Kinsey’s Insight

November 2007

All 50 states now have sex-offender registries (SORs), agencies with multi-million dollar budgets mandated to track every move of “sexually dangerous persons” and “sexual predators.” Though created only in the last few years, SORs have been retroactively registering those convicted of sex crimes decades earlier, people who had served their time and thought they were now free. And the U.S. Supreme has okayed SOR legislation permitting lifetime incarceration of people who aren’t serving time for any conviction, but who are deemed to have a “personality abnormality” that makes them likely to become a “sex offender.”

Who are these sexual monsters who have incited courts to void constitutional protections against ex post facto laws and violations of habeas corpus? The rhetoric of politicians and SOR crusaders makes clear that these laws are aimed at those who violate “innocent” children. Indeed, any sexual contact — consensual or not — by anyone of a person under an arbitrarily determined age (which varies from state to state) is automatically defined as a registerable offense.

Astonishingly, then, a majority of men in the United States are now deemed sex offenders! Alfred Kinsey established in his 1948 work Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that 57 percent of American men have engaged in pre-adolescent genital sex play (with the average duration of such activity being 3.7 years).

And while rational people might think it absurd to label such normative sex play as criminal, today’s hysteria about childhood sexuality has created the legal notion of the “child perpetrator,” and kids in many states have actually been prosecuted for raping each other. Those who were once “playing doctor” are now branded felons deserving lifelong monitoring.

Writing in 1948, Kinsey noted that up until Victorian times the sexuality of children and adolescents was widely understood and accepted. Literature through the centuries reflected the natural reality that sexuality wasn’t switched on only at adulthood; indeed, until recently, the enormous sexual capacity of young adolescent males was legendary. To this impressionistic literature Kinsey added scientific confirmation: kids are sexual from birth, and most males are very sexually active by their early teens.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, though, such sexuality became increasingly suppressed (especially in England and America) with an anti-sex moral crusade that coincided with delayed marriage. Kinsey noted the toll taken on youth denied access to the sexual outlets that nature intended. And in the half-century since Kinsey penned his concerns, the suppression of adolescent sexuality has continued and intensified. (Indeed, in a classic attempt to kill the messenger, many of today’s anti-sex crusaders assail Kinsey’s painstaking research as the self-interested work of a child molester.)

But today’s denial of all adolescent sexuality is akin to legislating that the sun goes around the earth; all the laws in the world can’t make a lie the truth. Childhood sexuality is a fact; pretending that its existence must signal some unnatural criminal corruption of innocence is a lie that does enormous harm to the very young people that such pretense ostensibly “protects.”

Gay people have a special interest in stopping today’s insane laws regulating adolescent sexuality, not only because homophobia exacts a particularly harsh penalty on kids exploring their homosexuality, but also because with a slight change in the law we all could easily revert to being the outlawed sodomites we were when Kinsey was writing. We, the sexual-offender majority, must demand that the law focus on legitimate concerns about violence and stop scapegoating sex.

Pasted from <http://www.guidemag.com/content/index.cfm?ID=350>