Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "When his children were small, Alfred Charles Kinsey used to fascinate them with descriptions of the Broadway he could remember in the New York of..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Paul Gebhard, Rockefeller Foundation (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It seems fitting that the man who started the culture wars over sexuality with the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male should now be the subject of them. Kinsey's life and career have always been controversial, but the 1997 publication of James H. Jones's Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life intensified the debate and attracted significant media attention by using sensational language to make the claim that the sex researcher was a deeply tormented homosexual masochist whose "inner demons" caused him to distort and falsify his research. While Gathorne-Hardy's new biography by necessity covers much of the same ground, and gives its predecessor fair credit, it also presents itself as a corrective to what its author sees as Jones's deeply ingrained prejudice against his subject and a "strong distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality" as well as nontraditional sexual practices. Methodical and cautious, Gathorne-Hardy lacks Jones's more gripping narrative drive, but he reveals much new important material--such as Kinsey's incredibly productive professional and personal relationship with novelist Glenway Westcott--that illuminates the man and his work. Gathorne-Hardy's study functions best, and most importantly, as a sharp and insightful critique of what he sees as Jones's biases. Tracking what he says are Jones's use of innuendo and pejorative language, his internal contradictions and seemingly purposeful misreadings of interviews, the author not only builds a solid case against the earlier work's conclusions but places them in an increasingly anti-sexual modern cultural context that is reminiscent of the society Kinsey himself fought against 50 years ago. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Comparing the cultural and sociological impact of the pioneering sexual research conducted by Alfred C. Kinsey with the work of Darwin and Freud may be an exaggeration. Nonetheless, in his own lifetime the popular press compared Kinsey's reports to the atom bomb, and his having merited two biographies within three years is a tribute to a dedicated scientist who led a crusade against sexual hypocrisy and whose landmark studies assuredly affected the sexual mores of the 20th century. Both British writer Gathorne-Hardy (whose book was first published in Britain under a different title) and James Jones (Alfred C. Kinsey, LJ 10/15/97) spent more than two decades digging in the archives of the Kinsey Institute, and both books show a dogged commitment to detail. Gathorne-Hardy insists that his is a kinder, gentler interpretation (he criticizes some of Jones's conclusions), but both authors reveal a voyeur's fascination with Kinsey's sex research as well as with his own homosexuality. Serious collections of human sexuality should have both titles.
-James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (February 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253337348
• ISBN-13: 978-0253337344
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,411,269 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When Ignorance Isn't Bliss, December 28, 2004

By	J. E. Barnes (Bayridge, Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's Kinsey: Sex: The Measure of All Things (2000) is a balanced, insightful, and fairly thorough biography of the controversial Indiana biologist who pioneered the study of human sexuality in the United States during the Forties and Fifties. Those distressed with the continuing tragic state of social discourse concerning sexuality in America will find Gathorne-Hardy's book courageous, invigorating, and wonderfully plain spoken on a variety of topics most Americans still can't discuss, publicly or privately, without demonstrating shame, rage, or the kind of psychological hysteria and displacement that created the 'satanic ritual abuse' scare--which ruined thousands of lives on both sides of the Atlantic--during the Eighties and Nineties.

If human sexuality is "the measure of all things," then it is also inherently a subject of enormous power for most and extreme sensitivity for many, and is likely to remain so throughout much of America for the foreseeable future. Despite the ubiquity of sexual content in the entertainment world and on the internet today, a reactionary backlash has certainly been asserting itself since the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties, most insidiously via the "political correctness" of the hypocritical elite media, governmental social welfare institutions, and college campus policy boards.

Thus, while many may initially find the reformist scientist a hero, the eccentricities and excesses of his professional and personal behavior will undoubtedly make many initially open minded readers wince in discomfort as the Kinsey story progresses. His theories in support of adult/child sexual interaction, for instance, are, tellingly, only marginally explored by Gathorne-Hardy, and Kinsey's obsessive search for personal sexual satisfaction, which led him to what many will interpret as self-mutilating activities, may be seen as signs of pathology by even the sophisticated general reader.

