A new film has been released, sub-titled The Waltons do Sex Research. Remember John Walton snr, solid with integrity, working to keep his mill open, often by securing finance from a reluctant and unfeeling banker?
Mama Olivia was wise and radiant, and kept a big family working in harmony. Sensitive elder brother John Boy was beloved by all, and younger Waltons - Jason, Mary-Ellen, Elizabeth, Erin - may have squabbled but they were still dedicated to their parents and each other.
Who could forget dear old Grandma and Grandpa, and Mamie and Emily Baldwin, the neighbouring elderly sisters who innocently made illegal alcohol?
In The Waltons do Sex Research, John snr is replaced by Prok, aka Prof Kinsey, who moves the earth (strictly in the Hemingway sense, you understand) to keep his sex research project viable, and is forced to obtain finance from the reluctant and unfeeling Rockefeller foundation.
Mama Walton is replaced by Mac, Prok's wife. She is allowed to break down in tears once; but mostly, her role is heroic stoicism and support, just like Mama.
John Boy's role is reprised as Clyde Martin, Prok's pet student, who has an angelic, open face and a proclivity for sleeping with first one, and then the other, of his new surrogate parents.
But it is all healthy and wholesome and in the interests of science. Just like Jason and Mary-Ellen getting married, Prok's researchers also marry. New wives are expected to share more than their recipes for pumpkin pie, but it is all done in the best possible taste and for the highest of motives.
When John Boy and Jason fall out over John Boy's wife preferring to be in Jason's bed, they are sternly ordered by Prok to sort it out and get back to work.
He acts just like Daddy Walton, separating boys sparring over, say, who really owns the new baseball glove. Prok gets addicted to barbiturates but the addiction is treated as lightly as the moonshine-still on Walton's mountain was.
The real revelation, though, is Grandma, upgraded from her role of sitting in the rocker on the porch after her stroke to explaining to Prok's gallant band how she now manages to achieve an orgasm in 10.4 seconds, despite having experienced nary an orgasm until she was 40.
Kinsey is a perfect example of film as hagiography. All the well-known problems with his research are glossed over. For example, Kinsey, played by the superb Liam Neeson, explains in exasperation that there were some "minor statistical problems" in the first volume that he published, but that they were sorted out by the second volume.
In reality, Kinsey's research focused on college students, prostitutes and prisoners, and he generalised from these unrepresentative samples to the entire US population.
His close associate, Paul Gebhard, who replaced him as director of the Institute for Sex Research (www.pbs.org/
fmc/interviews/ gebhard.htm) admits to statistical problems. He says that randomised sampling scarcely existed at the time, and that the interviews with lower-class, lesser-educated people do not stand up. The likelihood that Kinsey wildly overestimated certain behaviours, such as masturbation and homosexual experiences, is documented at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kinsey/
peopleevents/e_revisited.html.
Who are most likely to volunteer to give their sexual histories at a time when sex was taboo as a topic? It is not hard to guess that it would have attracted a fair few exhibitionists, not to mention outright liars. Most disturbing of all, Kinsey interviewed a paedophile who had abused more than 600 children.
In the film, Kinsey delivers a small sermon to the paedophile, to the effect that he never intended sexual liberation to encompass people being forced or hurt. Very noble, until you realise that in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, Kinsey records graphic and disturbing data concerning babies as young as five months, gleaned from interviews with paedophiles.
Gebhard claims that they took the data mostly from people who were in jail in California. He neglects to mention that Kinsey's team did not report those paedophiles who were not in prison.
Interestingly, Gebhard also states that he bitterly regrets that the oft-cited "10 per cent of the population is homosexual" figure was ever released into the public domain. What Kinsey's statistics suggest is that some 10 per cent of the population considered themselves to have been predominantly homosexual for three years of their life, mostly immediately post-puberty.
Gebhard says that if you phrased the question the other way and asked what percentage of men considered themselves to be predominantly heterosexual for three years, "you could come up with a 99 per cent figure".
Kinsey's own sexual experimentation is treated with reverence in the film. In a "blink and you'll miss it" clip, we see him participating in a threesome. Kinsey had sex with many of his team and recorded it on film and in photos. Paul Gebhard denies that any pressure was exerted, and that they filmed heterosexual and homosexual behaviour between researchers, their wives and others because "we couldn't ask others to do something which we ourselves were not willing to do".
In the film, the only attitudes to sexuality on offer are exemplified by Kinsey's father and Kinsey himself. Kinsey's father is convinced that the road to perdition began with the invention of the zipper.
Kinsey, as portrayed in the film, is astonishingly naïve, because he thinks you can study sexuality by divorcing it from emotion and morality. The real Kinsey, however flawed his research methods, did help America and the developed world to leave behind a puritanical view of sex which had caused deep and unnecessary misery to many.
However, like many zealous reformers, he lost the plot. He stubbornly refused to acknowledge that it was not just a killjoy spirit that causes human cultures to surround sexuality with constraints. As Mac says at one point in the film, constraints and boundaries exist to help prevent people getting hurt. Sexuality divorced from love and responsibility can be as harmful as prudery and puritanism.
With due respect to Kinsey, sometimes you just don't need to know why Grandma smiles so broadly in the rocking chair.