The Child Experiments
<< Who Conducted the Experiments? >>
Kinsey’s experiments were understandably conducted in secrecy. His zoologist’s taxonomic categorization methods are evident everywhere. Many subsequent schools of “sex science” have adopted his zoological methods of collecting, organizing, and classifying. In Kinsey’s words: “The techniques of this research have been… born out of the senior author’s long-time experience with a problem in insect taxonomy. The transfer from insect to human material is not illogical, for it has been a transfer of a method that may be applied to the study of any variable populations.”75
75. Male, p. 9.
Such human sex measurements and categorizing were virtually unknown in the 1940s. According to Kinsey, “None of the older authors, with the possible exception of Hirschfeld, attempted any systematic coverage of particular items in each history, and consequently there was nothing to be added or averaged, even for the populations with which they dealt…. The present study is designed as a first step in the accumulation of a body of scientific fact that may provide the basis for sounder generalizations about the sexual behavior of certain groups and, some day, even of our American population as a whole.” 76
76. Male, p. 9.
Kinsey effected the sexual reform of “our American population as a whole” via zoological quantification, accumulating copious statistics, tables, charts, measurements and percentages. Kinsey senior researcher John Gagnon, speaking of himself and his colleagues, noted that as a teenager: “[A local homosexual] plied us with beer and evidence from the Kinsey Report showing that although homosexuality might be a crime and a sin, it was statistically common, phylogenetically normal, and might indeed be pleasurable and profitable. This was my first experience in the use of sexual science for practical goals.… Kinsey wished to justify disapproved patterns of sexual conduct by an appeal to biological origins.… Putting a percentage in front of the topic made it speakable.”77
77. John Gagnon, “Reconsiderations,” Human Nature, October 1978, Volume 1, No. 10, pp. 93.
If Kinsey was not responsible for any experimentation on children, as maintained by Kinsey Institute Director John Bancroft and former Director June Reinisch,78 who was? In their attempt to minimize the public outcry over Kinsey’s scientific solicitation and collaboration with pedophiles, Bancroft, Reinisch, the Kinsey Institute, and Indiana University pointed to a single, anonymous individual. But they never produced a name. Why?
Pomeroy first introduced the mysterious “gentleman,” or “elderly scientist,” in 1972. The man we now know, (thanks to the Yorkshire television investigative team) to be Rex King, the traveling government surveyor, is called “Mr. X.” by James H. Jones in his Kinsey biography. Pomeroy described him as a “quiet, soft-spoken, self-effacing… unobtrusive fellow… a college graduate.” In his 1972 book on Kinsey, Pomeroy firmly stated that this “unobtrusive fellow” had sex with 800 children, had been initiated into sex by his grandmother and his father, and had sex with various animals. John Bancroft called their mystery man an “elderly scientist,”78 “educated in some technical field, perhaps holding a college degree,”80 and most interesting, as “an omniphile, an extraordinarily active man” whose “training was in forestry.”81
78. See May 7, 1993 deposition materials re: Reisman vs. The Kinsey Institute, in the author's archive.
79. Indianapolis Star, September 19, 1995, A1-4.
80. The Humanist, “Sex, Science and Kinsey,” September/October, 1996, pp. 23-26.
81. The Washington Post, December 8, 1995, F1-4.
“The longest history we ever took was done thus, conjointly, by Kinsey and me. We had heard through Dr. Dickinson of a man who had kept an accurate record of a lifetime’s sexual behavior. When we got the record after a long drive to take his history, it astounded even us, who had heard everything. This man had had homosexual relations with 600 preadolescent males, heterosexual relations with 200 preadolescent females, intercourse with countless adults of both sexes, with animals of many species, and besides had employed elaborate techniques of masturbation. He had set down a family tree going back to his grandparents, and of thirty-three family members he had had sexual contacts with seventeen. His grandmother introduced him to heterosexual intercourse, and his first homosexual experience was with his father. If that sounds like Tobacco Road or God’s Little Acre, I will add that he was a college graduate who held a responsible government job. We had traveled from Indiana to the Southwest to get this single extraordinary history, and felt that it had been worth every mile.
At the time we saw him, this man was sixty-three years old, quiet, soft-spoken, self-effacing—a rather unobtrusive fellow. It took us seventeen hours to get his history, which was the basis for a fair part of Chapter Five in the 'Male volume, concerning child sexuality. Because of these elaborate records, we were able to get data on the behavior of many children, as well as of our subject.
