Bartholomew's Notes

Ted Baehr takes matters in hand on the issue of “self-abuse” and the evils of Alfred Kinsey:

Kinsey was so preoccupied with “self abuse” that he thought you had to do it regularly each day. Moreover, it appears that his self-abuse actually contributed to his untimely death from “orchitis,” a painful testicular disease, commonly resulting from obsessive, brutal, genital stimulation. Other Kinseyites have insisted this is normal male conduct at four times a day. Christian author, Archibald Hart, in his book The Sexual Man claims “Almost all (96 percent) of the males under age twenty in my sample masturbate regularly…. 61 percent of all married men surveyed masturbate.” Imagine saying, right in the middle of a meeting, “Excuse me, I have to go do what Kinsey tells me to do because he says everyone does it.”

But Baehr pummels his fist against this sort of thing:

Well, the good news is that everyone does NOT do it. And, once, you recognize this good news, you don’t have to be trapped in sexual addiction…Dr. Reisman, has shown that the addictions that Kinsey promoted are just a bunch of lies that no one has to fall prey to in their own life…Frankly, I have a wonderful wife and four wonderful kids, an example of a healthy sex life, and will gladly confess that I do not engage in any self-abuse.

I note the use of the present simple “I do not engage”, as opposed to the present perfect “I have not engaged”…

And, you don’t have to feel guilty about being liberated from time consuming, self-destructive, relationship destroying behavior.

So, all those reluctant “J Grant Swankers” (Cockney rhyming slang) who’ve felt obliged to punish Percy just because the Kinsey Report told them to can now escape the dreadful fate of “orchitis” (not sure about how the ladies fit in here, but perhaps, as Queen Victoria thought, they don’t).

The occasion of Baehr’s sermon on Onan is the imminent release of a new film, Kinsey, which dares to be sympathetic towards the man so justly persecuted by minions of the great senator from Wisconsin. This is despite the fact that Dr Judith Reisman has provided lots of research on Kinsey that shows how the man trained paedophiles to do unspeakable research, consorted with Nazis and Communists, and even went on pilgrimage to the former Italian home of Aleister Crowley. According to Baehr in another article:

20th Century Fox arranged for me, Dr. Ted Baehr, publisher of MOVIEGUIDE®, to see the new KINSEY movie…However, I invited Dr. Reisman to join me.

When my secretary submitted the names of the people joining me at the screening, just three of us, I got a call back just a few minutes before the screening that it had to be cancelled because one reel of the film was damaged. The representative of Fox Searchlight told me that the projectionist had prescreened the film to check it out and found out that the print was damaged.

I continued onto the screening because Dr. Reisman was flying in from Arizona. When I arrived and talked to the projectionist, Josh, he said the print of the movie looked good to him. The delivery person from Fox, a very nice woman, said she had just brought the film from Fox and that no one had pre-screened it. So Josh went ahead to screen it for us.

Just at the end of the first reel, however, he said that Fox Searchlight called and told him to stop the screening. I got on the phone, and the Fox Searchlight representative told me again that the reel was damaged. Josh said he would not say that the reel was damaged to Fox Searchlight or to us.

How could an organisation like Fox do something like that to someone like Ted Baehr…?

Baehr’s argument is of course rather confused. On the one hand the prevalence of “self-abuse” is a myth, and this has led astray Christians like Archibald Hart. At the same time, it really is prevalent because of Kinsey. Hundreds of years of good, common sense information on the subject from Onania (1725) to The Hard Road to Manhood (1946) was swept away by one work of orchitised madness. In the same confused way Reisman argues that there are far fewer homosexuals than propagandists like Kinsey claim, but that means we should oppose gay rights for the good of society even more. Reisman also has the odd idea that if evidence was derived from immoral activities, that evidence must therefore be false.

Some of the materials from Reisman’s “exposés” of Kinsey can be found on her website, which has endorsements from Laura Schlessinger and Charles E Rice. She also quotes from a Lancet review of her 1991 book Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, which says that

“The important allegations from the scientific viewpoint are the imperfections in the [Kinsey] sample and unethical, possibly criminal observations on children…Kinsey…has left his former co-workers some explaining to do”

However, we do not get a sense of the reviewer’s overall opinion of her book (damn those pre-internet days!). The site is actually rather odd: a certain amount of the material about Kinsey appears as .doc files, and looks like rough drafts. One article has the bizarre title “Kinsey Revives Ancient Sexual Theology“, for no apparent reason.

The Kinsey Institute itself has posted a number of articles about the allegations against Kinsey’s methods (his personal life, orchitis or not, is left out of it), and notes that Reisman’s lawyer withdrew when she tried to sue for defamation over their response to her work. Institute Director John Bancroft notes that:

It is relevant to ask why these people continue to raise this issue. Clearly they have concerns about the effects of sex education, and they assert that this original information about children’s sexual responses, obtained from a few adult pedophiles, forms the basis for modern sex education. They apparently hope that if Dr. Kinsey and his work, carried out more than 50 years ago, can be discredited, modern sex education will lose its credibility also.

Dr. Kinsey believed that the evaluation of human behavior could not be based on scientific inquiry alone, but that evidence of how people actually behaved should be taken into account. He strove for objectivity in his inquiries by insuring his informants of anonymity and by avoiding any value judgments of their behavior. Dr. Kinsey’s pioneering work has contributed to more open discussion of sexual issues. In several respects his original conclusions have needed to be revised, but his commitment to a more honest appraisal of the sexual aspects of the human condition remains.

Further details on Reisman and her campaign can be found at Adult Christianity, which includes a stillshot of Reisman from when she was a singer on Captain Kangeroo. Miss Poppy Dixon can sum up much better than I can:

Reisman’s claims about the inadequacy of Kinsey’s work would bear more weight if they called for new, and more comprehensive studies of sexuality. But this is clearly not the case. Reisman and her cronies still labor to outlaw any kind of informational sex education not based on conservatively interpreted biblical principles. Free of factual data on sex Dr. Reisman and her followers are at liberty to publish any kind of unsupported nonsense they choose about sex, homosexuality, and pornography.

But that doesn’t make it science.

Beware Orchitis!

UPDATE: Reisman’s the toast of Wingnutville! See my survey of her supporters here.

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