Alfred Kinsey was a driven man in every major aspect of his existence, and moderation, balance, and other disciplines of self control were not qualities he advocated for the public or usually practiced himself where sexual activity was concerned. Had Kinsey been more intrinsically conservative in his private behavior, it is likely that many more people today would feel at ease with his work and be able to embrace it wholeheartedly. But Kinsey's solitary habits [...] are unlikely to gain him a broad sympathetic audience in either a personal or professional capacity.

The simple truth, which Kinsey was well aware of, is that full public disclosure of personal sexual practices, even those that are the most common, will probably never sit well psychologically with most members of Western societies. Kinsey had one of the highest public profiles of his era, and must have realized that his own sexual history would eventually become public knowledge and inevitably discredit him in the court of public opinion, which may partially explain the paranoia of his last years.

As Gathorne-Hardy emphasizes repeatedly, Kinsey's work--which amounted to a personal crusade--was largely motivated by his own puritanical religious upbringing and the sexual frustration that resulted from it. His subsequent sexual interaction with some of the private citizens whose histories he documented, as well as with his own professional staff, underscore the common sense concern that the researcher's occasionally intimate approach potentially contaminated his data and compromised his ability to remain object. However, Kinsey's findings have held up statistically over the ensuing decades and compared favorably with subsequent research.

Kinsey: Sex: The Measure of All Things offers a remarkable reading experience, especially as Kinsey and most of his professional colleagues--and their spouses--regularly engage in all varieties of hetero- and homosexual acts with one another in the name of education, experience, and sheer unadorned sensual pleasure. Handsome, perennially youthful assistant Wardell Pomeroy, who considered himself predominantly heterosexual, stands out as a kind of boundary jumping erotic hero, doing "a certain eye and swagger thing" under Kinsey's auspices which enabled him to "pick up anyone," and who was, with equally married coworker Clyde Martin, a consistent sexual partner of Kinsey's for almost a decade.

Kinsey's long physical relationship with subordinate Clyde Martin is one of the book's weaknesses, since almost all dynamics, details, and specific facts are strangely absent; nothing of Martin's perspective on the relationship is conveyed except his apparently contented sexual acquiescence to his employer and friend. Gathorne-Hardy also carefully builds up events leading to Kinsey's physical and professional relationship with onetime romantic partners Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler, but the resulting events are unexceptional, and, by that point in Kinsey's life, seem to have been strictly routine. Gathorne-Hardy's presentation of both these affairs suggests, rightly or wrongly, that there is something more to be told in both cases than the author has revealed.

Since the period in which Kinsey was most active professionally is generally thought of as aggressively repressive and conservative, readers may be surprised at the apparent ease with which Kinsey seems to have gathered the thousands of personal sexual histories he used as the raw data for his books, especially since these were often obtained from "100% groups" in which the individual's participation was known to all or most other group members. Though Kinsey repeatedly faced heated criticism from various religious institutions and competitors, in many ways the late Forties - early Fifties world of Kinsey: Sex: The Measure of All Things seems like a more intelligent and enlightened place than America does today.

Even in his mundane habits, Alfred Kinsey was an eccentric man, a quality his British biographer seems to share on occasion. Gathorne-Hardy's passage on the "appalling" and "ferocious" "American climate," in which he practically dismisses the entire North American continent as uninhabitable on the basis of its weather, makes him appear incredibly naïve, as does his footnote on "American raisins," which he describes as "soft, fruity, luscious lumps, as big as plums" rather than "hard little bullets," a description that will be news to most readers in the United States.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All You Wanted To Know Abourt Kinsey?, January 12, 2005

By	H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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In this scholarly, well-documented biography of nearly 500 pages, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy tells you probably all you ever wanted to know about Alfred Kinsey; and he does it in a most reader-friendly fashion. From Kinsey's early life, growing up in the confines of a narrow Methodist family, to his marriage and tenure at Indiana University, to his studies of the gall wasp and his studies of the sexual behavior of males and females that changed forever the way we look at sex-- it's all here. Since Gathorne-Hardy has written the most recent biography of Kinsey (1999) he had the benefit of the research of previous biographers. He thus attempts to set the record straight concerning the 1997 Kinsey biography by James H. Jones, ALFRED KINSEY - A PUBLIC/PRIVATE LIFE. He maintains -- and goes to considerable lengths to prove it-- that Jones ceased to be an "objective researcher" but rather attacked Kinsey's private sexual behavior. He, in Gathorne-Hardy's words, "belongs to what one might call the Kenneth Starr school of biography." Enough said.

