Joanna Kempner, a research associate at the Princeton University Center for Health and Wellbeing, shared preliminary results of her study of the impact of having one's sexuality-related research attacked by politicians….
Kempner studied 162 researchers who in 2003 either had their research questioned by lawmakers who tried (and almost succeeded in the House of Representatives) to have their projects blocked for support from the NIH or whose work appeared on what became known as "the hit list" of projects for which the Traditional Values Coalition tried to generate opposition. The research projects -- all of which had been approved through the peer review process at the NIH -- involved such topics as prostitution, gay sex, unsafe sexual acts, and drug use….
While she is still analyzing the results, early findings suggest that the experience of being a target has led some of the scholars to rethink their work or careers.
Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Erections, Mounting and AIDS: Incestuous Gay Monkey Sex (or seven words you can't write in your NIH grant)
[Hat tip to James Hughes] Fabulous title, important paper.
> Kempner studied 162 researchers. . . whose work appeared
ReplyDelete> on what became known as "the hit list" of projects for which
> the Traditional Values Coalition tried to generate opposition.
> The research projects. . . involved such topics as prostitution,
> gay sex, unsafe sexual acts, and drug use. . .
>
> [E]arly findings suggest that the experience of being a target
> has led some of the scholars to rethink their work or careers.
All the more reason for conservatives to celebrate, of course.
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[Alfred C.] Kinsey was the world expert on gall wasps before
he turned to human sexuality. . .
Attacks on Kinsey for his temerity in exposing America's sexual
secrets in his landmark studies ''Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male'' (1948) and ''Sexual Behavior in the Human Female'' (1953)
often focused disingenuously on his methodology; the irony that
the same methodology had merited praise when he applied it to
gall wasps did not cheer him. . .
With the publication of ''Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,''
Kinsey found himself under relentless attack. The most vicious
assaults came from the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, who
perceived a threat in his quantitative and tolerant view of
sexual variation, and from intellectuals like Margaret Mead
and Reinhold Niebuhr. Mead, [Kinsey biographer James H.]
Jones says, ''criticized Kinsey for upsetting the balance
between ignorance and knowledge upon which social restraint
depended,'' a curious position for a scientist to take.
-------------------------------------------------
"Father of the Sexual Revolution"
By RICHARD RHODES
_The New York Times_, November 2, 1997
(Review of ALFRED C. KINSEY A Public/Private Life
by James H. Jones.)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/reviews/971102.02rhodest.html
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In every society sex patterns depend on a careful and meticulous
balance between ignorance and knowledge, sophistication and naïveté....
the Kinsey Report, by the publicity that has been given to this
series of facts about extramarital and abnormal and unusual forms
of sex satisfaction, has upset the balance in our society between
ignorance and knowledge, between the things we don't mention, and
the things we do. And it may be expected to have considerable effect
in our society for that reason. Quite a good deal of our virtue
has depended upon people not knowing what other people were
doing --if they had known, they would have gone and done likewise;
and when they weren't quite sure, sometimes they didn't.
-------------------------------------------------
Margaret Mead, "An Anthropologist Looks at the Kinsey Report,"
in _Child and Family_, vol. 18, no. 4, 1979; pp. 294-303
(quoted in blog entry "The Shame of Alfred Kinsey...",
November 18, 2004 by Tim Bayly
http://timbayly.worldmagblog.com/timbayly/archives/010687.html )
-------------------------------------------------
Sexual permissiveness almost destroyed my life; mere dumb luck
saved me. Some of my friends were less lucky because they were
"more lucky", and it did destroy their lives, or the lives of
their children. This includes a relative of mine who killed himself.
Do you think we are discussing some abstract topic with no real-world
implications? Ideas have consequences. The cheerleaders of the
Sexual Revolution told him to leave his wife and small children
in order to consummate a relationship with another man. The pursuit
of sterile sexual gratification turned out not to be gratifying.
-------------------------------------------------
John C. Wright, in blog entry "Fibbing with Fiction",
August 13, 2007
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/111875.html#cutid1