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xssve

xssve

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Fascinating article on the history of sex surveys predating Kinsey.

In everything-you-think-you-know-is-wrong news, Dr. Alfred Kinsey was not the pioneer of sex surveys. Before Kinsey moved from a taxonomy of gall wasps to a taxonomy of human sexual behaviors, Dr. Clelia Mosher (pictured above), Dr. Katharine Davis and Dr. Robert Lou Dickinson had already collected survey data on early 20th century sexual attitudes and behaviors.
Click to expand...

Before There Was Kinsey: Mosher, Davis and Dickinson Surveyed Victorian Sex
 
Kinsey was crap.............

http://www.jillstanek.com/kinsey%202.jpg

Dr. Alfred Kinsey was a biologist who's professional project was Gall wasps (I'm serious). He was a professor of entomology and zoology at Indiana University,

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Eikennapjesgal_Neuroterus_albipes_forma_laeviusculus-levelsadjust-mask.jpg

He went on to found the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

As a Gall wasp entomologist he did decent research and was well regarded amongst his fellow bug studiers.

As a sex researcher he was a fraud of the first and worst order. Why Indiana University has failed to call bullshit on the guy is something for a serious research project by a PhD candidate in History or Philosophy. Preferably a someone doing a dissertation in the History and Philosophy of Science.

His search into attitudes about sex in America was not research. It was simple opinion survey done badly and he biased his sources of opinion to...well, damned if I know. My guess is he did it to make a name for himself and a few other reasons.

For his work on what became Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) he realized he had to look like a dispassionate scientist so he paid a friend $500 to be his statistician (Kinsey himself frequently couldn't tell the difference between the mean and the median in statistics) and then went out collecting the opinions he wanted to collect.

Over 75% of the men he surveyed were single and over the age of 21 while only 10% of American males over 21 were single at the time. Of the thousands men he personally surveyed (using a question and answer interview) only 87 were over the age of 60. In a time when divorce was uncommon, he interviewed 3000 divorced men.

At a time when only about 12% of American men had a college education, 64% of his sample had a college education. He specifically sought out gay men to interview and 20% of his sample were gay. He is the one who championed the idea that 10% of men are gay, when the real figure (hard to pin down at any time) is thought to be less than half of that. From what I've seen, it's about 4% give or take a bit. He excluded non Caucasian men.

Kinsey also stacked his figures with prison inmates. In 1941 he visited forty penal farms, which was three times the number of campuses he had surveyed. He particularly chose to interview sex offenders, and concentrated on violent rapists, paedophiles and those with a penchant for incest. The common garden variety statutory rapist was considered not interesting enough.

"At the Indiana State Farm we had no plan of sampling-we simply sought out sex offenders and, after a time, avoided the more common types of offenses and directed our efforts to the rarer types."
See Judith Reisman, Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences, Arlington, VA: Institute for Media Education, (1998), p. 94
Also, Reisman and Eichel, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, p. 22

For Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) Kinsey didn't care to tighten up his methodology. Out of 16,000 sexual histories collected, nearly all in his pre-biased fashion, he used less than 6,000 for his book. His published sample was mostly unmarried, three quarters had a college education when at the time less than 8% of American women had one. He sought out prostitutes, gay women, divorced women and totally ignored non Caucasian women.

Kinsey claimed to his readers that he deliberately avoided bias by not preselecting his sample groups. He lied. He lied on his sampling. He lied on his statistics. He lied on his claim that his studies were scientific.

His studies were crap. His books are crap. He was crap.

For a better look at what he really did, read chapter 2 of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology makes Smart people Fall For Stupid Ideas, Flynn, Daniel J., Crown Forum (2004).

http://thoughtsdecoded.com/wp-content/images/taboo3.JPG

What can you learn from the Kinsey Report?

How to recognize crap masquerading as science.
 
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Stephen's right, though, no matter what motive you may think he has.

Kinsey was pretty much proven to be a fraud years and years ago. They don't even include him in psychology classes anymore, except as a footnote.
 
God, I think that's the shortest posting I've ever seen from XSSVE. Makes reading the thread worthwhile.
 
