous orgasm with considerable regularity and thereby increases compatibilty between the sexes.  In the book Eichel contends that "Kinsey deliberately cooked the gay stats because, being an oddball himself, he wanted to advance the 'denormalization' of heterosexuality."         If the authors are right, then the world- famous Kinsey Reports are, as the introduction boldly asserts, "the most egregious example of scientific deception in this century."  And if they are wrong, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud is a shameful smear.       Despite the less- than- stellar credentials of Kinsey's detractors, legends are not what they used to be.  Martin Luther King may have committed plagiarism.  Bruno Bettelheim slapped young mental patients around.  Father Bruce Ritter, the founder of Covenant House, preyed on runaway boys.  Closer to Kinsey, Masters and Johnson have been disgraced for faking it in one way or another.         So it should not surprise anybody that Kinsey, who filmed strange people having sex in his attic, may have had skeletons in the closet. The problem is that Reisman does not seem to have the intellectual prowess to pull off the job.         As a thinker, the woman is no Madame Curie.  The 55-year-old former songwriter for Captain Kangaroo has little professional standing, no current university position, and no peer-review publications, though her creative 1983 resume was padded with phantom accomplishments.  For instance, it listed a book as her own-- Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography-- that was actually written and edited by others.  Then there is her Ph.D. in Speech Communication from Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University.  Although Reisman has no bachelor's degree, Case granted her a master's in 1976 and a doctorate in 1979.  Her dissertation was on the commentaries of a local octagenarian TV commentator.  But on the resume, Reisman gave this piece of scholarship a fancy Hautes Etudes moniker-- to wit: "The Application of Aristotelian and Systems Analytic Theory to Mass Media Effects."       When Reisman burst into prominence on Buchanan's program, it was love at first sight for Al Regnery, the outwardly anti-  porn head of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Ed Meese's Justice Department.  Regnery was a young law-and-order conservative and amateur social philosopher who wanted to help change the sexual climate of the United States.         After Reisman's sensational radio session, the sexual equivalent of Joe McCarthy's Wheeling speech, Regnery summoned  her to meetings to discuss mutual interests.  First he tried to shovel her $800,000 for a quasi-Frankenstein study that was going to measure the brain chemicals of men and boys who looked at arousing photographs.  Guffaws on Capitol Hill killed the original proposal, but $734,000 in govemment money went to Reisman anyway for plan B- a probe of child images in the cartoons Playboy, Penthouse, and Hust ler.  (Incredibly, this grant surpassed the entire budget of the attorney general's pornography commission.)        When the overpriced and oversold project was completed in 1986, it was immediately shelved by an embarrassed Justice Department.  That spring, Regnery resigned from his post only days before the New Republic carried this admission that he had kept porno magazines around the house.         Notwithstanding the six-figure humiliation, Reisman went on to scratch out a niche on the ioony right.  As the darling of the sex cranks, she deplores subversive phenomena like shaved genitalia in men's magazines and blames AIDS on gays.  Kinsey, Sex and Fraud is Reisman's latest grasp for respectability.  Pat Buchanan, of course, is putting his Krugerrands on Reisman's ultimate vindication.  "This book is social dynamite," he says in a blurb an the front cover.  He especially liked the antigay parts.  Smacking his lips in his syndicated column, he declared, "It may just blow the sewer cap off Kinsey's monumental reputation, reestablish homosexuality as a 1-in-50 aberration, expose the Gay Rights movement as a paper tiger, and even put at risk the enormous sex industry built upon Dr. Kinsey's 'research.'"       The blockbuster charge at the heart of the cluttered and repetilive j'Accuse is that Kinsey was a sex-mad pedophile who molested little boys in Nazi-type experiments and recorded their orgasms in his male volume/ A similar charge was first recited at the Fifth World Conference on Sexology in Jerusalem in 1981 to no effect before being recycled by Reisman for Buchanan in Washington in 1983.       Here is how Reisman and Eichel repackaged the Mengele business in Kinsey, Sex and Fraud:       Mengele-like 'scientific' experiments on infants and children were the basis for Kinsey's conclusions...  on childhood sexuality.       Somewhere and sometime in the course of the project, Kinsey appears to have directed experimental sex research on several hundred children aged from two months to almost 15 years.       This, of course, would implicate Kinsey and his team in promoting, and perhaps participating in, the criminal activity.       In the opinion of this book's authors, that is exactly how part of Kinsey's child sexuality research took place.        