The lovers who frolic through mainstream films are mostly beautiful and young—and dull. From Hollywood, we get the missionary position or, on special occasions, the woman on top. Occasionally a different sort of film makes it to the cinema. I can think of a couple of recent examples: Innocence, which includes a scene of an old woman masturbating, and Secretary, which investigates consensual sadistic sex. But usually the variety of human sexual experience is absent, the positions of The Joy of Sex off the menu. If you want to discover what arouses real people, an inspection of the videos in your local porn shop is more likely to be instructive than an evening at a UGC cinema. But even at the porn shop, a sense of what sex is actually like for people—the frustrations, joys, anxieties; the reality, banality and sublimity—is missing. Kinsey: Let's Talk About Sex is different.
Alfred C Kinsey was the first person to try, in a systematic fashion, to document the diversity of our sexual experiences, to find out who does what with whom and how often. For this he invented a new approach: the face to face interview. He convened a team to travel around the US and ask thousands of people about their sex lives—masturbation, wet dreams, first sexual encounters, homosexual experiences, visits to prostitutes, oral sex, premarital sex, orgasm, adultery and so on. The results, published in two volumes, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), shocked America, brought Kinsey instant notoriety, and transformed our understanding of human sexuality. Kinsey the movie is thus at once the story of a man's life, a social commentary, a scientific inquiry and a kaleidoscopic view of the landscape of sexual experiences. It is an ambitious mix, but by and large it succeeds.
The device for depicting all this is Kinsey's own face to face technique. The film opens with Kinsey himself—magnificently played by Liam Neeson—giving his sex history to a young man who is being taught how to interview someone so that they will speak openly. (One: make sure the interviewee understands the answers are completely confidential. Two: keep the questions simple and don't talk in euphemisms. Three: appear non-judgemental; don't frown or shift uncomfortably, but nod, smile, and look straight into the other person's eyes.) As the young man asks questions, we get flashbacks from Kinsey's life. Then, gradually, interviews with other people are interspersed—brief accounts of sex lives that are variously comic, interesting, ghastly and poignant. There is the man who, in reply to the question "How often do you reach orgasm?", says "Once." "Once a day?" "No, only once. About 20 years ago." A young woman thinks she is "dead down there" because she can't respond to her husband's clumsy lovemaking. A young man tells of how, aged 13, he ran away from home after his father caught him with another boy: "Pop walked in. Found us. Locked us in the barn. Called my brother. They branded us. Took turns doing it. And then they beat us raw. Broke a couple of ribs, collarbone. Tommy, he, er, didn't make out as well as I did."
The arc of Kinsey's life is typically heroic: conflict with his father, rebellion, romance, success, fall from grace, redemption. Born in 1894, he grows up in small-town America with a domineering father whom he loathes. But Kinsey the boy finds solace in the great outdoors, and becomes a naturalist. To his father's angry disappointment, Kinsey the man becomes a biologist, and for 20 years studies the tiny wasps that cause plants to produce galls, collecting more than a million of the critters. He switches his attention to sex when he realises how dearth of data and lack of frank discussion—or worse, overt scaremongering—are harming happiness. (He should know: he and his wife are virgins when they marry, and have terrible initial difficulties with sex.) So he sets out to collect human sexual experiences with the same enthusiasm and rigour with which he collected gall wasps.
The achievement was monumental and its impact enormous. Nevertheless, this is no hagiography. Kinsey emerges as an ambiguous figure. His own experiments with homosexuality were immensely hurtful to his wife. At least for a time, sexual permissiveness pervaded his group and caused emotional chaos (a novel published last year, TC Boyle's The Inner Circle, explores this). He based some of his statements about the sexuality of children on information given to him by a self-confessed paedophile. He became obsessed, a frenzied workaholic addicted both to sleeping pills and stimulants, and began conducting bizarre experiments including the piercing of his own foreskin.
But Kinsey's life is arguably not the most important part of the film. In one of the more skin-prickling moments, Kinsey's father consents to be interviewed, and talks of how, as a boy of ten, he was forced to wear a painful contraption on his genitals so that he would not touch himself. Kinsey ushered in more enlightened attitudes to sex. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this film should be made at a time when social conservatives are trying once again to remove sex education from America's schools, and hampering international efforts to combat the spread of HIV by promoting abstinence instead of the distribution of condoms. Kinsey is a timely reminder that ignorance is not bliss.
