How did this rant against age of consent laws wind up in an ostensibly scholarly publication? Since the piece cites famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, New York University Press transforms it from screed to scholarship. The piece claims, for instance, that “the myth that children are not sexual beings . . . is maintained, after all, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. . . . Infants in their cribs have orgasms — Kinsey documented them in babies less than a year old.”
UC-Santa Cruz Professor Gayle Rubin calls the government’s crackdown on child molesters “a savage and undeserved witch hunt.” Intolerance of pedophilia, she claims, has “more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics.” Rubin advances these opinions in the first essay of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, where she writes: “boy lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth.”
Rubin, too, cites Kinsey’s scholarship. She writes, “Alfred Kinsey approached the study of sex with the same uninhibited curiosity he had previously applied to examining species of wasp. His scientific detachment gave his work a refreshing neutrality.”
In a piece once used in a Cornell University course called “The Sexual Child,” Pat Califa writes, “Culturally induced schizophrenia allows parents to make sentimental speeches about the fleeting innocence of childhood and the happiness of years unbroken by carnal lust — and exhaust themselves policing the sex lives of their children. Children are celibate because their parents prevent them from playing with other little kids or adults.”
Public Sex, the tome where this essay resides, leans on Kinsey to grant science’s imprimatur to child-adult sex. Califa states, “Even though many prominent sex researchers have documented the existence of sexual capacity in children (for instance Kinsey verified the occurrence of orgasm in girls and boys at less than six months of age), our society is fanatically determined to deny it.”
Actually, Kinsey didn’t verify anything. Child molesters with whom he corresponded with supposedly “documented the existence of sexual capacity in children.” Kinsey took them at their word, and dressed up their findings as his, as “science.”
Aversion to child-adult sexual contacts, Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male maintained, is “culturally conditioned.” Pedophiles don’t harm children in most cases, the Indiana University professor argued, but the “hysteria” caused by police, parents, and others in authority does. According to Kinsey’s pedophiles, who became “trained observers” in his reports, signs of “orgasm” for children as young as infants included “violent cries,” “loss of color,” and an “abundance of tears.” This wasn’t science. This was perverts rationalizing their criminal behavior.
It took more than 30 years for academics to mount a serious challenge to Kinsey. In 1981, when Judith Reisman exposed Kinsey’s pseudoscience, other academics who found Kinsey’s scholarship politically useful ignored Reisman’s revelations. As shown by the rhetoric of Gayle Rubin and other academics, they still do.
The free ride Alfred Kinsey received from intellectuals more than a half-century ago has left us with a valuable lesson: When you don’t rebut junk science the first time around, it begets more junk science.
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