Features: DVD, Widescreen
Alfred Kinsey was a little-known biologist at Indiana University when, in the 1940s, he began compiling exhaustive data from tens of thousands of interviews about the sexual practices of men and women. The results of that research were the explosive, best-selling "Kinsey Reports." Implicit in the revolutionary study was a plea for greater tolerance. "Such terms as abnormal, unnatural, oversexed, and undersexed," wrote Harper's Magazine, "have little validity in the light of Professor Kinsey's revelations." The man behind the inflammatory reports seemed at first glance an unlikely "revolutionary." Publicly, he was an erudite, tweedy academic, but in private Kinsey was far more complex. As his interest in sex research deepened so did his wide-ranging sexual experimentation. Though his work was groundbreaking and up-ended established ideas about sexual practices in America, his own sexual orientation and personal beliefs almost certainly shaped and biased his findings. Through interviews with his research assistants, his children, people who took his sex questionnaire, his biographers, and intellectual historians, this probing documentary assesses Kinsey's remarkable achievements, while examining how his personal life shaped his career.
Editor's Note
In the 1940s, biologist Alfred Kinsey pioneered the study of human sexuality with a groundbreaking series of reports that documented the sexual practices of tens of thousands of American men and women. Revealing a broad spectrum of sexual experiences that negated such previously accepted labels as "deviant" and "unnatural," the Kinsey Reports literally changed the American cultural landscape by encouraging a social tolerance that helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s.Though Kinsey's work was indeed revolutionary, there was nothing in the doctor's past that would suggest his iconoclastic future: he grew up in a Christian conservative family and spent his early career as a professor of zoology and entomology. It wasn't until his professional sex research that Kinsey began his own personal experimentations with sex, pursuing an interest in bisexuality, sadomasochism, group encounters, and other then-taboo experiences. This biographical episode of PBS' AMERICAN EXPERIENCE series examines Kinsey's work and its impact on his personal life--as well as vice versa--through archival materials and interviews with biographers, historians, and Kinsey's own children and colleagues.
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