Alfred C. Kinsey was a moral degenerate. The more you know about him the less you can excuse his behavior or the people who elevated him to the heights of academic and cultural life.

Kinsey was the author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports. It is impossible to overstate the impact Kinsey’s work on modern culture, and equally impossible to overstate how malign that influence has been.

So it is of course unsurprising that Kinsey is being honored with a statue celebrating his achievements. Because these days the academic and cultural elite celebrate little but the worst our culture has to offer.

The statue has been erected at Indiana University in Bloomington, where Kinsey established The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. 

Here is how Indiana University proudly describes Kinsey’s work:

Kinsey revolutionized the scientific study of sexual behavior and provoked an international conversation about sexuality. He founded The Kinsey Institute, the world’s leading sexuality research institute, in 1947.

Sounds benign, doesn’t it? We don’t want to be prudes about sex, do we? And we certainly don’t want to hinder the progress of science, regardless of how uncomfortable we may feel about the topic. I personally wouldn’t want to autopsy a corpse because the idea creeps me out, but I am quite glad that my doctor was educated in anatomy and even practiced on corpses during her training.

All well and good, but this “history” of Kinsey glosses over just how creepy the guy was, and how immoral his research methods were. He was a sick sick man, and celebrating his work is not as evil as embracing Mengele, but it is Mengele adjacent.

Kinsey didn’t just study sexual behavior. He didn’t just “participate” personally in his “research,” (have sex with his subjects and then report on it), he recruited pedophiles to report on their own sexual conquests to get data on the sexual responses of children. He reported in his seminal work Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that he had recorded orgasms in 300 children aged from from two months up to fifteen years. He later claimed that the data came from recollections of adult subjects, not personal observation. That seems unlikely given that in Chapter 5 of his book on male sexuality he said:

“Better data on pre-adolescent climax come from the histories of adult males who have had sexual contacts with younger boys and who, with their adult backgrounds, are able to recognize and interpret the boys’ experiences.” Kinsey then goes on to say that “9 of our adult male subjects have observed such [pre-adolescent] orgasm. Some of these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which have been put at our disposal; and from them we have secured information on 317 pre-adolescents who were either observed in self masturbation, or who were observed in contacts with other boys or older adults.”

He also claimed to have witnessed and timed child sexual behavior, and/or to have gathered data from people who recollected their own orgasms as babies or young children. Color me skeptical on that.

Now I am in no position to judge his contention that two month old babies have orgasms–or that an adult could remember such an event so many years later–so I leave that to your imagination and common sense to parse out. Either he was a freak or a fraud, in any case.

The Kinsey Institute itself called into question some of his work on child sexuality, noting that he based some of his research on the diary of a single pedophile’s journal. If his multiple pedophiles were in fact just a single person,  he was a fraud as well as a freak.

Despite all the evidence that Kinsey’s work is so questionable, Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute said:

“Dr. Kinsey left us with the extraordinary legacy of his endless scientific curiosity, his unwavering commitments to academic freedom and his passion for understanding humanity’s sexual diversity,” said Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute. “This spectacular sculpture honors Kinsey’s international scholarly and public impact, reminding us of the importance of the ongoing research, education and historical preservation occurring daily at today’s vibrant Kinsey Institute.”

IU President Pamela Whitten gushed:

Around the nation and around the world, the Kinsey Institute is the trusted source for information on critical issues in human sexuality, relationships, gender and reproduction. And its reputation for excellent, relevant scholarship bolsters Indiana University’s reputation.

Bolster IU’s reputation? I am sure it does with the “right” people.

I don’t claim to be an expert on Kinsey, and frankly even reading about him gives me the willies. But the fact is that Kinsey’s work has had a profound and malign influence on our culture, perverting our discussions about healthy sexuality and distorting our view of how adults and children can and should behave.

Kinsey’s mantra was that “the only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.” Today we live in Kinsey’s world, where everything is permitted and even embraced.

In a world dominated by common sense no university would be erecting a statue to such a man. At minimum they should be condemning him for using either questionable research tactics or committing outright fraud. In a sane world they would burn down the Institute and start over so they could do real science, not bizarre advocacy.

But we don’t live in a normal world. We live in one where state-subsidized institutions celebrate men and women like Alfred Kinsey.

NOTE: The photograph for this article was changed to reflect the criticism of commentators.