Sex Revolution--It May Never Have Happened
Remember the “Sexual Revolution?”
According to the interpreters of the “latest major study” of American sexual habits, appetites and morality, it never took place.
That’s right. If the folks at the Kinsey Institute are correct--yes, that Kinsey Institute--the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s was all media hype. Americans, insist the Kinseyites, are major-league sexual conservatives.
After getting over one’s initial shock and disbelief, one is inclined to believe this newly released data simply because it comes from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, the keeper of the flame lighted by Alfred Kinsey, who in the late 1940s produced the seminal work on American sexual behavior.
Misusing the Findings
After all, whenever one throws around statistics regarding the number of times a week the “average” couple have sexual intercourse, or the percentage of homosexuals in the population, one is misusing Alfred Kinsey’s findings.
The name Kinsey is a creditable one, but these findings are, nonetheless, pretty startling. According to the researchers:
* Of the 3,000 adults sampled, 82% disapproved of teen-age girls having premarital sex, while 73% disapproved of such behavior by teen-age boys. (Boys will be boys?).
* If the first finding doesn’t surprise you, consider this: 70% disapproved of adult women engaging in premarital sex, and 65% said that such behavior on the part of adult men was wrong.
* Eighty-seven percent said that extramarital sex is “always wrong” or “almost always wrong,” which certainly flies in the face of surveys that show almost half of all women and three-quarters of all men stray at one point or another. (Granted, the Kinsey surveyors asked whether the behavior was wrong, not whether the respondents engaged in the behavior.)
* And when it comes to homophobia, the respondents were in rare form: 88% disapprove of homosexual relations between people who don’t love each other, and 79% said homosexual sex is wrong even if the two persons involved do love one another.
Where were these people during the “Summer of Love”? Weren’t they at Woodstock? Didn’t they ever go to Plato’s Retreat? Didn’t they ever make love instead of war? Who was consuming all those birth control pills, anyway?
Believing the Data
That’s hard to say. If the Kinsey data is to be believed, the ‘60s may never have occurred.
But there’s a reason to disregard the data: It may have been recently released, but it was collected 19 years ago.
That’s right. This “latest” study is based on data gathered in 1970.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Eugene E. Levitt, a psychologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine and one of the survey’s authors, said the findings show that “the number of women jumping in and out of bed at random is exaggerated, I think, just as the number of homosexuals in the population has been exaggerated.”
And survey editor Hubert J. O’Gorman of Wesleyan University said in his introduction that “these data will be indispensable to any attempt to describe the effects of AIDS on American sexual morality and behavior.”
1970 Information
Probably not. What the data tells us is how 3,000 adult respondents said they were behaving in 1970, as they watched in horror while their college- and teen-age children were swept up in the Sexual Revolution.
The data doesn’t tell us a thing about how to deal with AIDS because it doesn’t tell us a thing about sexual behavior today. Nor does it even suggest that the Sexual Revolution never took place.
Rather, what the data suggests is what we already knew from the work of Alfred Kinsey--that the parents of the Sexual Revolutionaries were themselves sexual conservatives.
That, in turn, should tell us two things:
Like all other revolutionaries, those whose rebellions are sexual in nature have to have an established order to rebel against; And, what is even more important, consider not only the source of data, but when it was gathered as well.