Donning his psychohistorian's cap and citing an FBI manual on child molesters as a guide, Eichel casually diagnoses Kinsey as a homosexual pedophile with the perfect motive for doing exactly as Reisman said:          [Kinsey] placed himself in professional and nonprofessional positions where he had access to young boys, such as Y.M.C.A.  camp counselor, boys' club leader, and Boy Scout leader-- activities he kept up 'during his college and graduate yeaers, and even after his marriage."         As crude as his analysis seems, Eichel was more than happy to elaborate even further in a recent phone interview.  "If you've ever been around boy- lovers, pedophiles, they are absolutely compulsive," he averred.  "Everything in his life is directed at getting children.  I didn't mention this in our book but the caption under Kinsey's high school picture was a quote from Hamlet: 'Man delights me not, no, [sic] nor woman neither.' What do you think they were picking up on?"        Before weighing what Reisman and Eichel pass off as proof of Kinsey's sex crimes, something must be said about Kinsey's scientific modus operandi.  He was a fiendish collector.  As a young zoologist with a D.Sc.  from Harvard, he collected 4 million gall wasps and 1.5 million related insects.  When he switched to sex exploration after agreeing to teach a marriage Course at Indiana University in 1938, he was no less curious or acquisitive.  Nothing that mammals did in the realm of reproduction was foreign to him.  He compiled masses of erotic materials including toilet wall inscriptions from male and female johns that highlighted differences in sexual psychology and flms of mating in 14 species of animals that showed an amazing similarity in oral eroticism.         Naturally, the sexual response of children, the genesis of eros, fascinated him.  It was impossible to understand the sexual behaviors of adults without examining their origins.  And so with the fervor of his bughunting days, Kinsey collected information about kids, though even his worst enemies-- until Reisman and Eichel-- refrained from linking him personally to his data on preadolescent sex.         Kinsey said plainly in the male volume that he got information on the sex life of young boys from people who had sex with them: "Some of these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which have been put at our disposal."  Although he gathered much boyhood data from the memories of his subjects and the observations of parents and nursery school teachers, he treated the documentary materia! of the pedophiles as pure gold.  There was nothing like it in the literature.         Kinsey's main source, a 63-year-old govemment worker, was also the most unforgettable character he had ever met.  This man, whose history took 17 hours to log, had sex with over 600 boys and 200 girls as well as 17 of 33 family members including his father and grandmother.  A sexual hobbyist and passionate record-keeper, he gave Kinsey detailed accounts of orgasms that he observed in preadolescent boys.  Relying on the man's meticulous research, which involved following some boys for as long as 16 years, Kinsey was able to identify for the first time six distinct types of male orgasm-- some of which involved violent contortions at the peak of release-- as well as the speed and the capacity of climax.         What Freud had only imagined about childhood sexuality, Kinsey had reported as fact.  Children were indeed erotic beings from the cradle.  "These data on the sexual activities of younger male provide an important substantiation of the Freudian view of sexuality as a component that is present in the human animal from earliest infancy," he concluded without raising eyebrows in 1948.         Then along came Judith Reisman.  Ignorng the legitimacy of Kinsey's inquiry, she beheld the ghost of Mengele in Bloomington.  She was appalled by the thought of infant ecstasy and read torture in the portrayals of prepubertal orgasm rendered by the government worker. And she dared to say that Kinsey was a sex criminal.         Well, was he or wasn't he? Let's go to the text.  There is no evidence in Kinsey, Sex and Fraud-- no witnesses, no paper, noteven a trace of hearsay-- that implicates Kinsey in either planning or partaking in child sex experiments.  After 12 years on the trail, Reisman has uncovered just two sources to back up her original charge- - amazingly enough, Kinsey himself and Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey's coauthor on both reports, to whom Reisman has never spoken.  It turns out that her whole case rests on a few passages in the male volume iand in Pomeroy's 1972 biography titled Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research.       After frisking every "the" and "and" in both books, Reisman came up with what she believes are "smoking" sentences.  To establish Kinsey's alleged role in the planning, she says that "there is a hint" in the fifth chapter of the male volume that Kinsey "directed" the orgasm studies on kids.  She cites his tell-tale quote from a critic of armchair psychoanalysis demanding that "writers...test their theories...by empirical study and statistical procedures."  Then she combines this quote with Kinsey's statement that some of the observations of his pedophile sources "were continued over periods of months or years until the individuals were old enough to make it certain that true orgasm was involved."         Putting two and two together-- Kinsey's empiricism and lengthy experimentation-- she arrives at her hint.  But realizing this dog would not hunt, she devoted but a single paragraph to Kinsey's supposed planning before shifting to the issue of his personal involvement.  