Thoughts on Kinsey

I'll confess, first of all, to not having known much about the man Alfred Kinsey until recently. Perhaps this is a tribute to the importance of ideas over authorship, since what Kinsey revealed about America and human beings has been a part of my culture all my life, even in those years when I felt deep guilt over my own sexuality. But with the release of Bill Condon's recent movie about the man, Kinsey has been reintroduced to the American social scene, and the response has shown both how much we have changed and how much we haven't.

Reactions to the film have varied widely, from condemnation by social conservatives who regard Kinsey's findings are morally objectionable and who often seem to blame the man for the existence of the practices he documented, to those who hail his work as setting us free from sexual repression by making sex just one more thing to talk about, by demystifying it.

It is a compliment to the quality of the movie that most of the debate is over Kinsey and not the film itself; since I regard one of the purposes of literature in any medium to be the encouragement of conversations. And clearly this is a conversation that we in America need to have. I have argued in the Preface to The Usahar that I consider modern Western society as perhaps the most sexually dysfunctional in history, and it seems to me that the debate over Kinsey, both the movie and the man, supports this contention.

But is it sex we're really talking about? To some degree I suppose it is, since sexuality is effectively universal in human beings and since it unquestionably manifests itself in myriad ways. And sex does make us all uncomfortable insofar as it makes us vulnerable; it's something we can't fully control no matter how much we may want to. But I think the debate over Kinsey is actually less about sex itself than we have been led to believe, because in the history of Western society, sex has been inexorably linked with power.

In other words, if you can control sex by defining it, you can control the person who is sexual. If you can define what is "normal" and what is "abnormal" and most of all make your definitions the standard ones for society, you can exert considerable pressure on people to behave and think as you want them to behave and think. It is no surprise, therefore, that extremely hierarchical groups such as the Catholic Church are far more prone to defining sexual "normalcy" than are groups like the Quakers, who lack such a hierarchy.

But there are problems with Kinsey's work, too, and it is a credit to the film that these are shown. As a biologist and a scientist, Kinsey was trained to set himself apart from that which he researched, to try and be objective. He was trained to observe, to record, and to analyze. As a result his human subjects became like his wasps: things. Of course, they weren't just things; they were people, and those who criticize Kinsey have a point here. People are much more complicated than wasps, and human sexuality has emotional, psychological and social dimensions that make its study much more than mere biology. His failing to see this, even in his own life, was arguably Kinsey's greatest weakness, both as a man and as a researcher.

This is unfortunate, and has led even some who have written positively about sexuality, like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, to argue that "the net effect of Kinsey's work was much more destructive than constructive." Like many of Kinsey's other critics, Boteach argues that sexuality is only positive when it matches the definitions set down by religious authority, and that he (presumably because he is a religious authority) gets to define what those definitions are; namely "Judeo-Christian morals and ethics." Just as with Boteach's Christian peers, one cannot help but sense a power play here.

But sex resists definition. It resists power, and therefore it can empower. Pornography, a favored target of social conservatives, is opposed precisely because it is subversive, because it excels at making us uncomfortable and because it challenges social norms. If there is one thing that Kinsey's research found, it's that humans are widely variable in how they feel about and express their sexuality, and that even in the sexually repressed world of mid-20th century America, people were simply not doing what they were told. Boteach and his clergical colleagues argue persuasively that sex in a loving relationship is a good thing, and they note correctly that sex can be hollow and unsatisfying, even addictive, but they also presume to speak for everyone when in fact they cannot. The fact is that through sexual expression human beings sometimes thumb their noses at religious, social and political authorities, and we should not be surprised that this makes those authorities so angry.

In a way, then, this is Kinsey's real legacy, intentional or not. Not that he invented sexual variation, but that he made it, and the defiance of authority inherent in it, very public. He revealed that the revolt against the old authorities was more widespread than we had ever imagined, and that one of their greatest weapons, the concept of sexual "normalcy," is in fact a sham. What Kinsey did not do and his critics have not done is what we now must: accept our humanity as complex and difficult, and structure our morality accordingly, founded on the principles of compassion, tolerance and love rather than thinly-disguised efforts to gain and hold onto power.

Great Books

Having come of age in the 1970's and later, I've had a good view of the changes in education that have taken place since the tumultuous years of the 1960's, including the reaction against what are known as the "Great Books", or as some call them, books by "dead white men". The argument in a nutshell against keeping these books as a major part of the educational curriculum is that books written by white men must be about white men, and must therefore exclude narratives about women and anyone who isn't white. A white man, by this argument, is somehow unable to write a book or a story about a black woman, and vise-versa. Secondarily, there is an affirmative-action side to the argument, which is that women and non-whites deserve to have their literature read too.

