Social Science and the Future of Sexuality

The recent publication of two books provides an opportunity to reflect on the profound but destructive influence of social science on our culture’s attitudes towards sexual behavior. In his The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead,¹Derek Freeman details the case he made earlier, that Margaret Mead was deliberately misled by three young Samoan women on whose testimony she largely based her famous account of guilt-free sex in Coming of Age in Samoa,²and further that her general account of Samoan society as a place of idyllic adolescent sex, and as a kind of prelapsarian utopia characterized by an easy, frictionless social life was grossly inaccurate. James H. Jones’s biography, Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life,³details the career of the most famous of the sex researchers, exposing the grim and horrifying details of Kinsey’s own sex life, a very troubling aspect of which is the degree to which Kinsey’s sexual pathologies influenced the outcome of his supposedly value-free scientific research, including even his statistics. These two books make the case that social science was corruptly used to convince the American public that a deterioration of its traditional sexual morality, transmitted by tradition and sustained by religion, was an inevitable process which would result in a progressive, healthful, and expressive attitude towards sexuality. In both cases, social science serves not as an independent source of facts the truth of which is guaranteed by the rigorous application of the scientific method, but as a purveyor of false values whose destructive effects are felt to this day. The larger question raised here is whether social science can ever be trusted as a guide for sexual matters and for human behavior generally.

The immediate purpose for Mead’s research published in Coming of Age in Samoa was to examine the nature of adolescent sexuality.⁴The psychological explanation, or more generally a developmental approach most often associated with the theories of Freud, explained adolescence as a time of personal and social stress ignited by sexual feelings and impulses which caused a conflict between natural adolescent desire for sexual knowledge and experience, and the rules, ethics and demands of religion and society. As against this view, Mead’s famous and influential mentor Franz Boas proclaimed the thesis of cultural determinism, that the sturm und drang of adolescence was merely the reaction of individuals to the restrictions of their ambient cultures.

In our own civilization, the individual is beset with difficulties which we are likely to ascribe to fundamental human traits. When we speak about the difficulties of childhood and of adolescence, we are thinking of them as unavoidable periods of adjustment through which everyone has to pass. . . . [t]he anthropologist doubts the correctness of these views . . . [and] much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization. ⁵

The method by which to settle the issue between psychological developmentalism and the cultural determinism of anthropologists was to find a “negative instance,” an example of a society where the stresses of adolescent sexuality did not in fact occur. Finding this example was Mead’s explicit purpose in traveling to Samoa, to vindicate what Freeman refers to as the “Boasian paradigm.”⁶Stemming from the issue of the nature of adolescent sexuality, however, was a larger issue which was the nature of human sexuality in general: Was it a raw, disruptive force which drew a crimson line through individual lives and human history, and which therefore had to be controlled by social sanctions of the most severe kind, or was it rather that human nature, being essentially plastic, human beings could be trained in a radically guilt-free environment in which sexual activity did not bring about intense feelings of guilt, conquest, lust, betrayal, and possession?

For Mead, the problem in America was that there were too many competing social factors contradicting the rigid set of rules laid down for sexual ethics, unlike the primitive but unitary society of Samoa. It was this conflict of evangelical ideals of chastity versus the advertising culture’s advocacy of easy sexual access which caused the stresses associated with the coming of age in America, and which implied that the rules for sexual behavior ought to be eased. The popularity of Mead’s book on Samoa came about not because it explained how adolescence was not required to be a time of travail and strain, but because it provided a justification for a social program for America which sought to separate moral standards and guilt from sexual activity.⁷Mead’s research in Samoa provided Americans with a glimpse of a realizable utopia of sexual freedom and easy living, as well as the absence of emotional conflict.

