Dr. Kinsey: A Human Study

This is a documdrama of a pioneer scientist and a human being in the same time. Probably Dr. Kinsey’s own personal experience and his scientific courage impeled him to move from zoology to human sex study. His oringial drive was to help people to understand themselves and solve their problems, in a scientific approach. His faith of the variation of each individul life, from a fish to a person, is inspiring. As he lectured in a class about his insect study, "if every single thing is different from every other living thing, then diversity becomes one irreducible fact of life. only variations are real". We welcome this idea because it finds our value and self-dignity. Everyone is a unique existence, and we are not copies of a same mold. This forms Kinsey's fundmental philosophy of his sex study too, when he had to answer so many 'am I normal' questions. Back to 1930s, sex study is not in the mainstream science and is taught briefly in hygiene class of general medicine, which is tedious of course. Kinsey’s “honest and objective” study attracted young students, but also shook the fundamental morality and public perspective on this usually ignored topic, which shortly became the target of the attacks from conservative groups.

While Kinsey carried on the human study using the same research methodology he applied to study animals, it comes up with controversy and paradox which may puzzle any scientists. As Kinsey argued, to be measurable, except physiology, any other thing tightly attached on sex, such as love, emotion, and consciousness have to be stripped off in study. But how much truth can physiology give us about our behavior, even in some simplication? Where to distinguish human from animal? How much can we be objective in studying our own behavor? It is a fundmental dilemma in science. As one of his young colleague argued that sex is not something, but it is a whole thing. Human beings can’t be simplified as lab rats. The tragedy is science has no ability to study a whole thing. It is only possible to study by dividing the whole thing into small pieces, which can be analysed and measured. In some sense, Kinsey is a fighter but also a victim of science.

In the end, the film returned back to love, when Dr.Kinsey gripped his wife’s hand on the stem of a big tree. Their eyes contacted for a moment, warm and soft, that is the opposite of his science.