[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Frank Rich: The Plot Against Sex in America

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Frank Rich: The Plot Against Sex in America

December 12, 2004
 


 

WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral
values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's
WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this
country has entered a new cultural twilight zone. 

Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a
spot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson
stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher
who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a
national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that
masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At
first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too
commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make
about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the
other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That
explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey"
distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail
from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating
that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and
"controversial press re: groups speaking out against the
movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints."


Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about
its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my
inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big
mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some
poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it
were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even
as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio
station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international
women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it
could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air
announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels,
fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public
service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public
health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis.
Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in
which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of
its 6,000 congregations to gay couples. 

Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make
"Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I
first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, it
struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and
somewhat quaint chapter in American social history. It was
in the distant year of 1948 that Alfred Kinsey, a
Harvard-trained zoologist, published "Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male," a dense, clinical 804-page accounting of
the findings of his obsessive mission to record the sexual
histories of as many Americans as time and willing
volunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The
book stormed the culture with such force that Kinsey was
featured in almost every major national magazine; a Time
cover story likened his book's success to "Gone With the
Wind." Even pop music paid homage, with the rubber-faced
comic Martha Raye selling a half-million copies of "Ooh,
Dr. Kinsey!" and Cole Porter immortalizing the Kinsey
report's sizzling impact in a classic stanza in "Too Darn
Hot." 

Though a Gallup poll at the time found that three-quarters
of the public approved of Kinsey's work, not everyone
welcomed the idea that candor might supplant ignorance and
shame in the national conversation about sex. Billy Graham,
predictably, said the publication of Kinsey's research
would do untold damage to "the already deteriorating morals
of America." Somewhat less predictably, as David Halberstam
writes in "The Fifties," The New York Times at first
refused to accept advertising for Kinsey's book. 

Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has
gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and
the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of
"moral values" voters, we're back where we came in. Bill
Condon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working on
this project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any political
climate. The film is a straightforward telling of its
subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included,
conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by
Kinsey's most recent biographers. But not unlike Philip
Roth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back to
an American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie,
however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel
entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even
fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did at
the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence. 

As for the right-wing groups that have targeted the movie
(with or without seeing it), they are the usual suspects,
many of them determined to recycle false accusations that
Kinsey was a pedophile, as if that might somehow make the
actual pedophilia scandal in one church go away. But this
crowd doesn't just want what's left of Kinsey's scalp. (He
died in 1956.) Empowered by that Election Day "moral
values" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host of
second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further
rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights,
pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it
aloud, reproductive rights for women. "If you have
weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values,
shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president of
the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush
after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner
and let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of this
Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that
it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates
instantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent
movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day. 

In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition
has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by
Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not
ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the
Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't
really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that,
however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a
relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film
is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger
goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the
closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether
circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist
sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged
Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The
Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are
dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in
public schools.) 

"Kinsey" is an almost uncannily helpful guide to how these
old cultural fault lines have re-emerged from their tomb,
virtually unchanged. Among Kinsey's on-screen antagonists
is a university hygiene instructor who states with absolute
certitude that abstinence is the only cure needed to stop
syphilis. Sound familiar? In tune with the "moral values"
crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention has obscured and downplayed the
important information that condoms are overwhelmingly
effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A
nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex
education, Advocates for Youth, publicized this subterfuge
and has been rewarded with three government audits of its
finances in eight months.) Elsewhere in "Kinsey," we watch
desperate students pepper their professor with a series of
uninformed questions: "Can too much sex cause cancer? Does
suppressing sex lead to stuttering? Does too much
masturbation cause premature ejaculation?" Though that
sequence takes place in 1939, you can turn on CNN in
December 2004 and watch Genevieve Wood of the Family
Research Council repeatedly refuse - five times, according
to the transcript - to disown the idea that masturbation
can cause pregnancy. 

Ms. Wood was being asked about that on "Crossfire" because
a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California
Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk
science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance)
have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education
programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900
million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of
sex education that our government supports, even though
science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or
may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University
study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to
delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a
high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but are
less likely to use contraception once they do. It's
California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept
federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a
40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past
decade, second only to Alaska. 

No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the
pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little
jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn
Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey"
will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity
and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always
survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the
cultural war over sex that is being played out in real
life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same
information about sexuality that was kept from their
antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when
pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own
"moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive
prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval
of local officials; you see it when basic information that
might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed
by the government because it favors political pandering
over scientific fact. 

While "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was received with
a certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americans
in 1948, the atmosphere had changed radically by the time
Kinsey published his follow-up volume, "Sexual Behavior in
the Human Female," just five years later. By 1953 Joe
McCarthy was in full throttle, and, as James H. Jones
writes in his judicious 1997 Kinsey biography,
"ultra-conservative critics would accuse Kinsey of aiding
communism by undermining sexual morality and the sanctity
of the home." Kinsey was an anti-Soviet, anti-New Deal
conservative, but that didn't matter in an America racked
by fear. He lost the principal sponsor of his research, the
Rockefeller Foundation, and soon found himself being
hounded, in part for his sympathetic view of homosexuality,
by the ambiguously gay homophobes J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde
Tolson. Based on what we've seen in just the six weeks
since Election Day, the parallels between that war over sex
and our own may have only just begun. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/12rich.html?ex=1103594025&ei=1&en=76901d8abc6d73c1


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