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The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson (Cornell paperbacks)

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Paul Robinson's The Modernization of Sex surveys the work of three pioneering sex researchers: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, and William Masters. (I say three rather than four since Virginia Johnson doesn't really count. Robinson names her in the subtitle of his book along with Ellis, Kinsey, and Masters, but as his chapter on Masters and Johnson shows, she was always the junior partner in the Masters and Johnson team, and of no greater importance compared to Masters than Kinsey's co-writers were compared to him.) Robinson describes their contributions to "sexual modernism", a movement to liberalize sexual values and subject them to scientific scrutiny. His treatment of Masters and Johnson is now seriously dated, since they went on to produce several influential works after Robinson's discussion of their work was first published in 1976. Thus readers won't learn about Masters and Johnson's attempts to therapeutically convert homosexuals to heterosexuality (as presented in their 1979 book Homosexuality in Perspective) or Crisis (their alarmist 1988 book about AIDS), both of which did a great deal to damage their reputations and tarnish their legacy. Robinson acknowledged that Masters and Johnson were still active when he was writing and that he therefore couldn't give a complete account of their careers. He has no reason to be ashamed of his judgments of them, however, since what Masters and Johnson did after he wrote about them abundantly confirms his impression that their values were basically conservative.

Robinson's chapter on Alfred Kinsey is in some ways the best part of his book, even though it is highly opinionated and far from being fully reliable. Kinsey's work raises more complicated intellectual issues than does that of Masters and Johnson, or Havelock Ellis (whom Robinson credits with making a more extensive and more representative contribution to sexual modernism than Freud), and it's perhaps for this reason that Robinson's discussion of Kinsey does the most to reveal his own strengths and limitations as a thinker. Robinson suggests that Kinsey's ideas about the nature of science were akin to nominalism, a philosophical tradition going back to the middle ages. Robinson is probably correct, but he does not back up his assessment with either a sufficiently careful reading of Kinsey or an adequate discussion of nominalism. He nowhere mentions the most nominalist-sounding of Kinsey's observations ("Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes", which can be found on page 639 of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in the chapter on homosexuality, and compares well to the definitions of nominalism that can be found in philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias; see eg, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy).

Robinson equates Kinsey's nominalism with "intellectual weakness", which is somewhat bizarre, given nominalism's long and distinguished history. If Kinsey was guilty of "intellectual weakness", that would only be because he adopted a nominalist position uncritically and without argument, but since Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was not intended as a work of philosophy, it would be foolish to complain that he failed to support his philosophical stance with philosophical arguments. The relevant question is how well the philosophical position Kinsey adopted served his needs as a scientist. Though Kinsey was, contrary to what Robinson mistakenly implies, well aware of "the difficulty of establishing viable analytic categories", it is unclear how far he succeeded in actually doing so. As Robinson suggests, Kinsey found himself stuck between denying in principle that "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals" are objectively valid categories of people and having to accept in practice that they are in some sense valid.

Robinson sees the famous Kinsey scale as Kinsey's way out of the dilemma, but pompously dismisses it, calling it "arguably the most pathetic manifestation of Kinsey's philosophical naivete." The Kinsey scale may well be flawed in multiple ways, and perhaps even radically unsound, but such conclusions would have to be supported by careful arguments to carry conviction. Robinson's arguments against the Kinsey scale are careless, and seriously misrepresent Kinsey. Robinson apparently believes that Kinsey thought that his seven-point scale for measuring sexuality ranging from 0 (completely heterosexual) at one extreme to 6 (completely homosexual) at the other was a perfect reflection of reality; in fact Kinsey always insisted that it was only a useful approximation of reality, and that finer distinctions could be made. That is to say, Kinsey would have accepted (although he didn't put it this way) that in addition to Kinsey 3s and 4s there are also Kinsey 3.5s, 4.5s, 5.25s, and so on. Another of Robinson's mistakes is to insist that the Kinsey scale can easily be collapsed into a three-way division of heterosexuals, bisexuals, and homosexuals. According to him, Kinsey 0s and 1s are obviously identical to heterosexuals, Kinsey 2s, 3s and 4s to bisexuals, and Kinsey 5s and 6s to homosexuals, but he presents this conclusion without argument, and gives us no reason why we shouldn't instead conclude (for example) that only Kinsey 0s are really equal to heterosexuals and only Kinsey 6s to homosexuals, while everyone else is a bisexual, or (alternatively) that Kinsey 0s, 1s, and 2s are equal to heterosexuals, 3s to bisexuals, and 4s, 5s, and 6s to homosexuals. Either conclusion would be equally as logical or illogical as Robinson's. Kinsey, and the reader, would have benefited from a more careful and scrupulous analysis.