Later on, Mead wrote frequently for the popular press, becoming something of a mother-figure, dispensing practical advice about living, along with liberal social commentary. In her popular writing, she resembled Eleanor Roosevelt, who also wrote a column, and who as a young person in the 1920s had also accepted the values of progressivism. (Mead was also to resemble such latter day feminists cum moral relativists as columnist Ellen Goodman, who deals with issues concerning women, sex, and family life by presenting them as problems of such complexity that no “easy” answers can be found. This means that in effect discovering a moral or standard basis for behavior is beyond our ability.) Mead’s fame was secured by her authority as a highly regarded social scientist. Despite the fact that she produced other works about primitive societies and on other anthropological topics, her reputation largely rested on Coming of Age in Samoa.⁸

Coming of Age in Samoa is surprisingly understandable and reads less like a scientific text than a cogently written travelogue. So facile and transparent is Mead’s prose that one can easily read twenty pages before realizing it, and so smoothly does it flow that the reader cannot perceive anything apparently controversial in the picture she renders of a way of living in which the lack of powerful attachments makes of Samoa a stress-free utopia. The text is mainly about the lives of girls and young women since Mead was not able to get anyone else to talk with her at length,⁹and four of the fourteen chapters of the book are about women. Mead’s general knowledge of social and psychological issues is extensive, but her claim that she has rendered a complete and trustworthy picture of Samoan society is not true, as many Samoans themselves have protested.¹⁰The “Foreword” by her mentor Boas and the final two chapters which apply the conclusions of her research to education of the young in the United States make it wholly apparent to any critical reader that Coming of Age in Samoa is not a work of scientific research but one of special pleading. The plea is on behalf of what would become known as a “permissive society” in which toleration is the primary ethical norm and the relativity of cultures and morals is the intellectual underpinning. The issue for Mead, then, went beyond the special nature of sexuality in Samoan culture to what could be the ideal for American culture: Since there was nothing intrinsic in the fact of adolescent stresses associated with sexual development, as Mead had claimed to show in Samoa, the same could happen in America. Coming of Age in Samoa constituted an open attack on traditional sexual morals and religious ethics prevalent in America in the guise of disinterested social science.

Mead’s attempt to change American sexual mores resulted, however, in an injustice to Samoans and a grossly false picture of Samoan society. Samoans, it turns out, highly value the virginity of their young women; jealousy, strife, and assault are common (as proved by the records of criminal proceedings available to Mead), disproving her image of a Samoan society devoid of deep attachments and characterized by easeful association.¹¹Further, Samoans are not casual about their religion, despite what Mead reported, for the whole society has been Christian for many generations. Derek Freeman, the Australian anthropologist who spent many years living in Samoa (unlike Mead who spent only several months there living in a medical officer’s house before writing her book),¹²found Mead’s account so contrary to his own direct observation that he was led to look for the reasons, general and specific, regarding the gross inaccuracies in Mead’s account. His explanation was first published in a book which caused a cultural shock wave, Margaret Mead and Samoa, in which he reported that Mead had relied in particular on the testimony of three young Samoan women for a personal account of the laxity of sexual morals and the prevalence of easy sex among unmarried teenagers, and that these three women had simply lied. Their motives, as one of them formally testified years later, was that an account of free sex was what Mead wanted to hear, and so they followed a Samoan custom (“tausuaga”) of fooling or gulling impertinent interlocutors.¹³

Freeman is aware that the lies told to Mead by the young women are not enough to explain how she misunderstood not only the the single issue of pre-marital sexual activity, but also Samoan culture as a whole. In fact, Freeman adduces no less than five specific reasons in his latest account,¹⁴but mainly relies on the fact that Mead’s research was guided, in his term, by the “Boasian Paradigm” of cultural determinism. Mead’s utopian vision of Samoan culture is based on the “suppression of affectivity”: that the emotional ties that bind individuals to one another are less strong when based upon the early separation of Samoan children from their mothers.¹⁵Whether or not this is true is highly disputable, but is unrealistic in any case as a prescription for society, for the emotional ties that bind mother to child and lovers to one another cannot be dissolved or weakened if a culture is to survive and prosper. These emotions which Mead and other liberal thinkers believed could be socially redesigned are the things that tie individual human beings to one another and make social life possible. Traditional and religious sexual morality at least has the advantage of recognizing the “facts of life,” that the fund of emotion that connects human beings, such as sexual desire and a mother’s love, are powerful constants in human life and cannot be dissolved by early training or a politically-correct social environment. Traditional morality is much more realistic about the intensity of emotion in the human psyche (as is Freud, even though he approaches emotion in its pathological manifestations) than social scientists like Mead and Kinsey, who seek to eliminate the elements of love and desire so as to avoid the possibility of tragedy and long-term consequences.

