Doctor sex, Ph.D.: are we all Kinseyans now?

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Doctor Sex, Ph.D.

ALFRED C. KINSEY is controversial again. A biologist who spent the first part of his career as an unobtrusive cataloger of gall wasps, Kinsey was, depending on whom you ask, either the harbinger or the catalyst of the sexual revolution. His frank catalogs of American sexual practices, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were a revelation at a time when many Americans still told their kids that touching yourself down there was a form of "self-abuse."

Now Kinsey is the subject of two major works of fiction, Bill Condon's film Kinsey and T.C. Boyle's novel The Inner Circle. The University of Indiana--where Kinsey was based for 36 years and created the institute that bears his name--apparently sensed a propitious occasion to move a few copies of Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's 1998 biography: It has issued a new paperback edition of Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things. It is an indication of the religious right's loathing of Kinsey that the picture, probably the least titillating movie ever in which sex plays a central role, prompted protests and denunciatory press releases.

For many who bemoan the greater sexual openness of the last half-century, Kinsey is not merely a messenger to be shot but a figure imbued with an almost supernatural power to change the culture. If only Kinsey's influence could be undone, they sometimes imply, the last 50 years would switch into rewind, a sexual implosion ending with the lid clattering closed atop Pandora's Box. For those who celebrate the sexual revolution, the doctor was the ultimate father confessor, listening patiently to the nation's sex history, then improving on absolution by declaring that almost none of it was a sin after all.

Condon's film, while occasionally painting Kinsey as irritable or emotionally obtuse, is a passion play, with Kinsey a martyr to the cause of sexual liberation. Seen in The Inner Circle through the eyes of an admiring younger colleague, John Milk (a barely disguised version of Kinsey collaborator Clyde Martin), Boyle's Kinsey is a more domineering, far less sympathetic figure who inspires in colleagues and subordinates the kind of terror his own father had once inspired in him. Taken together, these portraits capture the paradoxes of the real Kinsey: Rebelling against a strict Methodist upbringing of the sort that had caused so much sexual frustration, he became an evangelist for sexual liberty. And as he became the imperious...