Certainly there's some truth to both these points. Many of the "Great Books" are white, male-oriented narratives, and as recently as the last century, for example, female authors felt compelled to use masculine pseudonyms since the prevailing view was that women either had nothing to say, or nothing to say about certain subjects. James Tiptree, a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, who disproved the idea that there was a substantial difference between "male" writing and "female" writing in science fiction, is a good example of such a pseudonym. Clearly art and artistic talent occur in all cultures and in both genders, and to argue that only "Western" civilization, or dead white men, or left-handed housewives from Topeka, have produced literary masterpieces is to miss the richness that human literature embodies. Art resists definition, and one man's masterpiece is another's Ed Wood.

But lurking in the reaction to the "Great Books" is the idea that we can only write about our own "kind", that a white man is incapable of writing accurately about a black woman. While it might well be more difficult for him to do so, it cries conceit to say that he cannot, or worse, that he should not even be permitted to try. Such logic, followed to its extreme, would conclude that none of us can write anything but our own autobiographies, which is clearly not true. At the same time, to argue that all the great books that can be written have already been written is no less ridiculous. The concept that the canon of great literature is closed is clearly indefensible.

Unfortunately, the reaction against the "Great Books" has been swept up in the troubled world of academic politics, and this has diluted its original and noble goal of bringing out literatures beyond the old canon. Rather than simply add diversity to literature, the movement has sought to redefine the canon to exclude the old classics, claiming that they do not speak to the majority.

This begs the question: Can we read too much? Does spending an evening with Hemingway preclude us from reading Morrison? It is certainly true that there are more books in existence than anyone can possibly read in a lifetime; in fact there are more books published each year than one can possibly read in a lifetime. But given that the average American reads so little, it seems ironic that the very academics whose job it is to study literature (and teach it, presumably) should try to actually reduce how much people read. Such is my first objection: the canon is flexible, and open ended. We do not need to remove the "Great Books" from it; rather, we need to add to their number. As Joanne Greenburg put it in I Never Promised You A Rose Garden: "To praise one thing is not to damn another."

My second objection lies in the effort to redefine "Great Books" themselves. Again, a central argument is that they aren't relevant to the masses, that they speak only to a small minority of educated white males, and are therefore at best irrelevant and at worst guilty of perpetrating sexism, racism, and whatever "-ism" is currently trendy. Yet, as Jonathan Rose has noted, it is only recently that the "masses" have found such works inaccessible; perhaps the classics are classics because they speak to a wide audience, and that audience transcends generations and even cultures. Perhaps, in fact, there is something to Shakespeare or Homer or Austen or Steinbeck that makes them great, and that it is we in our reality TV mass-media dominated society who can no longer appreciate them. Perhaps those of us who fancy ourselves authors need to try and find out what that something is if we are to write literature that is meaningful.

In my own reading, the thing that most strikes me about "great" literature is that it is more than simply entertainment. Certainly there is a place for entertaining books, and a great book can be entertaining, but what distinguishes books I remember and reread from those I don't seems to be the extent to which they challenge me. This is different from simply having a "moral" to the story, or using a story to present a finalized philosophical idea; a great book is a sort of conversation in which the ideas the author puts forward are meant to inspire debate, thought, and growth. Often such books do not provide answers but rather simply frame questions. The result is that the reader must wrestle with the book and its implications long after the last page is turned, and for this reason the story stays with us. It may, if read by others, even engender dialogue among its audience.

When combined with technical virtuosity, the result is art of great power. The Grapes of Wrath may be about a white American family in the Dust Bowl, but its critique of capitalism and the "stumbling-forward ache" that characterizes human beings is about everyone; it is a thesis about humanity and can be applied to any time in history and any place in geography, and discussed in any of these contexts. The desire for revenge is sadly universal, and one not need be a prince of Denmark to benefit from the implications of Hamlet.

The conclusion? Read. Read the "Great Books" and read other books. Develop an eye not only for what the story is saying, but what it is making you think. And if it is making you think, even if this makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why and keep reading. Great literature is great because you can emerge from it with so much more than you had when you began.

Blogging

Welcome. I must warn you, gentle reader, that blogging is new to me, and that I am conservative by nature when it comes to new things, and often inept at new technology (this post is the second try, since I hit the wrong button and lost my first glorious Blog entry). But I have also been told that I should have a Blog, and that in fact as an author I need a Blog, because people might want a place to read my thoughts or find out what I'm up to in my work.

Fair enough, I suppose. I do have thoughts, though no more or fewer than anyone else. I tend to put mine down in writing, and I do love a good story. I add the qualification that as a human being, my thoughts, however much I may think they're brilliant, may be quite wrong.

Life's like that.

And so we blog (assuming, that is, that we don't hit the wrong button again...)