Clearly Mead discovered a utopia of easeful life without the pangs of adolescence, the guilt associated with sex, or the resentment and cruelty of misformed emotional attachments between lovers and among family members in Samoa, because, following Boas’s requirement for a “negative instance” of a culture that was unlike America’s, that is precisely what she meant to find. But she was untrue to the facts of the character of Samoans and so she misled Americans as to what was possible and desirable in the relations between men and women, and also between parents and children.

The 1950s in America, usually seen as a time of cultural senescence, in reality marked the resumption of the fifty-year attempt by America’s cultural elites to undermine traditional attitudes about love, sex, marriage, and the family.¹⁶During the 1950s, Playboy magazine was started; the novels of William Burroughs and Henry Miller became available; and Marilyn Monroe became Hollywood’s symbol of female sexuality. Yet, the event that started the assault on traditional sexual morality in the 1950s was the “Kinsey report,” a thick volume of social science research published in 1948, ostensibly for doctors and social workers, which nonetheless attracted a huge readership, caused enormous reaction and comment, and became a genuine cultural event. (The volume went through 10 printings, and according to a recent catalog of the Indiana University Press, where Kinsey taught and conducted his research, it is still available over forty years later.)¹⁷

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the product of ten years of intensive research conducted by Kinsey and his co-researchers, Pomeroy and Martin, was published by W. B. Saunders Company, a respected publisher of medical texts, but was given an immense amount of pre-publicity in the press carefully arranged by Kinsey himself. The double-faced character of Kinsey’s enterprise was thereby revealed in the very manner by which it was presented to the public. Ostensibly the results of a scientific study of sexual behavior, the Kinsey report appealed to the prurience of a general public looking for titillation and justification and finding it in the academic sounding text, tables and graphs of the volume, interspersed with disclaimers of value-neutrality and historical accounts of the origin of sexual practices and taboos. The general sense of the Kinsey report was that sexual activity of all sorts was far more prevalent among American men than anyone was hitherto willing to admit, encompassing a wide variety of “outlets” beyond marital coitus. The more significant ethical sense was that contemporary social and religious taboos restricting sexual behavior were completely unrealistic and hence invalid, and that sexual matters should be discussed openly and frankly, and, above all, without imputation of blame or guilt for such activities as sodomy, masturbation and extra-marital intercourse.

The question that arises is how or why did an ostensibly statistical report written for physicians and social workers come to acquire these particular senses? The answer lies both in the presentation and the statistics of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and in the fact that the public was waiting for such an event as this: an excuse to justify its desire for less strict guidelines for sexual behavior than those of an evangelical Protestantism. The supposed moral neutrality of Kinsey’s report was fraudulent, for Kinsey’s actual argument was for a divorce between sexuality and morality based upon the assertion that moral considerations impeded scientific research by making neutral observations of extra-marital sexuality impossible. This, in turn, implied that there was a scientific necessity for a complete toleration of all forms of sexual expression, a point of view made clear in the earlier textual portions of Kinsey’s book:

Dr. Kinsey has studied sex phenomena of human beings as a biologist would examine biological phenomena, and the evidence he has secured is presented from the scientist’s viewpoint, without moral bias or prejudice derived from current taboos [from the Preface by Alan Gregg of the Rockefeller Foundation].
For some time now there has been an increasing awareness among many people of the desirability of obtaining data about sex which would represent an accumulation of scientific fact completely divorced from questions of moral value and social custom. . . . An increasing number of persons would like to bring an educated intelligence into the consideration of such matters as sexual adjustments in marriage, the sexual guidance of children, the pre-marital sexual adjustments of youth, sex education, sexual activities which are in conflict with the mores,[sic] and problems confronting persons who are interested in the social control of behavior through religion, custom, and the forces of the law. ¹⁸

