Kinsey was a bisexual voyeur who engaged in increasingly violent masochistic masturbatory practices, which eventually led to a pelvic infection that killed him at age 62. He engaged in wife-swapping with fellow staffers at his Institute for Sexual Research, at least two of whom had sex with both Kinsey and his wife. Various couplings, orgies, and masturbatory demonstrations were filmed in the attic of Kinsey's home. Jones notes that Kinsey even engaged in a variety of blackmail, securing a stream of foundation money by "shrewdly obligating his sponsors in those organizations by collecting their sexual histories."
His scientific conclusions were tainted by advocacy for his own
unusual sexual preferences. "Kinsey's scientific data wasn't flawed.
It was fraudulent," says Dr. Judith Reisman, who questioned the
veracity of Kinsey's primary research on male sexuality for nearly
twenty years. "Kinsey wanted to change our sex attitudes and laws; so
he created the data that he wanted. He also threw out three-quarters
of the [questionnaire] answers he didn't want to use. He picked who he
wanted [as study subjects], and he lied about who he interviewed."
Reisman notes that five-sixths of Kinsey's research subjects were
aberrant males, representing a disproportionate sampling of prisoners,
sex offenders, and male prostitutes. Jones notes that Kinsey sought
out as many male homosexual interviewees as possible, both because
little was then known about homosexuality, and in order to discreetly
engage in anonymous sexual relations with men in the large cities to
which he traveled in search of data. That sampling bias led to
Kinsey's widely cited estimate that ten percent of American men were
homosexually oriented—at least three times the rate determined by
later surveys that used more reliable sampling techniques.
Kinsey also solicited ethically questionable data. One chapter of his first report on "early sexual growth and activity" among boys appears to have been based almost entirely on the reminiscences of a man who claimed to have engaged in sexual relations with about 800 children. Kinsey jumped at the chance to acquire the diaries and photographic archives of the man he called "Mr. X." In a passage based on these accounts, Kinsey notes that children "will fight away the partner and may make violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive definite pleasure from the situation." Kinsey made no effort to bring his unnamed source to justice. True to form, Kinsey's estimates made much of this seem like normative behavior: "85 per cent of the younger male population could be convicted as sex offenders if law-enforcement officials were as efficient as most people expect them to be."