Adgenda...what agenda.....

xssve said:
Got an agenda there Stevie?
Click to expand...

Yes, I have an agenda.
While I have nothing against Kinsey in particular, I do have something against him in general. I dislike all frauds, not just Kinsey.

Fobbing off fiction as fact is one of my hot buttons. Well, it used to be. Now it's one of my warm buttons. :D

That a fraud like Kinsey still has an institute at Indiana University named after him is deplorable. That the university has an institute for research in sex, gender, and reproduction is all good. Calling it the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction just makes the Indiana University administration look like fools. Why not call it the Creation Science Institute for Research in.........

They're supposed to be Hoosiers, not hosers.
***************

I suppose I could call myself stephen55 veritas....but ami scooped me on that one. :(
 
After I'm Emperor of the Americas I plan to stick all you Canadians in the US Marine Corps till you acquire a taste for pussy, honest toil, and brawling. We'll sweat all that Limey crap out of you.
 
note to stephen

your attempted hatchet job on Kinsey would seem to indicate you're drawing on some far right xian website with an obvious agenda (maybe it's yours?). it's not clear if it's your words, or quoted material. it's a mishmash. no sources are mentioned. the links are to pictures.

you give no indication of ever having read Kinsey. have you? if so, give some page citations to his books.

while he did pay attention to gays and offenders, etc, this does not invalidate the basic findings. IOW, if you want to know about pedophiles, you gotta talk to them, not just say "only one in a thousand is a pedophile, so let's ignore them."

as to agenda:

you [or whoever] say:

steph: At a time when only about 12% of American men had a college education, 64% of his sample had a college education. He specifically sought out gay men to interview and 20% of his sample were gay. He is the one who championed the idea that 10% of men are gay, when the real figure (hard to pin down at any time) is thought to be less than half of that. From what I've seen, it's about 4% give or take a bit. He excluded non Caucasian men.

bias of studies according to college population was a common problem of hundreds of studies by college profs, e.g. in psychology. but if the data are broken down by education, one can see the correct picture; i.e. if 10% of college boys fuck sheep and 20% of the non college boys do, then the true figure, if 90% of the 'boys' are NON college, is about 19%. simple. (so the college bias will lead to LOW estimates for some categories, not high ones.)

as to interviewing 20% gays.. what a crime! and if perhaps the estimate of 5% is better than 10%, depending on your definitions, what's the big deal? i'lll answer. the xian right is NOT happy with 10% gay as a figure; they'd like it to be rare and subject to stigmatization.

further, kinsey broke down "gay" into degrees [frequency and exclusivity of practice], which is useful. IOW, maybe 10% of males have had a homosexual encounter, perhaps once in adolescence, so applying the word 'gay' has that particular meaning.

this is a feature of all far right and xian criticism fo Kinsey: HORRORS; the practices are NOT that common, and if they are, SHUT UP about it.

i think his figures for premarital and extramarital experiences are reasonably good. in fact, the bias towards college students would UNDERREPRESENT those engaging in premarital intercourse. those who drop out of high school and go to work have vastly higher rates.

as to you off the cuff and unsourced overall remarks, mixed in with likely 'borrowed' material:

steph His search into attitudes about sex in America was not research. It was simple opinion survey done badly and he biased his sources of opinion to...well, damned if I know. My guess is he did it to make a name for himself and a few other reasons.

pure: asking about opinions and practices by 'survey' seems quite ok, to me. he had lots of interveiwers working for him, who were quite skilled at elicting answers.

as to making a name, well, pretty common, isn't it? and you have no idea as to the role of personal ambition in Kinsey; if it's in your opinion, excessive, why?

your rant, while not lacking in figures [undocumented and perhaps invented], is, IMO, 80% without substance, and no one wants to discuss the other valid part of your points with a zealot (or unwitting quoter of zealots).
 
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Sooooo... how 'bout that Clelia Mosher!