As for the report itself, it was based upon thousands of interviews which Kinsey and his collaborators had with over 5,200 volunteers (to whom Kinsey dedicated this volume). The interviews were done privately, one-on-one, following a complex standardized routine which encompassed hundreds of questions not all of which would be asked of each interviewee. The questions were put in such a way that they elicited denials rather than confirmations of specific types of sexual behavior on the principle that the interviewees were less likely to lie if they had to deny an activity specifically mentioned to them rather than to confirm it. Some critics insisted that this procedure, plus the fact that the interviewees had volunteered, skewed Kinsey’s data by exaggerating the prevalence of certain types of sexual behavior in the population at large.¹⁹The results of the thousands of interviews were diligently tabulated and cross-referenced by Kinsey’s staff, and it was these results put in the form of tables and graphs that provided the skeleton of Kinsey’s report.

A word must be said about the use of statistics, tables, and graphs in the Kinsey report and more generally about social science research as it is presented to the public. It is well known that statistics have the power to influence opinion beyond their actual facticity or truth. It is precisely the presence of graphs and tables on the page that give an illusion of veracity both to Kinsey’s report and to many other similar efforts from social scientists. Indeed, Jones, Kinsey’s biographer, comments that they seemed to say that “science had won, religion had lost” just by their appearance on the page.²⁰Tables of statistics appear to be immutable facts lying there on the page, severing the text, set aside with borders providing a focussed access to truth, even though in Kinsey’s case the methodology and the source of the data were so questionable as to provoke immediate scrutiny. Thus, while Kinsey had interviewed many more people than necessary for a valid statistical survey, they were mostly college students from the upper midwest and northeast, as well as selected groups such as prisoners. Because he had also made an intense effort to include homosexuals in his survey, he had badly skewed his study so as to overestimate the number of male homosexuals in American society.²¹In the end, it is apparent that, despite the appearance of factual exactitude and scientific truth, Kinsey’s statistics are not to be trusted.

What was inherently prejudicial in Kinsey’s methodology was the definition of sex itself, for sex was reduced to orgasmic activity pursued in a specified set of outlets: masturbation, nocturnal emission, petting, pre-marital, marital and extra-marital intercourse, intercourse with prostitutes, homosexual sex, and “animal contacts,” or bestiality. Each type of outlet was cross-referenced against variables such as age, educational level, marital status, profession, religious affiliation, etc. Such an approach was completely and explicitly divorced from moral considerations by Kinsey but, more surprisingly perhaps, it was divorced from any notion of love or procreation, and there were no tables (or questions either, presumably) about how many children the interviewees had or the duration of their sexual relationships. Kinsey’s reduction of male sexual behavior to orgasms meant that one orgasm was as good as another, and made all sexual outlets equal. Thus, the social aspect of sexuality, otherwise intrinsic, was suppressed so that sex inevitably became a matter of individual enjoyment and self-expression rather than the bond between a man and a woman, the means of human procreation, and the basis of marriage and the family. Sex had instead become atomistic and anti-social.

Jones’s well-documented and sympathetic biography of Kinsey describes the horrifying details of Kinsey’s own sex life and makes clear the links between Kinsey’s personal anguish and his sexual research. He portrays Kinsey as a repressed individual who was unable to control his own sexual drives, a situation which was complicated by his rigidly religious upbringing by his controlling father. Once freed of both religious and parental restraints by his college and graduate school experiences (Bowdoin College and Harvard University), Kinsey was drawn, like a moth to the flame, to investigate sexual matters at the same time that he was seducing his male graduate students and teaching a value-neutral informational course on sex and marriage to the undergraduates at Indiana University. Kinsey’s bizarre sexuality is not to be understood by the popular explanation of today, that of a sexually-repressed gay man afraid to “come out of the closet,” for Kinsey encouraged his researchers at his famous sex institute (funded in large part by the Rockefeller Foundation) to have sex with each other and each other’s wives, including his own wife, Clara. It was the price of admission, so to speak, into the sex institute, or an initiation rite used to prove that the researchers did not associate guilt with any kind of sex including deviant sex. (One new researcher who refused to partake of this rite immediately resigned.)²²

