http://nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/12rich.html

FRANK RICH
The Plot Against Sex in America

Published: December 12, 2004


WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight zone.

Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a spot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey" distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and "controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints."

Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis. Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples.

Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make "Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, it struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history. It was in the distant year of 1948 that Alfred Kinsey, a Harvard-trained zoologist, published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," a dense, clinical 804-page accounting of the findings of his obsessive mission to record the sexual histories of as many Americans as time and willing volunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The book stormed the culture with such force that Kinsey was featured in almost every major national magazine; a Time cover story likened his book's success to "Gone With the Wind." Even pop music paid homage, with the rubber-faced comic Martha Raye selling a half-million copies of "Ooh, Dr. Kinsey!" and Cole Porter immortalizing the Kinsey report's sizzling impact in a classic stanza in "Too Darn Hot."

Though a Gallup poll at the time found that three-quarters of the public approved of Kinsey's work, not everyone welcomed the idea that candor might supplant ignorance and shame in the national conversation about sex. Billy Graham, predictably, said the publication of Kinsey's research would do untold damage to "the already deteriorating morals of America." Somewhat less predictably, as David Halberstam writes in "The Fifties," The New York Times at first refused to accept advertising for Kinsey's book.

Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of "moral values" voters, we're back where we came in. Bill Condon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working on this project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any political climate. The film is a straightforward telling of its subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included, conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by Kinsey's most recent biographers. But not unlike Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back to an American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did at the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence.

As for the right-wing groups that have targeted the movie (with or without seeing it), they are the usual suspects, many of them determined to recycle false accusations that Kinsey was a pedophile, as if that might somehow make the actual pedophilia scandal in one church go away. But this crowd doesn't just want what's left of Kinsey's scalp. (He died in 1956.) Empowered by that Election Day "moral values" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women. "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of this Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates instantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day.

In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.)

"Kinsey" is an almost uncannily helpful guide to how these old cultural fault lines have re-emerged from their tomb, virtually unchanged. Among Kinsey's on-screen antagonists is a university hygiene instructor who states with absolute certitude that abstinence is the only cure needed to stop syphilis. Sound familiar? In tune with the "moral values" crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has obscured and downplayed the important information that condoms are overwhelmingly effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex education, Advocates for Youth, publicized this subterfuge and has been rewarded with three government audits of its finances in eight months.) Elsewhere in "Kinsey," we watch desperate students pepper their professor with a series of uninformed questions: "Can too much sex cause cancer? Does suppressing sex lead to stuttering? Does too much masturbation cause premature ejaculation?" Though that sequence takes place in 1939, you can turn on CNN in December 2004 and watch Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council repeatedly refuse - five times, according to the transcript - to disown the idea that masturbation can cause pregnancy.

Ms. Wood was being asked about that on "Crossfire" because a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance) have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900 million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that our government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It's California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska.

No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact.

While "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was received with a certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americans in 1948, the atmosphere had changed radically by the time Kinsey published his follow-up volume, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," just five years later. By 1953 Joe McCarthy was in full throttle, and, as James H. Jones writes in his judicious 1997 Kinsey biography, "ultra-conservative critics would accuse Kinsey of aiding communism by undermining sexual morality and the sanctity of the home." Kinsey was an anti-Soviet, anti-New Deal conservative, but that didn't matter in an America racked by fear. He lost the principal sponsor of his research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and soon found himself being hounded, in part for his sympathetic view of homosexuality, by the ambiguously gay homophobes J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson. Based on what we've seen in just the six weeks since Election Day, the parallels between that war over sex and our own may have only just begun.

I can't believe that we're encountering all of this in 2004. Come on people! Seriously!

First, the article mentioned Advocates for Youth. They are a fabulous organization, I saw a bunch of members and I felt so proud of them. I don't know them personally, but the work they're doing is great. Sometimes I hate seeing people give young people so much shit, when here are some kids that are really active and involved (and funny, in my experience).

I just don't get it. Abstinence-only education? I just read an article on education and it mentioned some of the really weird things that teachers say to students now, really false statements about pregnancy and the like. I'll have to find it when I get a chance. How can schools teach abstinence-only? How can they dictate morality to these kids? In comprehensive sex education, abstinence is ENCOURAGED because it is 100% effective in preventing pregnancy. Telling students what condoms are (HONESTLY) will not make them start having sex all over the place. Also, one can get an STI from oral sex and a lot of kids think they're being abstinent when sucking people off and such. We need to let people know what the truth is concerning their options, so they can make informed decisions and be a whole lot safer.

Sex is a good thing, people.

I only see the abstinence movement getting stronger with the current state of affairs in the US of A.

Has anyone seen Pornucopia on HBO? It's more or less hardcore sex on cable. Nothing is edited except actual penetration. It seems the like the efforts of the far right to get this stuff off the air are totally futile. The harder they push, the more the powerful liberal entertainment industry pushes back. A lot of people want sex on TV, and the ratings alone will make it a reality.

And the highest rated show in red states? Yep, Desparate Housewives.

I'm far less concerned with what is on HBO than what is being taught in schools.

