Alfred Kinsey

Kinsey

Program: Kinsey: Let's Talk About Sex
Date Watched: September 26, 2005

Kinsey is a movie that portrays the life and studies of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a man who revolutionized the way Americans perceive sex and sexual activities. The movie starts out with Kinsey as a child, and shows how he was brought up as a Christian, his overbearing father was a pastor, and was also very strict. He had always been taught that masturbation was a sin, but he did it anyway. His father had decided where he was going to college, but he decided to go elsewhere instead. He very much liked to study gall wasps, and went all over the world collecting them. In the class he taught where he talked about gall wasps, he met one of his students, Clara, and they ended up falling in love and got married. When Kinsey decided to teach a marital sex class, the school board was hesitant at first, but finally gave him the opportunity. Many people took the class, and many people were shocked at some of the material that was presented in the class. Kinsey had a few assistants, one named Clyde Martin in particular, who actually had sex with Kinsey in a hotel room for "experimental purposes." He eventually ended up having sex with Kinsey's wife too. Kinsey also had three children, a son and two daughters, and they would all talk about sex at dinner at night, which Kinsey's son didn't enjoy. Kinsey and his assistants, and their wives, had a strange relationship in that they would all switch partners on occasion. They were kind of like a big group of Swingers. Eventually Kinsey ended up being very publicly criticized for his work about female sexuality, but his wife and his close friends stayed with him.

The movie seemed to very much show the stereotypical belief that there is only one way to have sex, and that it should not be talked about, and it should be for reproductive purposes only. People weren't supposed to masturbate, and people weren't supposed to participate in any other sexual activities such as oral "tickling" or blow jobs.

The stereotypes in the movie were presented sometimes visually, and sometimes verbally. The visual stereotypes were presented by the way many women were dressed, and by the looks on peoples' faces when Kinsey would be talking about certain things. Verbally, a couple times people talking to Kinsey would have questions about their sex lives which led the audience to understand what their concepts of sex were, and also the critics of Kinsey in what they were saying made it evident that there were prominent gender roles and certain expectations that shouldn't have been violated.

This movie did not change the way I look at sex in general, but it was very interesting to see how far we have come sexually in the past century. I cannot even imagine sex in the 21st century being the way it was in the early 20th century.