The Facts of Life Can Be Exaggerated

Re “Kinsey Unzipped,” Opinion, Nov. 28: Based on my own experience, I take issue with the statement by James Jones, the Alfred Kinsey biographer, that the information Kinsey collected from his interviews was “trustworthy and complete.”

As a second-year medical student at the New York University School of Medicine in 1944, I clearly remember Kinsey coming to our physiology class to recruit students for interviews on their sexual behavior. Few responded, but one bright, extroverted, 19-year-old student from Brooklyn (the class comedian) volunteered.

After his interview, we crowded around him as he regaled us with his wildly exaggerated accounts to the interviewer of his fabricated experiences and sexual prowess.

That physiology class stayed in my memory these last 60 years because the study of human sexual behavior was so unusual then and, most important, because it taught me, early on, that a physician cannot rely on anecdotal and self-reported information when evaluating the findings of so-called research studies.

Samuel Sapin MD

Sherman Oaks

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Joseph Epstein is quoted regarding Kinsey. An unbiased author does not kill the messenger because of not liking the message. It is not a matter of the man, but of data.

Would you have us all return to the nonsense (even silliness) and prudery of Victorianism? Do you contend that people never prevaricate about their sex lives? May I assume that you cite, with specificity, the data and methods in Kinsey’s works that are erroneous?

Jim Hood PhD MD

Camarillo

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Jones describes Kinsey as “reviled as a charlatan and a fraud, while his admirers lionize him as the architect of the sexual revolution ... and the archetype of a new postmodern American icon.”

It strikes me that much the same could be said about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, no scientist but a media-savvy entrepreneur.

Kinsey is long gone and Hef has become somewhat of a cartoon, but in spirit maybe they were twins separated at birth?

Roxane Winkler

Sherman Oaks