The Ways of the Worldviews (Part 63): Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey–Sex is on the Menu

In this post, I focus on two people from the first half of the 20th century who have had a rather profound effect on modern attitudes toward sex, although you might not realize it: Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey.

Margaret Mead: Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

As the 1920’s moved along, the hits just kept on coming: one year after Freud came out with Future of an Illusion, Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa—a work of utter fiction and deception, written by a woman who simply was looking for an excuse to revel in promiscuity.

Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire were on a secular crusade against the supposed evils of Christianity—and by “evils,” of course, we mean Christian morality. Instead of claiming to get our morality from God, mediated through the Church, Enlightenment thinkers looked to nature: i.e. “natural religion.” What this eventually led to, of course, was the idea that the ideal state of mankind was to be found in the more primitive societies—the “noble savage,” if you will.

Margaret Mead shared in this mindset. She not only felt that Christian morality had to go, she also held to the notion that the ideal state of mankind was to be found among the more primitive societies of the “noble savage”—specifically, Samoa. In Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead made a wide range of claims about the sexual practices of these “noble savages,” and concluded that societies that were not burdened with Christian morality were more sexually carefree, experimental, and happy.

As it turned out, Mead made up her entire story. And why? The answer is simple: she wasn’t really trying to explain what teenagers who were “coming of age” in Samoa were really like; she was pushing a specific agenda. She took the so-called Enlightenment’s already fictional story about how “the more primitive and more ‘natural,’ the better society will be,” and she pawned it off as supposed actual historical fact. The only problem was that it wasn’t actual, historical, or factual at all. It was a con-job with a two-fold purpose: (1) delegitimize Christian morals, and (2) promote free love and promiscuity.

Mead’s Claims About Samoan Society: No Emotional Attachments, Lots of Free, Experimental Sex
So what did Mead claim Samoan society was like? First, she claimed that there was very little parent-child conflict because parents had no real emotional bond with their children to begin with. Parents were largely indifferent to their children, and thus the children were more or less raised by the village. This, for Mead, was a good thing. Tightly-knit, nuclear families, Mead claimed, was a Western (and thus Christian) invention that led to a tremendous amount of anxiety. But in more primitive cultures, Mead argued, there was no real close family connections, and therefore there was less anxiety in life, and more of a “happy-go-lucky” attitude among people.

Second, and closely connected with the first claim, was that Mead claimed there was no real notion of romantic love between men and women in Samoa. Instead, the Samoans were poster-children for Rousseau’s idealized native utopian lovers…or more properly speaking, sex-partners. For you see, “lovers” would obviously not be a correct term, for “love” (both for Rousseau and for Mead) was the problem. “Love” demanded monogamy and fidelity; “love” discouraged sexual liberation; therefore “love” made one unhappy and sexually frustrated. And unrestrained sex, for both Rousseau and Mead, was really the key to happiness and fulfillment. And no, I’m not being sarcastic—this is what Mead really thought.

Thirdly, Mead portrayed the Samoans as being sexually carefree, with no taboos or hang-ups to bother with. Girls freely slept around with both other boys and girls; teenagers and pre-teens regularly engaged in masturbation and homosexual experimentation with absolutely no guilt or shame. Yes indeed, the Samoans, Mead claimed, paid no heed to whether sexual encounters were of heterosexual or homosexual nature—for all sex was just fun and enjoyable. The only Samoans who had a problem with such sexual libertinism were those who had been influenced by, you guessed it, Christian missionaries. It was (no surprise) the Christian influence on the West that made sex shameful and sinful.

Mead’s conclusions were predictable: the Christian West was a sexually-repressed, unhappy society that needed to “get back to nature,” throw all sexual mores out the window, and just start having lots and lots of sex—it does a body (and mind) good. Monogamy, romantic love, and martial fidelity leads to unhappy marriages, guilt-ridden people, and just societal misery.

