The Sex Clash

Just three. \nIt takes only three letters, S-E-X, to start conversations and stir controversies. \nAnd when it comes to controversy, IU's influential sex researcher Alfred Kinsey sets the already hot topic on fire. Many people consider Kinsey a pioneering scientist and researcher who blazed the path toward understanding human sexual behavior. Others say his legacy sent the country spiraling into moral decline, causing crisis rates of sexually transmitted diseases and lighter penalties for sex crimes, including rape.\nOne of the most disputed remnants of Kinsey's influence is how we learn about sex today, an issue that is embedded in local and federal politics. Those against Kinsey's work say he formed the foundation for current sex education programs that harm adolescents.\n"Kinsey's doctrine that kids can have sex at any age makes up the modern sex education movement," said Melissa Pardue, policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, a public policy research institute in Washington, D.C., that promotes conservative views. "Kinsey didn't present this as a problem whatsoever."\nIn the 1940s and '50s, sex tips and intimate advice in Glamour magazine didn't exist, and the subject of sex stayed inside the bedroom. When Kinsey, the former zoology professor, taught a marriage course at IU in 1938, he found his students approached him with questions about sex that left the professor stumped.\n"There was all this chat about how people are supposed to behave, but nobody really knew what people were doing," said Adrienne Verrilli, director of communications at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. "[Kinsey] suddenly discovered how little people knew about their bodies."\nFor college students, sexuality can take on a new dimension in the transition to adulthood. With independence and the potential to establish serious romantic relationships, sex is a prevalent topic on college campuses. This is exactly why Verrilli says having information available is beneficial.\n"When you go to college, it's like being thrown into a hotbed of hormones," Verrilli said. "Not being armed with information to navigate relationships and sexual issues in college is detrimental."\nAlthough many college sexuality courses are optional, students who take the classes learn about dimensions of sex not often taught in high school. In a recent issue of American Sexuality Magazine, an article described how college sex education courses go beyond treating the body like a "glorified plumbing system" and clarify social and cultural influences on sex.\nBut Pardue, the Heritage Foundation policy analyst, says by the time kids enter college, their sex knowledge from high school classes, including contraceptive information and graphic displays of condom use, already has jaded them.\n"Your beliefs and standards regarding sex are established through sex education, and those carry into college," she said. "The idea that it's okay to have sex as long as you use a condom is ridiculous." \nBefore such sexuality institutes were established, Kinsey published two volumes of research, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1953). Kinsey and his colleagues discovered behaviors like premarital sex, masturbation, oral sex and extramarital sex were more prevalent than people wanted to know.\nVirrelli attributes these findings to the outrage that continues today.\n"America looked at itself in the mirror and realized that people aren't the way they pretended to be," she said. "That 'Beaver-Cleaver' world just didn't exist, and that really bothered people."\nFor anti-Kinsey advocates, the researcher's findings are anything but scientific. As director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute, a national group based in Washington, D.C., Robert Knight seeks to expose the truth about Kinsey -- that he was a fraud who used science as a disguise to justify his own sexual behaviors. \nPrior to Kinsey's research, Knight said, sex education consisted of human reproduction, hygiene and marriage. Now too many curricula follow what he calls the "Kinseyan Method," a dangerous view that trivializes sex and ignores its repercussions if done outside of marriage. Knight believes Kinsey is partially responsible for the wave of sexual freedom that occurred in the '60s and '70s.\n"This kind of sex education is just a way to keep the sexual revolution going, no matter how many victims it claims," Knight said. \nKnight said college students should resist sexual temptations that go hand-in-hand with independence and self-discovery. \n"Sex is too important to take lightly, and students should know that their lives are worth more than the immediate pleasure of hooking up," he said. "So many people are having sex out of marriage, and they're practically asking for STD's and other consequences."\nInstead of trying to de-program kids from the sex-saturated culture, today's sex education curricula assume they are going to have sex anyway, Knight said.\n"Now we equip kids with condoms and teach them they are only sexual beings, not moral beings," he said. "It's like teaching them how to drive and handing them the car keys."\nJennifer Bass, head of information services at IU's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, said many people like Knight who blame Kinsey for STI rates, pornography's popularity and rape incidents make connections that don't exist.\n"To research (and collect information about sex) is not the same thing as causing a problem, and people try to blame Kinsey for putting the information out there," Bass said. "Back then there was no Dr. Ruth or Dr. Phil -- and virtually no discussion in public about sex."\nBass said Kinsey's goal and the goal of the institute today is to help people make educated decisions.\n"Whenever you present information to people and shake up their worldview, it creates reaction,"\nshe said. "It can be denial, disgust, blame or joy -- but information in itself can only be helpful, not harmful."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Maura Halpern at mhalpern@indiana.edu.