Anybody got a problem with her?
 
bronze //[Mosher was] A plain, but good hearted gal.//

but plainly she talked to a lot of very immoral people; women who self abuse, and so on. :devil:
 
I think the real question is: How many threesomes did Dr. Clelia Mosher, Dr. Katharine Davis, and Dr. Robert Lou Dickinson have as part of their research? Who was the first to take Robert Lou's D in their A?

Edit: I change my query: Who was the first to take Clelia Duel's D in their A?
 
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Pure said:
bronze //[Mosher was] A plain, but good hearted gal.//

but plainly she talked to a lot of very immoral people; women who self abuse, and so on. :devil:
Click to expand...

Mosher was an impressive person. She worked in a field dominated by men, in a time when medical science had declared women to be "delicate" and "hysterical."

When she attended college, it was actually an accepted idea that while men breathed by expanding the diaphragm and women inhaled by expanding the chest. Mosher pointed out that the reason for this was that women were observed while wearing a corset. A full set of women's clothing, including the corset could weigh fourteen pounds and was stiflingly hot.

She was one of the first to put forth the idea that menstruation was a natural function and no reason to be a disability. She claimed that most of the pain and discomfort was caused by improper clothing and lack of exercise.
 
Kinsey isn't even wrong......

your attempted hatchet job on Kinsey would seem to indicate you're drawing on some far right xian website with an obvious agenda (maybe it's yours?). it's not clear if it's your words, or quoted material. it's a mishmash. no sources are mentioned. the links are to pictures.

Until I read Daniel J. Fynn's book, Intellectual Morons:.., I had no idea that Kinsey was such a fraud, at least in his work on sexuality.

Flynn is a right wing type conservative and I'm not. Another of his books is Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness (2002). Like Ann Coulter, he has been met on campuses by angry mobs of students. I have no problem with his right wing take, mostly because he backs up what he writes. That doesn't mean I always agree with the guy. (Chapter 2 of Intellectual Morons is about Kinsey, and Flynn gives 132 references and citations for that chapter alone.)

Daniel J. Flynn is an American conservative and author of the book A Conservative History of the American Left (2008), in addition to the books Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness (2002) and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (2004), and the information booklet Cop Killer: How Mumia Abu-Jamal Conned Millions Into Believing He Was Framed (1999). He is the former executive director of Accuracy in Academia, a non-profit conservative organization that seeks to combat a perceived left-wing bias in higher education, and is also associated with Young America's Foundation and the Leadership Institute. He also edits the weblog FlynnFiles. Flynn occasionally fills in for Michele McPhee on WTKK Boston (from Wikipedia)

My problem with Kinsey's books on sexuality is that they are purported by him to be based on valid scientific research when they are not. If his books were on ancient Chinese history and were in fact based on the same type of research, they would also be crap.

If he had prefaced his books with the truth as to how he gathered his data and tossed out what he didn't like, then fair enough. But he didn't. The guy had a Sc.D. from Harvard (equivalent to a Ph.D) and was a tenured professor at Indiana University. As an undergrad he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude with degrees in biology and psychology. At Harvard his dissertation in entomology (on Gall wasps) was first class and his methodology in itself was an important contribution to entomology as a science.

The guy knew what he was doing!! He knew how to conduct research. He understood the principles of science. He even advanced them in entomology.
For the guy to then pretend (okay...out and out lie) that his methods in "researching" sexuality were scientific was the height of scientific fraud. Long before computers, academics were saying "garbage in, garbage out." Kinsey's published results are garbage. In academia, one of the worst insults is "it's not even wrong." Kinsey didn't set out to answer a question and get it wrong. He didn't set out to answer a question. He set out to fabricate an answer.

The reason Flynn included a chapter on Kinsey in his book was to show how people get suckered by frauds like Kinsey.

As Flynn put it, [the Kinsey reports] " revolutionized American law, culture, education, and a host of other areas. Critics of the best sellers, the media informed America, were to Kinsey what the Church was to Galileo. Kinsey, after all, was a "scientist". (From Flynn's book, Intellectual Morons, p.34.)

