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Frank Rich's Plot Against America
©2004 Dr. Judith Reisman
Editor's note: This column deals with
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Lulled by the siren call and the lotus blossoms of Circe, Frank Rich resembles nothing less that a man stoned as he frets over "The Plot Against Sex in America." But Frank is no Odysseus – he needs more wit to find his way home.
On Page 1 of Sunday's New York Times' Arts&Leisure section, a poor, befuddled and naive Frank Rich is hysterically pushing the panic button in a sweat lest someone spoil the sappy fun he claims to enjoy.
Sexuality, he warns, is on the endangered species list.
Rich was traumatized – yes, I would say traumatized – that "the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York" rejected (temporarily) advertising for what Rich views as "the acclaimed movie 'Kinsey.'"
Well, Variety rejected paid advertising from Dr. Laura, me and others, documenting Kinsey's child sexual-abuse protocol. Maybe Frank will write a protest about that?
Speaking in standard New Yorkese, repeating the words he memorized at the feet, knees or whatever of hundreds of other elite, uneducated and mindless "critics," Rich gives us Liam Neeson as (sigh, here we go again) the "pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime."
Ah, Mr. Rich, blush! You're exposed, sir! Like all the others, you too never read Kinsey's books. You used the short Fox publicity blurbs, didn't you?!
Admit it now and you'll feel better! And you, a New York Times critic at that.
Indeed, your benighted literary bankruptcy is embarrassing. Let me spell it out for you. If "nonmarital sex [was] a national pastime" in the 1940s, Americans – other than Kinsey – would have noticed, really. Why? Well, you see, despite the moronic and uninformed claims in Kinsey's books, most Americans could read then, too. And although, in those years, the nation boasted thousands of newspapers nationwide, we even read the New York Times (it was also published then and they had "reporters").
I know you believe everything Condon says, but trust me on this. In the 1940s, Americans had eyes and ears, just like today. And we knew pretty much what our next door neighbors were doing. Even atheists like Lionel Trilling and Abe Maslow knew what people were doing – and not too many were witless enough to be doing what Kinsey said they were doing.
But, lets not heed the "scholars." Let's try some logic ourselves, shall we?
Now, I'll go slowly with this next sentence so that you may possibly follow the line of thought. You see, pre-Kinsey contraception was commonly by prescription and abortion was illegal. (Well, the foolish founders thought abortion was killing. Now we are smarter.)
OK, so far?
Now Frank, Kinsey said he found a 6 percent "illegitimacy" rate.
OK, you explain to the New York Times' readers how that works. Were girls burying babies en masse in their urban backyards? The last I saw, it was prom night in the 1990s when we found babies dumped in garbage cans.
So, try telling us how Americans had a national pastime of "fornication" without mass-producing babies?
Try telling us how we had such a "national pastime" without massive venereal disease – up well over 400 percent since?
Tell the New York Times' readers why there were no epidemics of genital herpes, human papilloma virus, chlamydia, AIDS or the other 20 or so new STD epidemics that plague our children today? And why even syphilis and gonorrhea were finally under control? Remember, every couple had to take that VD test before they could get a marriage license. My goodness, what prudes!
Mr. Rich, sir, you have a statistical reality adjustment to make here. But you liberal elitists seldom allow the truth to interfere with your anti-religious dogma.
Next, you say that Kinsey taught "that women have orgasms, too." Again, you are exposing your unlettered state, good sir. Sex manuals on how to provide women's orgasmic satisfaction were widely read. And, radical as it is to say so these days, the Bible has a hold on women's "satisfaction" more than Condon and his obtuse Kinsey.
Mr. Condon's film likened "satisfactory" sex to the attack of a lusting gorilla. Sorry, most women find such pounding and posturing to be nasty and brutish.
The eyes are the window to the soul. The Neeson-Kinsey character who (how shall I say this?) goes after his new young bride like a gorilla attacking a hunk of raw meat, unable to see who (or what) he is assailing, is hardly the person to teach anyone about love, romance or "orgasms." Women married to homosexual men uniformly complain, not to put too fine a point on it, that during sex the wives could have been anyone ... or anything.
Do women want the Condon-Kinsey heave-ho bump-and-grind, or – as the Hebrew Bible says in the Song of Solomon – "Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me."
Of course, that means you would have to see your wife. Nothing here for Condon or Kinsey.
As though he were still imbibing lotus leaves, Rich says our "pioneer" is the first to prove "that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity."
Of course, Condon largely lied about the sexual ignorance of the 1940s and Rich is a copycat. However, let us ask the literary critic P. Meehan to describe Kinsey's insanity, since he did it so very brilliantly:
can scarcely be a surprising one, given the nature of his utopian vision. But he was, as well, a voyeur, an exhibitionist, and a sadomasochist, descending at times in his masochistic moods into outright lunacy, thrusting the bristled end of a toothbrush deep into his urethra and pulling with force on a rope tied around his scrotum; on at least one occasion he noosed his scrotum in this way, looped the free end of the rope across an overhead pipe and wrapped it around one of his hands, and then, gripping the rope tightly, stepped off a chair, suspending himself in midair for a period that seems to have gone unrecorded, and which, incredibly, left him in one piece, albeit hospitalized.
This for you, Mr. Rich, is "sanity"?
I am glad that Frank is so distressed that Channel 13 almost censored the ad for Kinsey. I now would like him to get busy finding an American station that will screen the 1998 English, Yorkshire Television documentary, "Secret History: Kinsey's Paedophiles," which has never been shown in the USA. Like Frank said, "This would be funny if it were not so serious – and if it were an anomaly." The entire United Kingdom got to learn the real truth about "Kinsey's Paedophiles" – not the pabulum dished out by Condon.
But no American broadcaster will show "Kinsey's Paedophiles." Open letter to Mr. Rich: I'll send you a copy of "Kinsey's Paedophiles" if you'll review it for the New York Times. Talk about cowards! I dare you to challenge your own bigotry long enough to do that!
You used the public-relations copy on this "intelligent" film to repeat the bunk about Kinsey's "candor" vs. the "ignorance and shame in the national conversation about sex."
But, Frank, we can measure real sexual ignorance. It is measured by the post-Kinsey rates and new kinds of venereal disease – by the rates of abortions, rapes, child sexual abuse, juvenile sexual abuse of children, incest, divorces, "out of wedlock pregnancies" and other identifications of sexual well-being.
By all of these measures, modern sexual conduct has a massively higher ignorance rate than did sex in the 1940s. Every hard measure of sexual ill-health is off the charts now that "nonmarital sex really is a national pastime."
Frank, you used the Kinsey PR that says the film is "straightforward." Sure. How do you know?
Well, it is based on "Kinsey's most recent biographers." No, hagiographers, not biographers. None told the real skinny, not even James Jones. For, yes, Kinsey did solicit, court, cultivate and even in some cases pay men to rape infants and children for his books. Yes, he taught them to rape with stop watches, with "cinema." And your hiding your eyes won't make it go away.
Lastly, Frank, you are ranting about the alleged failure of "abstinence-only sex education," programs that are finally bringing down teenage sexual activity. Why? Do you have a problem with the idea that children avoid sex until they mature, until they even marry someone who will love, honor and cherish them, until death they do part?
What a mean-spirited cynic – ignorance is not bliss.
But, Frank, you may be right about one thing. With leftist libertarians running the mass media and creating a nation of "Desperate Housewives," Kinsey is in little jeopardy.
Dr. Judith A. Reisman is president of the Institute for Media Education and is the author of is a renowned author (Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences) and researcher.