The Plot Against Sex in America
The
New York Times, December 12, 2004
By Frank Rich
WHEN they start pushing the panic
button over “moral values” at the bluest of TV channels, public
broadcasting’s WNET, 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 a
spot for the acclaimed movie “Kinsey,” in which Liam Neeson stars 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 make about a routine pseudo-ad
interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on
“commercial-free” PBS. That explanation 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 the movie/subject matter” that might bring
“viewer complaints.”
Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about
its 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 it were not so serious—and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as
the “Kinsey” spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North
Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women’s rights organization based
in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase “reproductive rights” in
an on-air announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing
indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los
Angeles county’s own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of
syphilis. Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in which 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, it struck me as an intelligent
account of a half-forgotten and somewhat 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 of the findings of his obsessive mission
to record the sexual histories of as many Americans as time and willing
volunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The book stormed the
culture with such force that Kinsey was featured in almost every major
national magazine; a Time cover story likened his book’s success to “Gone
With the Wind.” 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 Darn Hot.”
Though a Gallup poll at the time found that
three-quarters of 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 research would 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 first refused to
accept advertising for Kinsey’s book.
Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has
gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike
pander to that supposed 22 percent of “moral values” voters, we’re back
where we came in. Bill Condon, who wrote and directed “Kinsey,” started
working on this project in 1999 and didn’t gear it to any political climate.
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 Philip Roth’s “Plot
Against America,” which transports us back to an 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 at the 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 that Kinsey 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. (He died
in 1956.) Empowered by that Election Day “moral values” poll result, it is
pressing for a whole host of second-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 of the
eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election.
“Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil.” Such is the
perceived clout of this Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C.
that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates instantly dump their
network’s broadcast of that indecent movie “Saving Private Ryan” on
Veterans Day.
In the case of “Kinsey,” the Traditional Values
Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox.
(With the hypocrisy we’ve come to expect, it does not ask its members to
boycott Fox’s corporate sibling in the Murdoch 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 a relatively
small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month’s handy
pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds
back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa
1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as
successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in
doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing
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 antagonists is a university hygiene
instructor who states with absolute certitude that abstinence is the only cure
needed to stop syphilis. Sound familiar? In tune with the “moral values”
crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has obscured and downplayed the important information that condoms
are overwhelmingly effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A
nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex education, Advocates for
Youth, publicized this subterfuge and has been rewarded with three government
audits of its finances 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, according to the transcript—to disown the idea that masturbation can
cause pregnancy.
Ms. Wood was being asked about that on “Crossfire”
because a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat
Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (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 $900 million
in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that our
government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs
don’t work—or may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University study
found that teens who make “virginity pledges” to delay sex until marriage
still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that
don’t, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It’s
California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept federal funding for
abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent falloff in teenage
pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska.
No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the
pop culture revolution since Kinsey’s era is in little jeopardy: in a nation
of “Desperate Housewives,” “Too Darn Hot” 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 always
survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex
that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are
denied the same information 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
contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of
local officials; you see it when basic information that might 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 with a certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americans in
1948, the atmosphere had changed radically by the time Kinsey published his
follow-up volume, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” just five years
later. By 1953 Joe McCarthy was in full throttle, and, as James H. Jones
writes in his judicious 1997 Kinsey biography, “ultra-conservative critics
would accuse Kinsey of aiding communism by undermining sexual morality and the
sanctity of the home.” Kinsey was an anti-Soviet, anti-New Deal
conservative, but that didn’t matter in an America racked by fear. He lost
the principal sponsor of his research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and soon
found himself being hounded, in part for his sympathetic view of
homosexuality, by the ambiguously gay homophobes J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde
Tolson. Based on what we’ve seen in just the six weeks since Election Day,
the parallels between that war over sex and our own may have only just begun.
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