Sex Histories and Sermons

As Kinsey instructs his interviewer in the opening scene, the viewer glimpses a piece of Kinsey’s data amassing techniques. Kinsey prefers to use interviews as opposed to surveys when collecting sex histories. Scene one offers an image of the sheet used to catalog the responses.



As the interviewer explains, “this piece of paper has been divided up into squares. Your sex history will fit on this single page in a cryptic code.” Kinsey reminds him, “Don’t forget to mention that there’s no written key to the code. The interview subject will only be candid if he knows he’s speaking in the strictest confidence.” Within this dialog rests a commitment to keeping the secret of sex. As Foucault suggested, modern societies “dedicated themselves to speaking of it [sex] ad infinitum, while exploiting is as the secret” (History 35). Within this method Kinsey brings Foucault’s statement alive. By using an interview instead of a survey Kinsey purposely directs subjects to speak about sex honestly and comprehensively. Simultaneously he plays into society’s image of sex as a secret. The cryptic code makes the subject feel secure and more able to freely discuss his sex history. Therein the filmmakers support Foucault’s observation of power working through sexual discourse. Kinsey’s father further depicts the manifestations of power associated with sexual discourse.

Kinsey’s relationship with his father is also evident throughout the film. His father appears as a superb example of one caught up in the repressive hypothesis and also offers a variant on the typical confession. Soon after the film begins, an interviewer inquires about Kinsey’s relationship with his father. A scene depicting a young Kinsey listening to one of his father’s sermons follows. The topic, as fate would have it, was sexuality. The preacher manages to find sex in nearly every aspect of life.



Lust has a thousand avenues. The dance hall, the ice cream parlor, the tenement saloon, the Turkish bath. Like the Hydra, it grows new heads everywhere. Even the modern inventions of science are used to cultivate immorality. The gas engine has brought us the automobile joyride and an even more pernicious menace: the roadside brothel. Electricity has made possible the degrading picture show. Because of the telephone, a young woman can hear the voice of her suitor on the pillow right next to her. And let’s not forget the most scandalous invention of them all: the talon slide fastener, otherwise known as the zipper – which provides every man and boy speedy access to moral oblivion.

Clearly Kinsey the elder portrays that part of Foucault’s theory that sees sexuality as immanent in all things. One of Foucault’s concerns with power as manifested in sexuality is that it locates itself in a number of dispersed places that seem to offer truth and identity. For example, Foucault writes of homosexuals that “Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principles; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret which gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him” (History 43). The preacher shifts this immanence from the level of the individual to the level of society as a whole. The modern inventions of science are seen as symptomatic of an underlying sexual sickness. But even though the preacher sees this immanence as problematic, though not as a manifestation of power, he nevertheless personifies the repressive hypothesis. His viewing of sexuality as dispersed, however far fetched, is on some level consistent with Foucault’s ideas. Nevertheless his desire to eliminate all but the most essential sexual actions betrays his commitment to repression. His persona therefore shows one caught in the repressive hypothesis; by finding sexuality everywhere power manifests itself through his will to knowledge but through his insistence on the privatization of sex he himself continues to keep sex a secret.