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Thermidor in the sexual revolution? - sex survey by Edward Laumann and the National Opinion Research Center shows the errors of Alfred Kinsey's famous 1948 study that exaggerated irresponsible heterosexual and statistically high homosexual behavior - Editorial
National Review, Nov 7, 1994
MOVE OVER, Kinsey. A team of sociologists--Edward Laumann, Robert Michael, Stuart Michaels, and John Gagnon--has completed the most thorough study of American sexual behavior ever done. Laumann et al. worked with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the all-stars of survey research, to select 3,500 subjects, ranging in age from 18 to 59, who would make up a random cross-section of the population. The findings were surprisingly, well, conservative. Americans turn out to be predominantly monogamous. Almost three-quarters of the married men, and 85 per cent of the married women, said they had been faithful. They are also over-whelmingly straight. Only 2.7 per cent of the men and 1.3 per cent of the women said they had engaged in homosexual sex in the last year. So much for the one-in-ten orthodoxy.
That discredited percentage--like much of our sexual conventional wisdom--came from Alfred Kinsey's 1948 best-seller, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Specialists have long known that Kinsey's research was unreliable, but the Laumann report has compelled the mainstream media to acknowledge this with brutal frankness. Thus Time: "Kinsey took his human subjects where he could find them: in boardinghouses, college fraternities, prisons and mental wards.... It was hardly a random cross-section." This is the second lesson of the Laumann report: Professor Kinsey and the horde of popularizers and soi-disant researchers who followed in his wake were not neutral observers but cheerleaders, exhorting us to emigrate to a brave new world which they described as if we were already there. Their "findings" were embraced by an entertainment industry eager to cash in on titillation.
Most Americans went on to lead normal, moral lives, despite what they heard on the radio or saw on the tube. Yet even inaccurate ideas have consequences. The Laumann report notes that half of all black males have engaged in sexual intercourse by age 15; by age 17, half of all white males have done so. These dry figures point to the increase of teen pregnancy in recent years. This is the empty, icy depth of the sexual revolution, which has not yet experienced a Thermidorean thaw. Those most vulnerable to sexual hype turn out to be the young, particuarly the young poor. George Gilder, go to the head of the class.
COPYRIGHT 1994 National Review, Inc.
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