Gentlemen's Disagreement by Peter Hegarty

Author:Peter Hegarty [Hegarty, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Gay Studies, Sociology, Science, Psychology, Human Sexuality
ISBN: 9780226024448
Google: C-CRyUYO7mcC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-07-02T04:10:23+00:00

6

Ancient Ascetics and Modern Non-Americans

As long as Christians saw themselves in some way the extension and fulfillment of Jews, they needed Jews in their conceptual framework.

Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (1993, 9)

In this chapter, I will discuss the last of the four criticisms that Terman leveled against Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a criticism which centered on the sense that Kinsey made of differences between secular and religious men. Much Kinsey scholarship—including this book—has implicitly located Kinsey as a forerunner to new left movements such as second wave feminism, the lesbian/gay rights movement, and other transformations of the “sexual revolution.” Terman’s critiques show differences from Kinsey with regard to the moral/intellectual value attached to the precocious emergence of male sexual behavior and its orientation toward the pleasure of the self, or of other women and other men. Their debate could suggest that Kinsey was more “inclusive” and Terman more “exclusionary”; that Kinsey was more “liberal” and Terman more “conservative”; or even that Kinsey was more “modern” and Terman more “traditional.” For example, Paul Robinson (1977, 50) has identified the fundamental tenet of Kinsey’s sexual ideology as tolerance. However, tolerance found its exception in Kinsey’s failure to appreciate the importance of religion, and Kinsey’s thoughts on religion in general, and on Jewish men’s sexual character in particular, trouble this characterization of him as “tolerant.” Rather, Kinsey’s particular form of a “nonjudgmental” attitude to sex led him to conclusions that “othered” Jewish men repeatedly. If we are not to locate Kinsey and Terman on a liberal-conservative axis, how then can we characterize the differences between these two “gentlemen”?

Historian of psychology Graham Richards (2010, 10) has recently argued that claims about “secularization” in modern societies represent a desire on the part of the secular human sciences rather than a firm empirical conclusion derived from the evidence of those sciences. Richards (2010, 3) bemoaned particularly how Foucaultian critiques of psychology have failed to attend to the normativity of Christianity—even as “Foucaultian discourse analysis” has come to name the analysis of dynamics of seemingly structural forms of power other than religion in psychological discourse, such as patriarchy, racism, and neo-liberalism, for example. A Foucaultian perspective would, of course, caution against the claims that Kinsey’s work led to a liberation from repressive power. Foucault rejected narratives of progress based on the politics of liberation and ontologies of the nature of human sexuality. For Foucault, there has been no “historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical analysis of repression” (1978, 10), presumably even in Kinsey’s work. I share Foucault’s very skeptical orientation to discourses about sexual nature, and will give reasons to be more skeptical of Kinsey’s account of sexual variation in this chapter. However, there are also reasons to consider Kinsey and Foucault’s accounts of the history of sexuality as similarly invested in narratives of historical rupture that shape all resulting discourses in the “Western” scientia sexualis. In contrast, Richards urged caution about assuming that such transition points between religious and secular authority are ever clean breaks.

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