Frank Rich: The Plot Against Sex in America
WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting'sWNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight zone. Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed aspot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neesonstars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to makeabout a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. Thatexplanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey"distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and"controversial press re: groups speaking out against themovie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints."Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints aboutits own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if itwere not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet evenas the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radiostation in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that itcould not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-airannouncement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels,fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own publichealth agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis.Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad inwhich the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples. Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make"Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, itstruck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten andsomewhat quaint chapter in American social history. It was in the distant year of 1948 that Alfred Kinsey, a Harvard-trained zoologist, published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," a dense, clinical 804-page accounting ofthe findings of his obsessive mission to record the sexualhistories of as many Americans as time and willingvolunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The book stormed the culture with such force that Kinsey wasfeatured in almost every major national magazine; a Timecover story likened his book's success to "Gone With theWind." Even pop music paid homage, with the rubber-faced comic Martha Raye selling a half-million copies of "Ooh,Dr. Kinsey!" and Cole Porter immortalizing the Kinsey report's sizzling impact in a classic stanza in "Too DarnHot." Though a Gallup poll at the time found that three-quartersof the public approved of Kinsey's work, not everyone welcomed the idea that candor might supplant ignorance and shame in the national conversation about sex. Billy Graham,predictably, said the publication of Kinsey's researchwould do untold damage to "the already deteriorating morals of America." Somewhat less predictably, as David Halberstam writes in "The Fifties," The New York Times at firstrefused to accept advertising for Kinsey's book. Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians andthe media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of"moral values" voters, we're back where we came in. BillCondon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working onthis project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any politicalclimate. The film is a straightforward telling of its subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included, conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by Kinsey's most recent biographers. But not unlike PhilipRoth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back toan American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie,however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did atthe actual Kinsey is not a coincidence. As for the right-wing groups that have targeted the movie(with or without seeing it), they are the usual suspects,many of them determined to recycle false accusations thatKinsey was a pedophile, as if that might somehow make the actual pedophilia scandal in one church go away. But this crowd doesn't just want what's left of Kinsey's scalp. (Hedied in 1956.) Empowered by that Election Day "moralvalues" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host ofsecond-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women. "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president ofthe eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burnerand let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of thisRepublican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliatesinstantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day. In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalitionhas called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released byFox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does notask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in theMurdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that,however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by arelatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The filmis just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into thecloset and undermining any scientific findings, whethercirca 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: TheWashington Post reports that this year some 40 states a redealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.) "Kinsey" is an almost uncannily helpful guide to how these old cultural fault lines have re-emerged from their tomb,virtually unchanged. Among Kinsey's on-screen antagonistsis a university hygiene instructor who states with absolute certitude that abstinence is the only cure needed to stopsyphilis. Sound familiar? In tune with the "moral values"crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention has obscured and downplayed theimportant information that condoms are overwhelminglyeffective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex education, Advocates for Youth, publicized this subterfugeand has been rewarded with three government audits of itsfinances in eight months.) Elsewhere in "Kinsey," we watch desperate students pepper their professor with a series of uninformed questions: "Can too much sex cause cancer? Does suppressing sex lead to stuttering? Does too much masturbation cause premature ejaculation?" Though that sequence takes place in 1939, you can turn on CNN in December 2004 and watch Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council repeatedly refuse - five times, accordingto the transcript - to disown the idea that masturbationcan cause pregnancy. Ms. Wood was being asked about that on "Crossfire" because a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the CaliforniaDemocrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junkscience (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance)have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900million in five years. Right now this is the only kind ofsex education that our government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - ormay be counterproductive. A recent Columbia Universitystudy found that teens who make "virginity pledges" todelay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but areless likely to use contraception once they do. It'sCalifornia, a huge blue state that refuses to acceptfederal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent fall off in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska. No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, thepop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in littlejeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too DarnHot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey"will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will alwayssurvive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by thecultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the sameinformation about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own"moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptiveprescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approvalof local officials; you see it when basic information thatmight prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact. While "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was received witha certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americansin 1948, the atmosphere had changed radically by the timeKinsey published his follow-up volume, "Sexual Behavior inthe Human Female," just five years later. By 1953 JoeMcCarthy was in full throttle, and, as James H. Joneswrites in his judicious 1997 Kinsey biography,"ultra-conservative critics would accuse Kinsey of aidingcommunism by undermining sexual morality and the sanctityof the home." Kinsey was an anti-Soviet, anti-New Dealconservative, but that didn't matter in an America rackedby fear. He lost the principal sponsor of his research, theRockefeller Foundation, and soon found himself beinghounded, in part for his sympathetic view of homosexuality,by the ambiguously gay homophobes J. Edgar Hoover and ClydeTolson. Based on what we've seen in just the six weekssince Election Day, the parallels between that war over sex and our own may have only just begun.

posted by Joshua P. Angell  @ 10.12.04

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