At one point in his history taking he said he was able to masturbate to ejaculation in ten seconds from a flaccid start. Kinsey and I, knowing how much longer it took everyone else, expressed our disbelief, whereupon our subject calmly demonstrated it to us. I might add, in case this story confirms the worst fears of any surviving critics, it was the only sexual demonstration among the 18,000 subjects who gave their histories.
Few interviews were anything more than routine—or seemed so, after the first few thousand—but some responses were memorable. Early in the interviewing we learned that the most embarrassing question we asked, particularly for women, was “How much do you weigh?” I remember, too, the female psychiatrist, quick and sharp in her answers, who answered when I asked how she found out about masturbation: “I invented it, and if I could have patented it, I’d have made a million dollars.” Memorable, too, was the female gynecologist, an inhibited old maid, who observed, “There are two questions I never ask my patients—their age or anything about their sex lives.” She told us she thought masturbation was normal unless it was excessive. When we asked her what “excessive” meant, she said, “Anything over once a month.” Not surprisingly, her own masturbation occurred once a month.”
Wardell Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, Harper & Row, New York, 1972, pp. 218-219.
Jones writes: “Kinsey began his courtship of Mr. X in the fall of 1943… [He] correctly divined that Mr. X longed for recognition and approval. From the beginning, therefore, Kinsey treated him like a colleague, a fellow seeker of truth who had compiled valuable scientific data. In a letter that combined flattery and praise, Kinsey wrote, “I congratulate you on the research spirit which has led you to collect data over these many years.”…[H]e was “very much interested in your account [of certain illegal behaviors Mr. X had practiced in hotels, such as drilling holes in walls to film people engaged in sex in adjacent rooms].… There are difficulties enough in this undertaking to make it highly desirable for all of us who are at work to keep in touch. I hope we keep in touch with you.” Much to Kinsey’s delight, the materials arrived by return mail, the first of many shipments over the next several years. “Your instant willingness to cooperate and your comprehension of the problems involved in these studies make me all the more anxious to meet you,” replied Kinsey.… “Mrs. Kinsey and I should be glad to entertain you in our home.… Everything that you accumulated must find its way into scientific channels.””82
82. James Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, WW Norton, New York, 1997, pp. 507-513.
Kinsey offered to cover the expense of bringing the serial child molester to his family home in Bloomington, and expressly hoped “to work out further plans for cooperating with you.” Jones continues: “Kinsey’s benign view of pedophilia does not fully explain why he was so taken with Mr. X. To fathom their relationship, one must understand that Kinsey considered Mr. X not merely a sexual phenomenon but a scientific treasure. Privately, Kinsey had long believed that human beings in a state of nature were basically pansexual. Absent social constraints, he conjectured, “natural man” would commence sexual activity early in life, enjoy intercourse with both sexes [any and all ages] eschew fidelity, indulge in a variety of behaviors, and be much more sexually active in general for life. To Kinsey, Mr. X was living proof of this theory. Describing Kinsey’s joy in discovery, Nowlis [a junior Kinsey staffer] declared, “This was like finding the gall wasp which would establish not a new species but a new genus” .…As Nowlis put it, Kinsey looked upon Mr. X as a “hero” because “the guy had the courage and the ingenuity and the sexual energy and the curiosity to have this fantastic multi-year odyssey…and never get caught.””83 [Emphasis added.]
83. Jones, pp. 512-513.
Jones admits that Kinsey’s “hero,” Rex King, copulated with “countless adults of both sexes.”84 Hence, he would be at the very least a statistical vector for sexually transmitted diseases. Jones records Pomeroy’s testimony that Mr. X could “masturbate to ejaculation in ten seconds from a flaccid start… [which] our subject calmly demonstrated,”85 meaning that he was, as we now know, still an active serial, not merely nostalgic, child molester. Jones does not, however, directly relate King’s sexual feats to the abuse of even a single child. He does not tell us, for instance, the age of the youngest girl and boy molested by Kinsey’s “hero,” whom the Kinsey Institute considered to be an expert on the “truth” about child sexuality.
84. Jones, Ibid. Pomeroy reported this information in his 1972 biography of Kinsey (ghost-written, reports Gathorne-Hardy, by John Toffel, as were all Pomeroy's books). See: Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex, the Measure of All Things, Chatts & Wendres, London, 1998, pp. 231, 444.