Did America's ideas about sexuality need shaking up? I say yes. Flynn, as a conservative may say no, hence including Kinsey in his book. Flynn castigates Kinsey for causing such a ruckus in American sexuality, based on shoddy work and academic fraud. I castigate Kinsey for shoddy work and academic fraud, period.
 
stephen55 said:
Did America's ideas about sexuality need shaking up? I say yes. Flynn, as a conservative may say no, hence including Kinsey in his book. Flynn castigates Kinsey for causing such a ruckus in American sexuality, based on shoddy work and academic fraud. I castigate Kinsey for shoddy work and academic fraud, period.
Click to expand...

Well, stephen, I know that America is a wonderful place where everybody can bash everybody, as long as he got a simple reason to do so. But I don't know if it is a good idea to bash Kinsey.
To me, this is similar to bash Elvis Presley for being the King of Rock n' Roll while not playing Rock n' Roll in the end of his years and not being the inventor of Rock n' Roll. In my eyes, it doesn't take his importance to the world.

The thing would be different, if Elvis ever claimed to be the inventor of Rock n' Roll, or claimed that it was a white thing. Tell me he did, I never heard of. So, bashing him, like Public Enemy does in "Fight the power", is wonderful anarchistic. Not more.

Same thing to Kinsey: he made a study about sexual behavior and published it successfully, in a time when the most explicit sex scene in a movie was an overlong kiss in a Hitchcock movie. You say, it has an impact on society, but "castigate him for shoddy work and academic fraud". To me , the question is, if the goal of the Kinsey Report was ever to be well accepted by scientists - or by public, which is absolutely not the same.

So eyyyo man, chill, yo, Kinsey is a fraud and an American motherfucker and a racist misogynist, yo! I'm from Canada and I shit on his head ! You're cool, stephen.http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/2550/vetteoo3.gif

But seriously, scientists can do mistakes, too. He was not the best scientist, I accept that. But I don't see a political agenda behind the work of Kinsey, that made me call him a fraud.
 
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Kinsey lied about what he actually did....hence the fraud....

But seriously, scientists can do mistakes, too. He was not the best scientist, I accept that. But I don't see a political agenda behind the work of Kinsey, that made me call him a fraud.

Kinsey was a great scientist. His Doctoral dissertation (1919) and his published works in entomology (1920 to 1935) were all first rate. That's likely how he became a full professor of entomology and zoology at Indiana University. Then he took up human sexuality.

I don't know what Kinsey's agenda in sexuality was either. What I know is that his work in sexuality was not science by any scientist's definition, including his own. Having made a professional reputation (honestly) in the science of entomology, he abused that reputation in his published work on sexuality. He claimed to have not biased his sample when he clearly had. Kinsey insisted his results were a fair and unbiased sampling of American views on sexuality when they weren't. And he knew it all along. He wasn't publishing science as he claimed. He was publishing what amounted to little more than his own opinion, veiled in the words and methods of science, but backed by his own biased sampling. In that, he was a fraud. If he had prefaced his reports with his true methods of research, he would have been laughed out of academia. (Which might explain that omission.)

His work was as unreliable as a report on American society's attitudes toward health care reform taken only from a sample of people attending a Tea Party rally. Or a report on handgun law reform taken only from a sample of members of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Real science simply doesn't work that way and Kinsey was well aware.

Kinsey's reports certainly helped jump start the Sexual Revolution. I have no problem with said revolution. Just don't think Kinsey was telling the truth in his reports. His sampling technique was crap. His survey technique was crap. His use of proper statistical analysis was non-existent. He tossed huge amounts of his data that didn't support his agenda, whatever it was. Thus, his reports were crap.

I think bashing Kinsey (as a researcher in sexuality) is a great idea.
 
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EO Wilson won the Pulitzer for On Human Nature, people don't disrespect Darwin because all he specialized in were some itty bitty finches then talked about human evolutionary history. The finches were important for Descent of Man same as the ants are important for On Human Nature. Wilson put his study of biological science into theories of social organization, Kinsey really didn't at all, he just recorded data and created a fictional science to deal with that data, I guess we call it 'sexology'. That's why Kinsey's a footnote(basically akin to Newton doing alchemy after creating physics) and Wilson has a vibrant legacy in hard and soft biology, psychology, cog and social science.
 
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