As for the alleged participation, after poring over Pomeroy's biography, Reisman found several hidden clues suggesting Kinsey's likely hands-on approach to kiddie sex.  Here the chain of reasoning is more complex.  She points out that Kinsey was interested in clitoral measurements, collecting sperm and filming sex in his attic.  Since Kinsey did indeed mislead Indiana University about the purpose of his cinematography-- he said that he was filming "animal sex"-- Reisman asserts that a "similar misrepresentation may yet apply to Kinsey's child sex experiments."  Catch the "may"!       Reisman was also struck by Kinsey's doubting Thomas attitude toward the never before recorded climax of female rabbits: "Kinsey, according to Pomeroy, was the type of person who needed to see things for himself.  Pomeroy gave the example of orgasm in the female rabbit. Because he had not personally witnessed this event, Kinsey had difficulty in accepting its reality, even on the strength of testimony from a distinguished scientist.  How then did Kinsey testify to the actuality of orgasm in a 5-month-old infant from the mere 'history' of a sex offender?" (But, of course, he did not: he depended on their records.)        From this fantastic alchemy of conjecture mixed with clitorides, sperm, attic cumshots, and climax-in-cottontail has Reisman defamed the legendary Kinsey.       Paul Gebhard succeeded Kinsey as the director of the Kinsey Institute and now lives in retirement outside Bloomington.  Reached by telephone, Gebhard defended the pedophile connection and denied Reisman's nasty imputations.  "I don't understand the resistance of people like Reisman to studying the sexuality of children," Gebhard said more in exasperation than anger.  "That is where sex begins.  We were happy to take data wherever we found it.  Even though pedophiles commit criminal acts, they are usually not violent folks.  They wouldn't be very successful if they were.  One of our best sources was a headmaster of a boys' school who maintained a kind of alumni club and sometimes went to the weddings of his former students.  As for directing experiments, that's absurd.  We never told any of our subjects what to do.  lt was against our principles.  Almost all of the pedophile material was retrospective anyway.  Nor did we ever conduct sex experiments with children ourselves.  That would have been highly inappropriate."         I asked Gebhard if Kinsey had ever seen a child in a sexual situation.  "I think a mother once brought in a little girl who humped her teddy bear and Kinsey watched it."         As for Kinsey's sex life, it is still shrouded in confidentiality.  He was married to the same woman for 35 years and fathered four children.  Apparently, there are no huge sexual revelations, although rumors of homosexuality have persisted without confirmation through the years.  Gebhard took his boss's history back in the '40s, but he refuses to discuss what he knows.  "We never divulge anything about anybody's history, whether dead or alive," he says.         Reisman said no to an interview for this article on the grounds that I had once worked for Penthouse-- not to mention the fact that we have been debating each other in various forums for the past five years.  In keeping with our contentious history, she took a swipe at me in her book for continuing "the Kinsey practice of euphemizing incest."  My offense was using the biblical variant "lying with a near relative" in a 1977 article on the subject of incest.  As a synonym for intercourse, "lying with" appears eight times in Genesis.         Ed Eichel is a different story.  Though seemingly obsessed by Kinsey like his coauthor, he was friendly in long conversations.  He told me that he began to smell a big baised agenda in sexology when he was a student in New York University's Human Sexuality program in the early '80s.  "It was literally a gay studies program for heterosexuals," he says.       Around 1985, Eichel came upon Reisman's critique of Kinsey and the conspiracy theory started to sink in: the sex establishment was ruled by a Kinseyan bisexual bund advocating the overthrow of the heterosexual norm.  No wonder he was having such a rough time promoting the joy of simultaneous orgasm-- anything that enhanced sexual compatibility between men and women inevitably raised objections.       Eventually, Eichel exchanged philosophical fluids with Reisman, and from this union Kinsey, Sex and Fraud was born.  Eichel's main contribution to the book is discovery and analysis of a Kinsey conspiracy that supposedly seeks "the establishment of bisexuality as the balanced sexual orientation for normal, uninhibited people" which, by destroying the traditional family structure and normal sexual behavior, "would open the way for the second and more difficult step-- the ultimate goal of cross-generational sex (sex with children)."         When I pressed him for specific references to back up his outrageous contentions, he said weakly, "You don't think Kinsey is going to come right out and say that everybody is basically bisexual and should have sex with kids, but this is implicit in the Kinsey reports."         Meanwhile, Eichel is demanding a congressional investigation of Kinsey and his data.  Perfect.  That's just what the country needs-- a House Un-American Sexual Activities Committee, looking under beds and asking people if they are now or have everbeen a reader, a sympathizer or-- God forbid-- a subject of Dr. Alfred Kinsey.            Elf !!! -- elf@halcyon.com  (Elf Sternberg)