Other reviews presented the sexual revolution as a Rorschach Test for how one views the famed sex-researcher. The Village Voice notes, “Kinsey remains a puritan bete noire, held responsible for everything from jump-starting the sexual revolution and promoting junior high school sex education classes to enabling pornography, gay rights, and abortion on demand.” Newsday’s review maintains, “What the case against Kinsey is about is exactly what he was guilty of—bringing sex out in the open, and perhaps making a lot of people’s lives more happy.”

The publicity surrounding the film’s release promotes a false dichotomy that reduces the controversy to a battle between prudes and libertines. This clouds the issue of fraudulent scholarship, which fuels the legitimate criticism of the mid-century Kinsey Reports and their chief author.

Instances of Alfred Kinsey’s untruthfulness are numerous and consequential. Kinsey actually paid a friend $500 to pretend to be his Institute for Sex Research’s statistician. He cultivated a Norman Rockwell public image while behaving more like Larry Flynt behind closed doors. The Indiana University professor gullibly took pedophiles at their word that their child-victims enjoyed sex, interpreting “violent cries,” “loss of color,” “an abundance of tears,” and “sobbing” as symptoms of sexual climax for infants and young children.

Kinsey erased blacks, and almost wholly ignored senior citizens and devoutly religious people from his survey data. Prison inmates, on the other hand, constituted about twenty to twenty-five percent of those interviewed for 1948’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. If a political pollster were to use such methodology, he would be laughed out of a job. For a sex researcher to employ such sampling techniques is far worse, particularly when one considers two admissions from the Kinsey team.

First, Kinsey admitted that including interviews with inmates would skew the conclusions of a sample group. In effect, he invalidated his entire report on male sexuality in a passage in 1953’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Explaining why he disregarded data collected from incarcerated women for his second volume, Kinsey confessed that they “differ as a group from the histories of the females who have not become involved with the law.” How so? Kinsey surmised, for instance, that between half and three-fourths of male inmates engaged in homosexual acts. Including inmate data for the female volume, he admitted, would have “seriously distorted the calculations of the total sample.” But not only did he rely on inmate data for the male volume that he later admitted would have “seriously distorted” his female survey, but this data constituted a massive portion of his interviews for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

Second, Kinsey targeted a specific type of inmate—the sex offender—in his prison interviews. All three of Kinsey’s coauthors later confirmed this. Wardell Pomeroy, portrayed on the silver-screen by Chris O’Donnell, admitted: “We went to the [prison] records and got lists of the inmates who were in for various kinds of sex offenses. If the list was short for some offenses—as in incest for example—we took the history of everybody on it. If it was a long list, as for statutory rape, we might take the history of every fifth or tenth man.”

Whether people see Kinsey as a hero or villain needn’t have anything to do with their bedroom behavior. After all, does it require Victorian morals to recognize how unscientific it is to rely on rapists to determine whether their victims found the assault pleasurable? Is there any connection between one’s view of the sexual revolution and the notion that a researcher focusing so heavily on the habits of sex offenders can’t in good faith project his findings upon all of America? What, exactly, do your sexual tastes have to do with concluding that Kinsey paying a friend to masquerade as his statistician doesn’t exactly conform to scholarly integrity?