Jones writes: “Kinsey [was determined] to exhaust Mr. X’s collections and personal expertise. In March, 1945, Kinsey offered to pay Mr. X’s salary if he would take a leave from government and pull together his materials.… Confessing that his own data on preadolescent orgasms were “definitely scant,” Kinsey wrote to Mr. X in March, 1945, “Certainly you have very much more material than we have in our records.” Specifically, Kinsey asked for information about the average age at which orgasm occurred in preadolescent boys, their capacity for multiple orgasms, and the earliest age at which orgasms have been observed in boys… it took months for him to… pull this material together. “This is one of the most valuable things we have ever gotten and I want to thank you most abundantly for the time you put into it and for your willingness to cooperate.… Anyone who is scientifically trained must comprehend how valuable the data are.””86 [Emphasis added]
85. Jones, Ibid.
86. Jones, pp. 510-511.
That Kinsey admired this criminal serial child molester whose “courage and ingenuity” in his child sexual “odyssey” were outstanding because he was not “caught,” is further documented in Kinsey’s personal correspondence, where child sexual abuse is transmogrified into acts of virtual heroism. Only Vincent Nowlis, then a junior Kinsey staffer, appeared to have voiced any objection to the Kinsey team’s support of Mr. X and his “research.” Jones recalls, “Nowlis saw things differently. He regarded Mr. X as a monster pure and simple and thought it was wrong to use data that came from immoral research. Decades later, he recalled telling Kinsey, “Look, that material on timing infants and youngsters to orgasm— I don’t think that belongs in this book.” But Kinsey was adamant.… Kinsey meant to change the public’s thinking on sexual matters… Kinsey was determined to provide those data.… The end justified the means.”87
87. Jones, p. 513.
Indiana University records confirm that Kinsey did not report Mr. X to authorities. Indeed, for over fifty years the entire Indiana University Kinsey Institute team collaborated in covering-up sex crimes perpetrated against children involved in its research.
During an appearance on the Donahue television talk show in December 1990, Kinsey colleague Clarence Tripp stated that several pedophiles gave testimony about their sex crimes to Kinsey, but they were not criminals because they had not been prosecuted or served prison time. This author asked Tripp, as we waited in the Green Room prior to our joint appearance on the program, “Are you saying that if one kills an unarmed person, a child or two, unless one is caught, tried and convicted one is not a murderer, a criminal?” Tripp repeated the Kinsey position: that one is not an offender, not a criminal, unless one is caught and convicted. And while Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Gebhard emphatically admitted the involvement of the Kinsey team with several pedophiles,88 and Gebhard affirmed that their team was ”amoral” and “criminal,” and Pomeroy documented Kinsey’s own personal collection of “early adolescent…sperm,”89 Jones neglects to report such critical information. We are told only of the dead Kinsey, while information that could trigger prosecution of the living remains in limbo.
88. Gebhard admitted his (and the team's) collaboration with the several pedophiles in a telephone interview, and in several press articles, all in this author's archive.
89. Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey and The Institute for Sex Research, Harper & Row, New York, 1972, p. 315.
During a 1995 Canadian television program, Kinsey Institute Director John Bancroft stated that the reason he had determined that there was “only” one man who had experimented on hundreds of children was that “some otherwise” reasonable people were asking how Kinsey could have gotten specific information about “speed” of climax, time between “climaxes,” and so on. Yet, Gebhard and Bancroft both spoke of “Mr. X” as “pedophiles” (plural). And in the Male Volume, Kinsey asserts that there were “nine” men involved in the laboratory experiments: “Better data on pre-adolescent climax come from the histories of adult males who have had sexual contacts with younger boys… 9 of our adult male subjects have observed such orgasm… in contacts with… adults.”90
90. Male p. 177.
But, we now know that it was Kinsey’s mentor and colleague Robert Dickinson who “trained” Kinsey and King in the “proper” techniques of child sexual abuse. Yorkshire Television investigators discovered that Dr. Robert Dickinson, Kinsey’s famous “mentor in sex research,” had “collaborated with the pedophile [King] for several years, and taught him how to record his child abuse in scientific detail.” Tripp reported: “Dickinson taught him how to measure things, and time things, and encouraged him to—he knew he was going to do his ordinary behavior anyway, Dickinson couldn’t have stopped him from being a pedophile—but he said, at least you ought to do something scientific about it so it won’t be just your jollies, it’ll be something worthwhile, so he gave him some training by letter and correspondence.” [Emphasis added.]
Obviously, by reporting this serial child rapist to law enforcement authorities, Dickinson and Kinsey could have “stopped him from being a pedophile” who harmed children.
