Ashli Dodd

Morath 10:00- 11:20

9/8/2014

Kinsey
For my lab homework I decided to watch the video on Alfred Kinsey and his work
throughout his life. There is a lot of overwhelming information and aspects that go into his study
that could make his work unethical or just appear that way. I pondered a lot about the meaning of
boundaries and what is ethical or not, but taking into account all of outside specifications that
could influence the significance of his studies is something that was very hard for me.
Sexuality, I believe, is something in society that is not shunned upon in personal
conversations, but is usually not advisable in casual conversation, a social rule that isnt spoken.
The 30s, 40s, and 50s are time periods (not excluding before) when sexuality was not a
common topic of discussion among anyone at all, as I depicted from the movie. Many things in
time have changed from sexuality in fashion, books, movies and socially. What is ethical or
socially acceptable now could have been something that was completely unheard of back then.
Ethical is a word that is hard to describe and interpret. Watching the movie Kinsey, I
discovered a whole new aspect of sexuality in the past as well as a new way to look at what is an
ethical study or not. Who is to determine whether or not filming naked women having sex is
ethical? It is for a study, or for his own perverted preferences of time killing. He has a past of
becoming obsessed with projects. His bug collection for instance was something that he
dedicated his life to which, to me, proves that he is a dedicated scientist that wants the world to
know about something that he is passionate about.

Kenneth Braun in particular is someone that defies ethical. Is it ethical what he was
doing? Did Kinsey believe his actions were ethical? Because his actions were so socially
unacceptable there is obviously a line of what is acceptable and what is not. The place of where
the line should possibly be is a thick, dark, grey area that has no certain place of contention.
There are a few examples of where disappointment and upset were apparent i.e. His wife at the
beginning, Kenneth Braun, and the fight between his colleagues were a few major ones I picked
up on. However, what about what he was actually doing with the subjects. He certainly had a
front seat row observing the female anatomy or personally experiencing things with multiple
women through a camera and directly. It is very much so up to each individual and their
discretion of whether or not the study was ethical. There are many standpoints in which he was
very strong in his argument. The subjects were not forced, they gave consent to what they were
doing, they were not personally traumatized by what he was doing (as far as I know) and he was
recording the data to share. However, the study was characterized by areas of weakness. The
question, alone, becomes whether or not educational funding should be used towards this and if
it was strictly business. In my opinion, there needed to be more of a promotional outcome and
more reasons. Do the pros outweigh the cons/ social consequences? What are the hard reasons
behind this study?
These questions get lost within the research. I was under the impression that he wanted
people, married people in particular to become knowledgeable about sex, what your body does
and how to help people with questions about their bodies. Yet it was communicated as though it
was pure advice, that turned into what some could interpret into how to have sex, who has sex
and how to get the highest arousal. Is it ethical for an educational study at a university during the
mid-1900s, perhaps it was a bit far-fetched. The conclusions drawn by the study are similar

what you would see in an article that Carrie Bradshaw writes in Sex and The City, a newspaper
or even a study about sexually transmitted diseases. When you look at it from an exterior
analytical viewpoint with the mindset tailored to our current societal standards where
pornography and gratuitous sex is often viewed as mild perversion, the actual findings and
process were basically moral. But given the standards of the population during that time period
as it relates to sex, the general consensus was rooted in immorality and unethicality due to how
green all of this information was. Just like many other experimental studies, Kinsey had a
curiosity that he followed, and he did everything in his power to discover the information that he
had been wondering about throughout the years of his human experience.