Kinsey, an extremely complicated individual, was an atheist (he rebelled vigorously against the strict religion of his father), a brilliant professor and scientist, mesmerizing lecturer, intolerant of what he considered shoddy work of other scientists, a loving husband and father, a "benevolent despot", a bisexual, a compassionate and humane person. (For years he corresponded with both prisoners and their families and often gave and/or lent them money.)

Gathorne-Hardy maintains-- and offers considerable proof-- that while some of Kinsey's conclusions may have been erroneous, that no one since him has done the client interview, the heart of Kinsey's research, better than he and his staff did. For instance, he used a face-to-face interview with an elaborately coded chart he devised and did not ask the first question about sex until 20 minutes into the history. Interviewers never said, "have you ever" but rather "when did you first?" He abhorred random sampling and attempted whenever possible to take the histories of 100% of the members of a group so as to decrease the chances of error. Just as he went everywhere looking for new varieties of gall wasps, he and his group interviewed everyone they could: prostitutes, prisoners, castrates, the Yale Divinity School, amputees, rapists, lobotomy patients, professors, colleagues, students.

Although Mr. Kinsey was denounced by many church leaders including Billy Graham-- after all Kinsey did most of his sex research in the 1940's-- he was revered and praised by many, and was a life line to many persons troubled about their sexuality. He received thousands of letters throughout his career from people hungry for advice and answers and attempted to respond to them all himself. He was incensed and saddened by most of the prisoners he interiewed serving sentences for "sex" crimes, since he believed that they should never have been in prison in the first place. After all, they were just doing what many other people were doing, or as he put it, everyone's sin is no one's sin. His statistics on the incidences of homosexuality in the general population, though often challenged, have never been successfully refuted even though his numbers may have been slightly exaggerated.

Finally, while for the most part, Gathorne-Hardy tells the reader nothing without documentation, occasionally he makes a statement he cannot prove. For example, on page 32, he writes that Kinsey had difficulty expressing intimate personal feelings in public, but that "as often with people who have difficulty here, Kinsey loved small children nd was extremely good with them." I'm not convinced that is an accurate statement and Mr. Gathorne-Hardy makes no attempt to offer up proof. Since this book was first published in England, the author offers explanations and illuminations to his British reader about some of the "Americanisms" here. He, for example, explains the semester system in American universities, defines our corn crop as "maize," tells the reader what "tea room" means and comments often on the "ghastly" weather, meaning of course our 100 degree-in-the-shade summers. They would be a far cry indeed from England's dark, damp Decembers.

You may love Kinsey or you may hate him; but when you finish this biography, you'll feel that you've got at least a glimpse as to what the man was all about and what he accomplished-- no small feat for any biographer.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars As uncritical of Kinsey as the Jones book is critical, July 26, 2005

By	po1058 (champaign, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things (Paperback)

I chose to read this book because I wanted a balanced account of Kinsey's life and science, unfortunately, this book does not satisfy the requirement. Where the Jones book turns Kinsey into a demon, Gathorne-Hardy seems to want to turn him into a god. Gathorne-Hardy has a well researched account of Kinsey's life and activities, however he constantly tries to justify Kinsey's methods and continually comments on how no one has been able to do better sex research since, a patently untrue and scientifically unsupported statement. It would be difficult to cover both the biographical research on Kinsey and do an indepth study of current sex research, and I don't believe that Gathorne-Hardy even tried to do much research into current sex literature, that is why it is irritating when he tries to justify most of Kinsey's ideas. Overall, if you want a book that details the activities of Kinsey's life, this is an acceptable book, but if you are interested in his science, it is woefully lacking.