Mead on “The Problem”: Christian Homes and Loving Parents
But then, what is preventing the West from getting back to this idyllic state of nature? Mead clearly saw the “problem”: Christian homes and loving parents who teach their children morals regarding sexual behavior. Mead called for children to be taught (in school, quite obviously) to have an open mind regarding sexual behavior. “Tolerance” for any sexual practice must be encouraged. After all, there really is no “right” or “wrong”—it is just all a matter of preference. That is why tolerance must be the chief virtue in society.

As it turned out, though, Mead had entirely made her story up. As Benjamin Wiker states, the Samoans were actually “…far more concerned with chastity, and hence far less sexually promiscuous, than Westerners of the time” (190). The utter scandal of writing such a dishonest book didn’t derail Mead’s popularity. Who can take the time to worry about actual facts and truthfulness when there’s a radical, left-wing ideology to push? That’s obviously not to say everyone on the “political left” in America today endorse this sort of thing. But it should be quite obvious to anyone that the real, underlying motivation for much of the philosophy of people like Rousseau, Voltaire, Sanger, and Mead wasn’t a search for truth; it was an excuse to indulge in unrestrained sex. Read their stuff, they actually say that very thing.

As for Mead, you have to hand it to her: despite the utter fictitious story of her time in Samoa, she was determined to make it non-fiction in her personal life. Although she was married when she first went to Samoa, she left her first husband for a man she met on the way back home in 1928. She eventually left her second husband in 1935, got married again to a third husband in 1936, who eventually left her in 1950. During this whole time she carried on a lesbian affair with her lover, Ruth Benedict. Wiker tells us that Mead said, “quite frankly, ‘rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature.’ In her ideal society…people would be homosexual when young, then switch to some heterosexuality during the breeding years, then switch back again” (190).

Alfred Kinsey: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male  (1948)

Another highly-influential, and utterly horrific, book was Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948. But to anyone who can think clearly, it is obvious that Kinsey had an agenda, an ideology if you will, that he was trying to push. But in order to gain credibility, Kinsey had to sell his ideology under the guise of “objective science.” The tragedy of Kinsey’s work is, as pseudo-scientific as it was, it ended up, as Benjamin Wiker writes, becoming “foundational for the sexual revolution, used both in courts and classrooms to push a limitless sexual revolution that began in the 1960s and through which we are still living” (Ten Books That Screwed Up the World, 208).

Despite what some might claim, Kinsey’s presuppositional worldview was not Darwinism—it was social Darwinism. Kinsey’s presupposition was that human beings are in no way different than any other biological animal. And since we do not project the concept of “morals” on the animal kingdom, Kinsey felt that neither should we apply that concept to human behavior. Therefore, for Kinsey, any sexual behavior that human beings engage in was not either moral or immoral—it just was nature taking its course. That opinion—that there is no such thing as “morality” and that human beings are nothing more than evolved animals with natural urges—Kinsey presented in his book as “objective science.” It was a dishonest propaganda piece from beginning to end.

Despite his claims of objectivity, Kinsey wanted to convince people that any sexual urge and any way people chose to satisfy that urge was completely natural and good, and that was the way to fulfillment and happiness. Simply put, Kinsey was pushing for a “the more natural and primitive, the better” of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Margaret Mead.

Bestiality, Homosexuality, Pedophilia…Kinsey Was All For It
So what sort of things did Kinsey claim, and what things did he condone? For one, Kinsey said that since cross-species bestiality was common in the animal world, that human beings were wrong to condemn it. Since most human beings had not tried bestiality, Kinsey said we have no right to judge whether it is good or bad. Kinsey then made an outstanding and unsubstantiated claim: he claimed that 17% of boys raised on the farm had sex with animals before they even reached adolescence. How did he know this? He didn’t—he made it up because he was trying to convince the public that sex with animals was a natural thing that shouldn’t be condemned.

