Studying sex

Before the Christian Right gets all discussion of s-e-x not approved by Focus on the Family banned from print media and TV, it's worth remembering how far much of the world has come in the last century or so, thanks in no small part to medicial and sociological research on human sexuality.

See, for instance, The Kinsey effect Los Angeles Times 11/15/04.

Kinsey's work did more than reassure people they were not alone: It highlighted a disconnect between certain laws of the land and actual sexual practice. "Everybody's sin is nobody's sin," Kinsey once said.

Perhaps above all, researchers say Kinsey's work and the later studies it inspired showed social scientists, public health workers, therapists and geneticists just how much there was and still remains for them to study.

"His No. 1 contribution was simply recognizing that sexual behavior is diverse and that people do very different things … that there was a marvelous and very substantial diversity of sexual behavior in all segments of the population," says Dean Hamer, author and molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, who has studied sexuality and genetics.

This reminds me of one the best books ever written on fundamentalist Christianity, the novel Elmer Gantry (1927) by Sinclair Lewis.  Gantry was a Bible-thumping Methodist minister who had some personal experience of the weakness of the flesh.  When he was transferred from a small city church to a parish in the big city of Zenith, Ohio, he applied some marketing savvy to attracting parishoners to his first Sunday sermon, advertising in the city's newspapers on Saturday his topic, "Can Stranger Find Haunts of Vice in Zenith?"  As Lewis tells the story:

They could, and with gratifying ease, said Elmer in his sermon.  He said it before at least four hundred peole, as against the hundred who had normally been attending.

He himself was a stranger in Zenith, and he had gone forth and he had been "appalled - aghast - bowed in shocked horror" at the amount of vice, and such interesting and attractive vice.  He had investigated Braun's Island, a rackety beach and dance-floorand restaurant at South Zenith, and he had found mixed bathing.

I suppose I should interrrupt the quotation to mention that "mixed bathing" means men and women swimming at the same location at the same time.  Yes, with bathing suits on. This was considered a sin by the more devout.

He described the ladies' legs; he described the two amiable young women who had picked him up.  He told of the waiter who, though he denied that Braun's Restaurant itself sold liquor, had been willing to let him know where to get it, and where to find an all-night game of poker - "and, mind you, playing poker for keeps, you understand," Elmer explained.

On Washington Avenue, North, he had found two movies in which "the dreadful painted purveyors of putrescent vice" - he meant the movie actors - had on the screen danced "suggestive steps which would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of any decent woman," and in which the same purveyors had taken drinks which he assumed to be the deadly cocktails.  On his way to his hotel after these movies three ladies of the night had accosted him, right under the White Way of lights.  Street-corner loafers - he had apparently been very chummy with them - had told him of blind pigs, of dope-peddlers, of strang lecheries.

Elmer's  investigation was a somewhat less systematic study of the topic than that conducted by Kinsey.  But the story reminds us that sex sells, in the 1920s just like today.  And there's still a market for those who want to call down fire and brimstone on all forms of it not officially sanctioned by their particular church.

I wonder about the business with "blind pigs," though.  Maybe I should e-mail Rick Santorum's office and ask them.