Alfred Kinsey FBI File Analysis

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Alfred Kinsey was an American Professor of biology and zoology at Indiana University. During his career he decided to shift his focus from studying gull wasps to that of human subjects. He embarked on a study of human sexual behavior by doing a series of interviews consisting of 18,000 people. The first installment of nine books was “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” This 30 year project was anything but non-controversial especially with in the realm of the FBI and the United States government. As any breakthrough research goes through, there were positive and negative critiques of his study. Within the FBI files themselves there are various negative critiques of his work stating that he himself was not suited for this type of research and that his research methods were “nothing new and radical regarding interviews by looking the subject ‘straight in the eye; to prevent the subject from lying.” The same reviewer, M.A. Jones, states that his analysis of homosexuality among young boys to be a flaw in his research as he did not actually interview any boys, but just uses accounts of adult men from their child hood and calls his scientific approach “prejudicious.” He also calls the value of the study to be limited and that in the wrong hands it could be harmful. This fits the purpose of this file because in order to prove that Kinsey and the Institute were ineligible to obtain obscene material for his research, they had to prove that he was not using them for academic purpose and that his book itself was “appropriate” for the audiences it would reach. Kinsey’s book, also known as the Kinsey Report, was reviewed as well by Reverend John B. Sheerin and he called the work “insignificant.” Circulating were all these negative comm... ... middle of paper ... ...y, May 20, 1955, Electronic Reading Room, “The Vault”, http://vault.fbi.gov/Alfred%20Kinsey, (accessed Nov. 6, 2013). Vern L. Bullough, “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: Historical Overview and Lasting Contributions”, The Journal of Sex Research 35 no. 2 (May 1998):129. Vern L. Bullough, “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: Historical Overview and Lasting Contributions”, The Journal of Sex Research 35 no. 2 (May 1998): 127. PBS, “Kinsey in the News”, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kinsey/sfeature/sf_response_female.html (accessed 11/10/13. John Bodar, “Unruly Adults: Social Change and Mass Culture in the 1950s”, OAH Magazine of History 26 no. 4 (2012): 22. Donna J. Drucker, “A Most Interesting Chapter in the History of Science: Intellectual Responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”, History of the Human Sciences 25 no. 75 (2012): 79.

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