Dickinson confirmed in his Foreword to Ernst and Loth’s American Sexual Behavior (1948) that “nine” men were involved in the study: “The total of the case histories carrying rather full details of sex experience, gathered by nine different investigators during twenty-five years, [Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, Gebhard and five other men] is something like two-thirds of the present Kinsey collection of 12,000.”91
91. Robert Dickinson, Forward in Ernst and Loth, American Sexual Behavior, The Greystone Press, New York, 1948, p. vii-viii.
We were left to wonder exactly who those “nine” men were, and why the identity of the notorious “Mr. X” was kept a secret. Thanks to the Yorkshire documentary, we now know that “Mr. X” was Rex King, and we also know the name of at least one other key Kinsey pedophile. In a classic case of truth being stranger than fiction, one of Kinsey’s child sex experimenters was a World War II Nazi Storm Trooper. Yorkshire Television researchers uncovered his name, photograph, history, and court records. After the war, Dr. Fritz von Balluseck became a respected lawyer.
The Sample
For his database, Kinsey classified more than 1,400 criminals and sex offenders as “normal,”3-4 on grounds that such miscreants are essentially the same as normal men. By doing so, he bolstered the belief that reported increases in sex crimes are spurious; the result of sexually disturbed police or repressive “reform groups.” In his Female volume, he wrote, “Preliminary analyses of our data indicate that only a minute fraction of one per cent of the persons who are involved in sexual behavior which is contrary to the law are ever apprehended, prosecuted, or convicted, and that there are many other factors besides the behavior of the apprehended individual which are responsible for the prosecution of the particular persons who are brought to court. The prodding of some reform group, a newspaper-generated hysteria over some local sex crime, a vice drive which is put on by the local authorities to distract attention from defects in their administration of the city government, or the addition to the law-enforcement group of a sadistic officer who is disturbed over his own sexual problems, may result in a doubling-a hundred percent increase-in the number of arrests on sex charges, even though there may have been no change in the actual behavior of the community, and even though the illicit sex acts that are apprehended and prosecuted may still represent no more than a fantastically minute part of the illicit activity which takes place every day in the community.”3-5 [Emphasis added.]
3-4. Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin and Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, W.B. Saunders, Philadelphia, 1953. “Satisfactory increases of figures on the homosexual cannot be obtained by any technique short of a carefully planned population survey... every segment of the total population,” p. 618. Kinsey states that they have data in the Male volume on “1200 persons who have been convicted of sex offenses,” p. 392. Elsewhere the figure is 1,400, etc.
3-5. Male, p. 18.
A confidential 1990 letter from erstwhile Kinsey Institute Director Paul Gebhard, to then-director June Reinisch, focused on your author’s challenge to Kinsey’s data and techniques. Gebhard asserted: “In your recent letter of December 3, which I gather was sent to a number of individuals as well as to me, you refuted Judith Reisman’s allegations about Kinsey and the Institute. However, I fear that your final paragraph on page 1 may embarrass you and the university if it comes to Reisman’s attention. Hence, I want to warn you and relevant university officials so that some damage control might be devised. The paragraph ends with the sentence: “He never used data from the special samples, derived from such populations as the gay community or prisons, to generalize to the general public.” This statement is incorrect. Kinsey did mix male prison inmates in with his sample used in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. I describe this defect at the bottom of page 28 of The Kinsey Data and add that Kinsey later recognized this error and hence did not use prison inmates in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. This inclusion of prison inmates was a major reason why on page 35 of The Kinsey Data I state the sample “ was misleading with respect to the lower socioeconomic class.” As to generalizing to a wider population, in his first volume Kinsey did generalize to the entire U.S. population. See, for one example, the tables on page 188 and 220 where he clearly extrapolates to the U.S. Subsequently he realized this error and no such extrapolation is found in his second volume. I am distressed that neither you nor your staff seem to be familiar with Kinsey’s first book nor with The Kinsey Data and consequently produced the erroneous statement in your letter.”3-62 [Other than book titles, emphasis added.]
3-62. Private letter from Gebhard to Reinisch, December 6, 1990, obtained during Reisman deposition. In the author's archive.
