"What Is a Woman?": Correcting the Record on Kinsey
Setting the story straight on Kinsey and his research, according to Matt Walsh and Miriam Grossman's revisionist version.
In the now infamous “What Is a Woman?” (Folk 2022) film starring conservative commentator Matt Walsh, it’s asserted that the history of human sexuality, which started with Kinsey, is fraught with methodological bias and perversion. In this article, I will review the claims made regarding Kinsey and correct the record.
It’s important to note that I will not be responding to all criticisms regarding Kinsey and his work, only those noted by Matt Walsh and Miriam Grossman, M.D., an adolescent and adult psychiatrist.
At the 50:51 mark, Grossman shows Walsh a book entitled It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, a book made for those 10 years and older. As the name implies, the book discusses sex and sexual health, with Walsh and Grossman disgusted that a book on sex and sexual health would be written for kids and the like. According to Grossman, children were taught sexuality at a young age because of one man: Alfred Kinsey. (The issue of sexuality regarding minors will not be dealt with here, though I have written about it in other posts, like here and here.)
According to Grossman, Kinsey wanted to “rid society of Judeo-Christian values” regarding sexuality — and, according to Grossman, “he succeeded”. Walsh spends a few seconds implying that Kinsey was a pervert due to his research on child sexuality, even bringing up Table 34 from one of The Kinsey Report’s, specifically the book on sexuality regarding males (Kinsey 1998).
Using this table, Grossman and Walsh assert that “his research was fraudulent” as his data came from sex offenders rather than non-deviant populations, and Table 34 was a display of sexual abuse from Kinsey himself. In other words, the orgasms among pre-adolescent males were data gathered by Kinsey through his own hands, painting Kinsey as a child abuser. However, neither Grossman nor Walsh are being honest in their revisionist version regarding the history of human sexuality.
It’s important to note that the criticisms regarding the sampling method are not new, as was noted by Tukey directly to Kinsey. As noted in Jones (2006), “Tukey came at people frontally, and he refused to cut Kinsey any slack on the statistical errors and compromises he had made”, and “Despite the huge number of histories he had compiled, his sample was far from random and therefore far from representative—too many of his histories came from prisoners, too many from college students, and too many from subjects he knew in advance to be gay.” As Kinsey noted at the time, gathering random samples for sex research was nearly impossible given “the high declination rate that sex researchers routinely encountered”, a fact agreed with by another report on Kinsey’s data. As Jones remarks about this report, “Assuming he did, Reed’s silence on this point suggests that he agreed with Kinsey and had decided not to hold him to an ideal standard no sex researcher could meet.”
Though Walsh and Grossman are adamant about the sampling bias present in Kinsey’s work, it’s important to remember that Kinsey’s work was not solely based on deviants, but also on average people. This fact is left untouched by Walsh and Grossman, instead implying that the data only came from deviants. However, this is not to say that the issue of sampling bias is truly not an issue. Gathering data from deviants can certainly skew the results, but Walsh and Grossman fail to mention that Kinsey’s findings regarding human sexual behavior do not significantly change when the data is cleaned.
In The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938-1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research from Gebhard and Johnson (1998), the researchers cleaned up the data by removing data from prison populations, individuals with known sexual bias (e.g. homosexuals, mental patients, etc.), and special groups with small sample sizes. As Duberman (1997) says,
Instead of Kinsey's 37 %, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4 %; the 10 % figure (with prison inmates excluded) came to 9.9 % for white, college-educated males and 12.7 % for those with less education. And as for the call for a "random sample," a team of independent statisticians studying Kinsey's procedures had concluded as far back as 1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey's interviewing technique had been "extraordinarily skillful." They characterized Kinsey's work overall as "a monumental endeavor."
Why was this not mentioned by Walsh and Grossman? Who knows — one can only assume that their research into the film was inadequate given this information.
Finally, Walsh and Grossman are wrong to imply that Kinsey is a child abuser. Contra their claims, data from Table 34 did not come from Kinsey himself, but rather came from known pedophiles — and even then, Kinsey did not encourage the abuse of children. As The Kinsey Institute notes,
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male clearly stated the bulk of information about sexual response in childhood came from adults recalling their own childhoods. Some was also from parents who had observed their children, some from teachers who had observed children interacting or behaving sexually, and Kinsey stated that there were nine men he had interviewed who had had sexual experiences with children and had told him about how the children had responded and reacted. In 1995, former Kinsey Institute director Dr. John Bancroft discovered that it was only one man, not nine, who was the source of that data listed in table 34 of the book. Dr. Bancroft suggested that possibly Dr. Kinsey had changed the number to protect the confidentiality of this source, just as he took other measures to protect the confidentiality of all his interviewees”, and “Kinsey did not carry out any experiments on children. He did not falsify research findings, and he in no way condoned any sexual abuse.”
All in all, much of the claims surrounding Kinsey in the film are misleading. A disservice to truth and the history of sex research.
In conclusion, the criticisms leveled against Alfred Kinsey in the film "What Is a Woman?" are effectively rebutted through a thorough examination of the claims made by Matt Walsh and Miriam Grossman, M.D. While acknowledging that Kinsey's work was not without flaws, this article has demonstrated that many of the accusations of fraudulence and misconduct are unfounded. By providing a nuanced analysis supported by evidence and scholarly sources, the record has been set straight regarding Kinsey's contributions to the field of sex research. While his work may not be perfect, it is far from the damning portrayal presented by Walsh and Grossman. Thus, it is imperative to recognize the importance of accuracy and integrity in discussions of historical figures and their research endeavors, ensuring a more informed understanding of the complexities surrounding human sexuality.