Note: this is an editorial. The viewpoints expressed here belong to me, Devin Faraci, and not Nick Nunziata or Dave Davis or anyone else who ever contributes to this site. If you have a problem with my editorial and my beliefs, please feel free to send me an email at devin@chud.com.
Unbelievable. The last time I did a news story about people protesting a movie it was to register my complete disgust with the NAACP picketing a screening of Birth of a Nation. But it’s not just the so-called PC police who are completely out of their fucking minds when it comes to movies. The impending release of Bill Condon’s excellent biopic Kinsey is already drawing the ire of sex-hating conservatives.
Here’s some of the ridiculous rhetoric being spouted: "Alfred Kinsey is responsible in part for my generation being forced to deal face-to-face with the devastating consequences of sexually transmitted diseases, pornography and abortion," said Brandi Swindell, head of a college-oriented group called Generation Life that plans to picket theaters showing the film.
Look at that quote really carefully. "[F]orced to deal face-to-face." Indeed, because as much as Brandi (she spells her name with an I and she’s anti-sex? As if) wants to deny it, STDs, porn and abortion all predate Alfred Kinsey by some small number of millenia. It’s ludicrous to be angry at the guy who studied sex scientifically for the existance of this stuff. I want to know where I picket to show my disdain for the God who invented horrible things like nakedness and sex. Damn that Kinsey for making people recognize that these things exist!
There’s more! "Instead of being lionized, Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist," said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America’s Culture & Family Institute.
Mengele. I want you to let that sink in. Mengele, the evil Nazi doctor who performed hideous experiments on living humans is the equivalent of a man who tried to quantify sexuality in a scientific way. Did the guy have a ton of serious issues? Sure, and Condon’s film does a great job of showing us that, as the director says, "Kinsey was a very complex man, in some ways damaged beyond repair." But comparing him to a NAZI? Unreal.
Hey, let’s go back to Brandi. In case you weren’t sure she was a total moron, try out this quote for size: "If this was a true documentary, they would have included more negative information. They’re sugarcoating the issue, trying to make him look like a genius who all of humanity should be grateful for."
A true DOCUMENTARY? You know, as frustrating as it was trying to explain to people what a documentary is and how the label covers op-ed pieces like Fahrenheit 9/11 comfortably, this is almost too much to take. Did Brandi note that Dr. Kinsey bears a strong resemblance to Qui Gon fucking Jin in the astonishingly extensive archival footage Condon has collected?
"To say that it is rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual agenda would be beyond stating the obvious," wrote reviewer Tom Neven of Focus on the Family. Yes, that evil homosexual agenda of being able to love whoever they happen to end up loving, and not to get beaten to death for it. What a hideous agenda! My own readings of the Scripture indicate that Jesus would have been against this agenda, Tom, and probably would have fully supported such excited curbs on that agenda as the murder of Matthew Shepard. Oh wait, no he wouldn’t. I’m confusing the shepard with his fucked up flock.
In the end I know that this is actually GOOD for Kinsey. It isn’t like the evangelical right is going to be heading out to a movie that’s all about sex research and even includes a shot of a penis penetrating a vagina. If only this film had someone being filleted like a fish while screaming in a dead language, they could have gotten behind it and brought their seven year olds, but it’s about something as unnatural as sex.
But the uproar will make more people pay attention to the film, and it’s a good film. And while Kinsey wasn’t a perfect man – which the film makes clear – and while there are some aspects of his statistical representation that wasn’t ideal and may have compromised some of his findings (imagine that a movie doesn’t involve an exciting scene about statistical sampling. Jesus, they’re just throwing away the math dollars here), the basics of Kinsey’s work have stood the test of time, and his work paved the way for further scientists to investigate a subject that had long been taboo. And in the end it all boils down to whether or not you thinking having a real, physiological understanding of sex is a good thing. Or whether you think that people should feel shame and horror at some of their most simple biological urges, living forever at war with their own bodies, cruelly handed to them by God.
In the meantime, if you agree that these people are screwed in the head beyond all hope, I urge you to go see the movie to make up your own mind about what it does or does not present, and to read up on the life and work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey (here’s a good place to start – The Kinsey Institute) and make up your own mind on whether he was a man driven by science to do what science does best – understand things – or if he was wearing the Number of the Beast on his lab coat.