Kinsey, according to Jones’s account, was not merely repressed but compulsive, not only gay but also a homosexual seducer, not just morally flawed but a sexual adventurer who justified his actions in the name of science. In short, he was not just led by personal interest to study sexual behavior but driven by personal devils to corrupt his own science of sexology. Jones leaves no doubt about Kinsey’s compulsive masturbation, homosexual one-night stands, adultery, self-mutilation, seduction, and sexual propagandizing. How far Kinsey’s degeneracy extended both sexually and scientifically is a significant question, for the claim has been plausibly made by Dr. Judith Reisman, a Kinsey critic, that Kinsey was a child molester. This was the only way, she argues, that he could have acquired the data on pre-adolescent male sexuality that appears in the Kinsey report. Jones says, however, that the accusation that Kinsey took part in child sex is “groundless,” although he does acknowledge that Kinsey violated ethical norms in using the detailed testimony of a pedophile, and that Kinsey justified pedophilia on the grounds that in some cases it had a positive long-term effect on a child as the object of sexual aggression.²³

It may be argued that for scientists, as for politicians, aspects of their personal lives are irrelevant to the validity of their research or their work as politicians, yet the standard is the same for scientists as for politicians, that when personal misbehavior influences their work, an investigation is warranted and the inference of a connection is legitimate. This is so in Kinsey’s case, for his basic mistake was the same both personally and scientifically, that is, divorcing sexual behavior from its moral and social context. It was Kinsey’s separation of sex from morality that left no stopping point for him personally as he descended into various stages of perversion, and that led him as a scientist to describe sexual behavior in the minimal physiological terms of “outlets” having no intrinsic connection to the proper object of desire. The divorce between sexual behavior and morality which seemed to guarantee that sex could be guilt-free ignored the psychological fact that sexual contact frequently brings emotional attachment of such strength that it is a conduit of desire and a basis of fateful attachment. Guilt-free recreational sex is a destructive myth, a myth which led to the corruption of Kinsey’s scientific research and probably hastened his own death at the age of sixty-two.²⁴

The social scientists who are arguably the two most influential researchers on human sexuality have been revealed as grossly inaccurate and ideologically driven in one case, and as a rationalizer of compulsive personal misbehavior in the other. The two cases may seem accidental and unconnected; however, the misuse of social science for the purpose of propagandizing on behalf of permissive sexuality was no accident, but an inevitable outcome of the use of scientific methodology to study human beings. Modern science began when Copernicus and Galileo disengaged the study of the heavens from the net of teleology and the complex levels of causality in which Aristotle had enmeshed the study of astronomy, for the divorce of phenomena from a teleological or moral context has been a constant historical feature of modern scientific method, although teleology may be returning to astronomy by way of “the anthropic principle.”²⁵

In the case of astronomical phenomena, the divorce from purpose and morality left behind such things as astrology and the mythic description of the planets, for instance, assigning male qualities to Mars and female qualities to Venus, a process which, while controversial, did not arguably leave anything of importance behind. In the case of biological phenomena, however, when Darwin divorced the origin of life forms from purpose and biblical creation by means of the mechanism of natural selection, the issue was far more severe, for what was left behind was the ultimate meaning of human life as designed by nature and as the gift of the Creator God. The divorce of meaning and purpose from human phenomena in the social sciences presents even more of a dilemma, for this process implies denuding human nature of what specifically characterizes it, such as mind, choice, aspiration, foreknowledge, and, not least, human dignity as the pinnacle of nature herself. Here, what is left behind in the attempt to study the phenomenon of man scientifically are those characteristics that make men and women human, and the resultant portrayals of human beings by empirically-minded social scientists are caricatures of real human beings, as in the portrayals of Skinner, Marx, and Freud.

