Kinsey

I managed to catch the Liam Neeson biopic in Boston over the weekend...a product, I guess, of being in a real city for a change.

Quick review: fuckin' a man, it was awesome.

Somewhat longer (but still short) review: I'm not really a fan of Neeson---I thought Michael Collins was good, the rest (including Schindler's List) was pretty mediocre---so Kinsey is easily his best movie.

I'm hardly an expert on Kinsey himself, although Neeson's portrayal seemed spot on to what I imagine Kinsey must have been like. I'm not sure what the current agreed-upon view of Kinsey's research is, but a lot of it seems intuitively right. Indeed, some of his findings now seem so self-evidently true that we easily forget both that they were contentious and that he was the source of them, e.g. his findings on masturbation frequency in both men and women.

I guess the most controversial of his analyses is that almost all people of both sexes are not exclusively hetero- or homosexual, but fall somewhere within a gradient of bisexuality. My own intuition is that that's a lot more true for women than for men. And even if we assume for the sake of argument that there are very few 0's and 6's (on the Kinsey scale), at least among men, I think there are very few 3's and 4's and mostly 1's and 5's. Female sexuality, if experience and anecdotal evidence are at all reliable, is quite a bit more fluid. Obviously any blanket generalization ought to be taken with a grain of salt, but I'd suggest that the proportion of women who, under certain precisely defined circumstances, couldn't wind up in a sexual relationship with either a man or a woman, is very small indeed. (You have to try to imagine the right psycho-emotive conditions, along with the presence of a strong female friendship, etc. Conversely---I might get into trouble for saying this---but to echo Bill Maher, lesbianism is to some extent the product of women giving up on men.) A corollary to this is the phenomenon of girls kissing girls on a drunken whim or to impress boys or to be caught "going wild" or whatever. There is simply no male parallel to that. Of course, a traditional feminist/gender-theoretic response is that it's all the result of social construction and pressure. As is often the case in gender studies, this is a half-truth. Of course there's a social element enabling homosexual flirtation among girls. But it's ludicrous to suggest that such a thing would be possible, to the extent that it is possible, without an underlying biological element.

My best guess is that Kinsey's own bisexuality influenced his approach to the study of male bisexuality. And, one would certainly concede, the fact that his researchers were having sex with the subjects of his study on female sexuality renders those findings just a bit suspicious. (OTOH, Kinsey has a point in saying that there's no way to study the female orgasm without observing it.)

To revert to the movie itself, the reason it's good (in addition to the acting) is that there is irony, and indeed comedy, running through every scene, including the serious and tragic ones. At times, the line between the humorous and the appalling was quite blurred, although I guess part of the point of the film is that nothing in it should be shocking. Still, like Kinsey's assistant, I stopped laughing at the man who could go from flaccid to ejaculating in 10 seconds, who had had sex with most of his extended family, multiple species of animals, thousands of men and women, etc., when he turned to discussing his own experiences in child rape and asked Kinsey if he knew what a "boy orgasm" looked like. That, I thought, was a bit much even for the most open-minded observer.

So see this film. And (*spoiler alert*) enjoy the true masterstroke, casting Tim Curry as Kinsey's moralizing antagonist.