NO LIES, NO HALF-TRUTHS.

--PunkDavid

I have an idea.

If you don't like Kinsey or what the movie represents, shut the fuck up and don't go see it.

Oh, c'mon man. You know that's not good enough for those people. I mean they don't watch you have sex in your bedroom, but they still want to control what you do there.

--PunkDavid

I find it hilarious when people advocate "small government" but want to regulate your bedroom activities.

Nothing like a good cultural war to distract us from... war.

That's a good show!

For the most part you're getting the same argument from the right. Even Rush Limbaugh is pissed about shit like this. Hell, every right wing radio talk show I know of has done nothing but complain about the FCC since the Janet Jackson incident.

All in all, it was the TV's decision not to air it. It doesn't matter if the recieved negative feedback for not showing it. They still didn't show it, and it was still their choice to do so. I don't see a problem with that.

If the dude in question in this movie was a pedo...what does that have to do with problems of pedophalia in the Roman Catholic church? Seriously, what a pointless, disgusting low blow. These are the types of comments that make liberals look riduculous. Just because I'm Catholic means I can't speak out about pedophiles? Disgusting. This guy being a pedo has nothing to do with priests being pedo's. And this might come as a shock to a lot of people here. But Roman Catholics are the people the MOST pissed off about the scandal. It fucking pisses us off. People of my faith hate pedo's, we should be able to be pissed about this guy being a pedo (if he was, I'm unfamiliar with him, I'm just saying I get my voice too.)



Well. I for one don't want my kids to be taught sex ed in schools. I'm going to teach it to them. I advocate comprehensive education, and that's how I will teach my future kids. Heck, in a perfect world we wouldn't need to teach sex-ed in schools because parents would be parenting and raising their kids to be decent human beings. Someone already posted an article that was recently printed in the media about untruths being disseminated by some teachers. Again, this isn't advocated by the government, and they are isolated incidents. After all, we really have to keep in mind who runs public schools in America...

But yeah, those problems do need to be addressed. Perhaps the government should stop funding schools which teach untruths, but I wouldn't look for that to happen...

That's good to hear. Why is Rush pissed off? Pure 1st Amendment reasons? Bloated government bureaucracy? It sure isn't for the sex and bad language on his program.



The problem is that the TV stations FEARED getting slapped with a HUGE fine just because a couple dozen people in the country took offense and wrote letters. This is the big problem with the FCC's current methods.



I agree, it was a low blow. Also for the record, Kinsey was not a pedophile and no evidence, credible or not, has ever been presented that he was.



This IS advocated by the government as abstinence only sex-ed is the only type of sex-ed currently being funded directly by the federal government. These are not isolated incidents, there are many thousands of children across the country, being taught from only a very few standard curricula, who are hearing the lies referred to in this and that other article about the abstinence only sex-ed courses. These courses are not being given in public schools, but that doesn't make them any less government related if they are government funded, which they are to the tune many many millions of dollars per year.

And who is it that runs the public schools in America? I don't see what you're getting at there?



I DEMAND that happen.

--PunkDavid

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with including abstinance in sex education...as long as it is included with all of the other methods of safe sex and sexual health issues.

To isolate abstinance as the only means of safe sex is obviously not in everybody's best interest.

Parents definately should be involved in the sex education of their children, however, a school program or class can provide plenty more information (and hopefully accurate information) that can supplement the parental advise. I would say a more ideal situation would be a child recieving proper sex education in school who would feel comfortable to come home and discuss what he or she learned with the parents. Ideally, the parents would foster an open environment on the subject. I think that schools and parents need and should work together on this subject. In truth, sex and sexual health is a complex subject that is often beyond the knowledge of most parents and adults in general (hence the STD and unwanted pregnacy epidemic), so I would not advocate a home-schooling sex education approach only. The school can definately supplement parental teaching (supplement...NOT supplant).

Not obvious enough it seems.

--PunkDavid

Of particular importance to me.

Does the fact that they are government funded mean anything to you?

Also, those who advocate abstinence-only sex ed have worked their programs into many public schools, and certainly seek to expand.

--PunkDavid

I was taught abstinence in my sex-ed class. Pretty much, abstinence is the only 100% method, but they taught us other preventative measures as well. Seems pretty simple to me.

Also, you can't count on parents to teach sex ed to their kids. It really irritates me that for some people it's just too touchy a subject. I would think parents would rather have their kids be safe than try and keep them sheltered in a little sexless box that next to nobody is going to stay in anyways.
My mom doesn't think I know what most sexual terms mean, and she absolutely refuses to bring it up with me, other than to say things like "never leave your drink unattended when you're out, because someone will put ecstasy in it!" Other than that, I've learned nothing from my parents. So I'd much much rather have it in school for kids who have parents like mine and don't have enough impetus to look the information up themselves.

Just so you know, I actually would put ecstasy in your drink.

a movie like kinsey should ignite serious debate over how depraved we are as a people, instead these closeted anal sex lovers force that under the rug.

By the way, according to most modern sex studies, Kinsey seriously overestimated how depraved we are. But due to tight asses like the FRC it's still a difficult task to get people to talk openly and honestly about sex.