The whole range of the social sciences is crowded with theories and major ideas that are philosophic, ideological, or literary in their origin.²⁶Hence, the outcome of research in any field of social science always has to be regarded with skepticism, for even the most seemingly objective and positive of the social sciences, economics, with its mathematical criteria, its precise model of “economic man,” and its discrete units such as money and price, is so driven by politics that it is possible to divide up many of its best-known theorists as either left-wing (Galbraith) or right-wing (Friedman). Further, given the facts that the character of social scientists is often activist rather than analytical, and that their ideological inclination is to identify with the cultural and political left, a bias in social science research is nearly inevitable. The opportunity for even the best-intentioned social scientists to mistake their beliefs for the necessary outcome of their scientific research means that social science should never be depended upon to yield a basic or overarching truth about human nature, human behavior, or ethics. Plainly, in the cases of Mead and Kinsey, the permissive view of sexuality held by them both did not originate from their research but guided it from the outset. It is precisely the removal of any concept of purpose or meaning found in religious or traditional morality from sexuality, the intimate and fundamental human activity that biologically links human beings to one another, that lets in ideology, wishful thinking, and rationalization as guiding principles.

All these considerations lead to this question: Where should we get our ideas about sexual ethics from if not from social science? The obvious answer is from our moral traditions expressed in formal ethics and informal mores, from the practical wisdom passed on from father to son and mother to daughter, and from religious revelation. These are what provided the basis of Western sexual ethics in the past. In the current social situation when children’s cartoon characters spout vulgarities, when situation comedies idealizing family life are subjected to venomous attack,²⁷when “toleration” becomes a destructive notion used to undermine any standard of sexual value, and when social science becomes not value-neutral but the avatar of sexual permissiveness, there is urgent need to return to the old verities. The fact remains that social science cannot save us from the misuse of our sexual powers—and never could.

Notes:

1. Boulder, 1999.
2. New York, 1928.
3. New York, 1997.
4. Coming of Age in Samoa, 11.
5. Ibid., xiv, xv.
6. Margaret Mead and the Heretic (Ringwood, Australia, 1996), 285.
7. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, 194, 195.
8. Ibid., 201, 202. Male and Female (New York, 1949).
9. Coming of Age in Samoa, 9. On Mead’s style, see The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, 196, 197.
10. Ibid., 201.
11. Freeman spends eleven chapters and 165 pages in an item-by-item refutation of Mead’s account of Samoan society in Margaret Mead and the Heretic, 113–278.
12. Ibid., xi; in The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, see chaps. 6–9 for a detailed account of Mead’s time in Samoa preparatory to writing Coming of Age in Samoa.
13. Margaret Mead and the Heretic, xi, xii, and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, 14, 15.
14. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, 14.
15. Coming of Age in Samoa, 188, 199, 209, 210; Margaret Mead and the Heretics, 86, 87.
16. Francis Fukuyama, “The Great Disruption,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1999, 56.
17. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, 1948).
18. Ibid., vii, 3. See also Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, 615.
19. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, 399.
20. The New Yorker, August/September, 1998.
21. In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male Kinsey states that 10% of the male population is “more or less exclusively homosexual,” but lately the usual figure is given as 3% (by homosexual advocate Andrew Sullivan, for example). On the general untrustworthiness of Kinsey’s statistics, see Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, 635, 636.
22. On Clara, see Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, 393; on the incident of the researcher, 488–492.
23. Ibid., 512, 851–852. For Reisman’s case, see Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People (Lafayette, La., 1990), 46–55. The issue of pedophilia continues in the recent controversy surrounding the publication of a study in 1998 in an American Psychological Association sponsored journal that concluded that not all victims of child sexual abuse viewed their experiences negatively. The United States House of Representatives condemned the article in July 1999.
24. Jones describes the masochistic incident that landed Kinsey in the hospital two years before his death and which it is plausible to infer hastened his demise at the age of 62. Ibid., 738–741.
25. On teleology in contemporary physics, see my “Natural Right and the Re-Discovery of Design in Contemporary Cosmology,” Political Science Reviewer, Vol. XXV (1996), 273–309.
26. See the opinion piece “When Theory is Everything, Scholarship Suffers,” by Richard Wilk, an anthropologist, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 1999.
27. E.g., David Halberstam’s attack on the benign if pallid “Ozzie and Harriet” television program in The Fifties (New York, 1993).