Nominative determinism could hang like an albatross around your neck. I'm sure the the Kinsey Institute's current director, however, is pretty relaxed about such things. She comes across as quite cool in this interview on Science Blog. I can't help but wonder if the interviewer is starting the conversation with a dig in the same juvenile vein as this post.
posted by hifimofo on Jun 1, 2005 - 5 comments

Lincoln Outed. It's a subject that has been discussed before (hopefully not here), but in "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," to be published next month by Free Press, C.A. Tripp, a psychologist, influential gay writer and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, tries to resolve the issue of Lincoln's sexuality once and for all. The author, who died in 2003, two weeks after finishing the book, subjected almost every word ever written by and about Lincoln to minute analysis. His conclusion is that America's greatest president, the beacon of the Republican Party, was a gay man.
posted by three blind mice on Dec 20, 2004 - 57 comments

No sex, please, we're Republicans. At the dawn of a digitised, globalised millennium, these creeps want the clocks turned back to a time when the church held sway over our sexuality. They prefer us ignorant and terrified, alone in the dark, the better for them to control us through fear and guilt. Too bad for them that we live in the bright, vivid light of our incandescent dirty dreams.
posted by acrobat on Dec 3, 2004 - 64 comments

Alfred Kinsey: Liberator or Pervert? (New York Times link, I hope you know the drill by now.) A newish movie explores the life of Alfred Kinsey, sex researcher and founder of the Kinsey Institute. Kinsey was author of the controversial book Sexual Behavior In The Human Male. The controversy has blossomed oh these many years later with accusations that Kinsey's work is fraudulent, and conducive to child based porn and fantasy. The ultra-right seems obsessed with sexualizing his research in terms of "protecting the children". His observations have been linked to the addictive, destructive nature of pornography, that twists our notions of sex and love, and even enables the sexual abuse of college students in class. (Yeah, I know, that last sounds kinky, doesn't it?)
posted by Wulfgar! on Oct 5, 2004 - 11 comments

Heavy Petting - Peter Singer (bioethics professor, animal rights guru, frequently admired or hated Australian philosopher) discusses bestiality, which is probably much more popular than you imagine: "In the 1940s, Kinsey asked twenty thousand Americans about their sexual behavior, and found that 8 percent of males and 3.5 percent of females stated that they had, at some time, had a sexual encounter with an animal. Among men living in rural areas, the figure shot up to 50 percent. "
posted by pracowity on Mar 3, 2001 - 19 comments