In addition to bestiality, Kinsey also promoted homosexual sex activity. After all, any kind of sexual gratification was natural, and therefore “good,” so homosexual sexual activity should be embraced and celebrated. Kinsey actually claimed that 33% of the men he interviewed had engaged in homosexual activity, or at least had had a “homosexual experience.”

Well, that might have been true: in fact, it was very probable that 33% of the men he interviewed had had homosexual experiences—why? Because the large majority of men Kinsey interviewed were street prostitutes and/or sex offenders. News flash: if the majority of people you interview are either prostitutes or convicted sex offenders, chances are you’re going to find a lot of them have engaged in illicit sexual activity. That doesn’t mean, of course, that a large percentage of the larger population whose job is not having sex for money will have the same experiences.

In addition to bestiality and homosexual activity, Kinsey also had something to say about pedophilia. Well, Kinsey didn’t call it pedophilia; he called it “pre-adolescent sexuality” (it sounds more “objective” and “scientific” that way). Kinsey interviewed child molesters, not to understand how people could engage in such deviant sexual behavior, but rather to “understand” just a variant and thoroughly natural way of achieving sexual gratification. No, Kinsey didn’t condemn pedophilia, he essentially approved of it—all under the guise of scientific objectivity.

Furthermore, Kinsey wrote about how babies and young toddlers were able to achieve multiple orgasms. As Wiker writes, Kinsey even claimed that “nearly a third of the 182 boys ‘studied’ was able to have five or more sexual climaxes in rapid succession. Kinsey then conjectures wistfully that, if such unnatural moral restrictions against pedophilia were dropped, the rapid orgasm rates of pre-adolescents could be boosted to over fifty percent!” (207).

Wiker points out that Kinsey, far from being an objective scientist, was an active participant in the many sexual escapades he studied:

“Without going into too much detail, it is important to know that Kinsey was a devoted homosexual sado-masochist who masturbated while ramming large objects (like toothbrushes, bristle-end first) into his urethra and simultaneously strangling his testicles with a rope. He had sex with all his male colleagues quite frequently, and they traded wives as well.  He also regularly commandeered his own wife, Clara, for all manner of deviance for the cameras at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. …Kinsey was a sexually twisted man” (205).

To Conclude
If any of this is disturbing to you, it should be. It should be even more disturbing that Kinsey’s work was hailed and lauded throughout society. Just like Margaret Mead essentially lied in her book, Alfred Kinsey also wrote his pseudo-scientific canard in an attempt to justify his own sexually-deviant behavior. Apparently, if you want to justify such behavior, just claim you’re being scientific. And indeed, that is precisely what the likes of Sanger, Mead, and Kinsey did during the first part of the 20^th century. They held to a presuppositional worldview that believed human beings were nothing more than animals, and therefore there was no such thing as “right and wrong,” especially in the realm of sexual activity. Therefore, they argued, anything goes, because it’s all “natural.”

Knowing exactly what sort of things people like Kinsey, Mead, and Sanger claimed and advocated in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s will help us understand the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s didn’t just happen—it was a direct consequence of the indoctrination and propaganda of the first part of the 20^th century. The kids of the 1960s were simply acting out what society had been embracing for the previous four decades.

Now, it is true, there were the fifties. We need to realize that immediately after WWII and the threat of Communism, there was a resurgence of not just American patriotism, but a concerted attempt to show how America was different than the USSR. It was at this time that “In God We Trust” was put on our money and that “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance. It was attempt to say, “Those Communists are godless, we’re a Christian nation!” But it was a thin veneer, to say the least. It was only a matter of time that such thin cover would wear away, and the real driving worldviews in America would come bursting forth once again.

In any case, what struck me as I read about the likes of Sanger, Mead, Freud and Kinsey was how consistent they all were in what they advocated: (A) there is no God, (B) Christian morality was repressive, (C) the primacy of science should provide the moral landscape, and (D) sexual libertinism is good and natural in all forms.

If you realize this is what these influential people were saying in the first half of the 20^th century, you’ll be able to better understand how those very points of view have come to dominate American society today.