The Plot Against Sex in America

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/12rich.html