Another member of the Kinsey team, Pomeroy himself once claimed that the Kinsey reports were the most often-cited, but least-read, books of all time: “In America the book was the basis of a thriving industry. Not only was it near the top of the best seller lists in its own right, but it touched off a spate of books attempting to capitalize on it, not to mention the national controversy that embroiled laymen as well as scientists. The book itself was one of those occasional phenomena in the publishing business, a little-read best seller, much like Masters and Johnson’s first volume. People who read the reviews or heard about the controversy rushed to buy the book and found themselves holding three pounds and 804 pages of scientific prose and statistical charts, for which they had paid $6.50. The simple fact of the matter was that few lay readers would have had enough background knowledge in psychology and statistical method to grasp any more than the essentials of what Kinsey was talking about. Only the idea of a massive “sex book” could explain the phenomenal sales of more than 200,000 copies in the first two months. ... In Kansas City, the magazine said, a grain merchant gave his mistress a copy inscribed on the flyleaf, “I hope this will help you to understand me better,” and in Miami Beach a playboy was said to have bought fifty copies and sent them to all the women he knew.””3-65
3-65. Wardell Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, Harper & Row, New York, 1972, pp. 3-4, 274-275.
Gebhard could have added that Kinsey once claimed that he and his team had earned the rights of “a priest or of a physician”3-63 to keep confidential the information provided by rapists, murderers, child-molesters, and pedophile murderers.
3-63. Male, p. 47.
Kinsey associate Paul Gebhard explained that even the prison sample was heavily weighted toward sexual disorder, since the Kinsey team specifically sought the worst sex offenders: “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 offense (e.g. statutory rape) and directed our efforts toward the rarer types. In the early stages of the research, when much interviewing was being done at Indiana correctional institutions, Dr. Kinsey did not view the inmates as a discrete group that should be differentiated from people outside; instead, he looked upon the institutions as reservoirs of potential interviewees, literally captive subjects. This viewpoint resulted in there being no differentiation in our 1948 volume between persons with and without prison experience. . . . the great majority of the prison group was collected omnivorously without any sampling plan-we simply interviewed all who volunteered and when this supply of subjects was exhausted we solicited other inmates essentially at random.... Kinsey... never... [kept] a record of refusal rates-the proportion of those who were asked for an interview but who refused.”3-6 [Emphasis added.]
3-6. Gebhard, Gagnon, Pomeroy, and Christenson, Sex Offenders, Bantam Books, New York, 1965, pp. 33, 32, 31.
Kinsey’s self-serving “low-class” population could hardly have been selected by chance. He knew that scientific privilege would not allow him to commit crimes or protect others who had done so. “I know perfectly well that some people would suggest that all persons who have ever been convicted and done jail sentence [sic] should be ruled out. By the same token, one would have to rule out anyone who ever will do a jail sentence. For our part we have felt that a man who has lived sixty or seventy or eighty years without going to jail and then is arrested on a drunk charge after his wife has divorced him, or some other similar thing, is a normal individual, the same as a thirty year old who has not lived long enough to prove that he will never be caught by the law.”2-108
2-108. Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey and The Institute for Sex Research, Harper & Row, New York, 1972, p. 292.
Kinsey was understandably anxious to downplay the extent to which his “research” had been based on the experiences of deviants, prisoners, homosexuals in bars and baths, and child molesters. Much of Kinsey’s animosity was directed at critics within the scientific community. Scientists, he claimed, “have proved as likely as anyone else to become emotionally disturbed at the very notion of research in the area of human sexual behavior in facing facts ...with anything like objectivity. A prominent scientist, a leader in science at a great university, and ultimately an important figure in scientific political organization in the national capital, began his review of our first volume by saying: “I do not like Kinsey, I do not like the Kinsey project, I do not like anything about the Kinsey study of sexual behavior.” The persons who have been most vociferous, both verbally and in their writing against our undertaking [ellipses in original] would include some who honestly believe that ignorance is safer than knowledge in this, and presumably many other areas. But the prime objectors have been persons who are most disturbed in their own sexual lives. This we know specifically because we have case histories on some of these individuals.“109 [Emphasis added.]
2-109. Pomeroy, p. 223.
Once again, as noted earlier, there was the veiled threat that he could, and perhaps would, reveal such information should a critic go too far. There were so few scholarly critics of Kinsey at the time that when one raised his head (as did Gorer and Terman), this raised questions about the critic’s own sexual life, whether justified or not. Christenson quotes Kinsey, hinting at the “strain” of protecting the critic’s sex history: “We have guaranteed to keep confidence on each individual history which we have taken in this study, but it must be admitted that it has imposed a terrific strain upon us at times to know the sexual history of some of the persons who have been the bitterest opponents of our sex research, as they would be of any other sex research.”2-111
2-111. Cornelia V. Christenson, Kinsey: A Biography, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1971, p. 224.
Such was the mindset of the man widely credited with triggering a destructive “sexual revolution” that has radically altered our nation’s morals, culture, and politics.
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