Month: July 2010

Judith Reisman is about to publish Sexual Sabotage, her latest and most comprehensive book on Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent research, which came to mind when I saw this Time magazine article:

Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America’s most sexually industrious. . . .
[University of Texas psychology professor David] Buss and his students say evolution has encouraged women to be more sexually active as their fertility begins to decline and as menopause approaches. . . .
To test this theory, Buss and his students asked 827 women to complete questionnaires about their sexual habits.

Three words: Self-reported data. And two more words: Volunteer bias.

These were the basic errors of Kinsey’s research: Assuming that people can be relied on to accurately report their own sexual activities, and further assuming that there is no significant difference between people who agree to participate in such a survey and people who refuse to participate.

Inevitably, then, such a research methodology produces unverified data from a sample that is not random and cannot be presumed to be representative of the general population.

Of course, as Reisman has documented, Kinsey’s work went beyond these mere methodological errors into outright abuse (including coercive interrogation of students) and fraud. Kinsey included data survey derived from prisoners, among them sex offenders and prostitutes, that was included in a study purporting to present “normal” sexual behavior. Furthermore, as Reisman points out, the overwhelming majority of Kinsey’s male surveys were conducted among civilians during World War II, at a time when most healthy young men were serving in the military, so that the sample could not possibly have been representative.

What’s interesting is that Kinsey’s basic statistical errors (though not his more egregiously fraudulent methods) were identified and reported in leading social-science journals shortly after after publication of his reports — and no one in the major media seemed to care.

As Reisman has also documented, Kinsey’s work was promoted by a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign — a campaign funded, as was his “research,” by David Rockefeller’s foundations. Major media (notably including Time magazine) eagerly cooperated in this publicity effort, and Kinsey’s scientific critics were almost entirely ignored.  Reisman has persistently led the effort to expose Kinsey’s fraud, but she has similarly been ignored by most journalists, who seem unwilling to reevaluate the methods and motives of Kinseyan sexual research.

So while I’m perfectly willing to believe that women in their 40s are super-hot — hey, my wife is 46 — I am skeptical of the basic validity of the University of Texas research cited by Time. I’m especially skeptical of the claim that such data can be usefully employed as a basis for Darwinian theorizing about women’s sexual nature, ignoring every other possible influence on the reported findings and asserting that one has scientifically isolated an evolutionary genetic factor.

Needless to say, Andrew Sullivan’s colleague Chris Bodener is enthusiastically credulous. Some people would swallow a porcupine if you told them it was “science.”

To what purpose will this sort of science be employed, if not as a sort of “Darwin made me do it” excuse? How many would-be Mary Kay LeTourneaus and  Debra LaFaves will now claim that they are genetically programmed to jump the bones of jailbait boys? Are we prepared for genuinely degenerate consquences?

A Waterford mother will spend at least nine years in prison for having sex with the 14-year-old son she gave up for adoption when he was a few days old.
Aimee L. Sword, 36, apologized for her actions at her sentencing Monday in Oakland County Circuit Court, said her attorney Mitchell Ribitwer. . . .
“When she saw this boy, something just touched off in her — and it wasn’t a mother-son relationship, it was a boyfriend girlfriend relationship,” said Ribitwer, who added that Sword said she was sexually and physically abused as a child. . . .

If God doesn’t destroy America, Sodom and Gomorrah deserve an apology.