Book News and Reviews of Titles about the Male Body
Hearty
Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History
Alex Potts
This is the first intellectual biography in English of Johann Joachim
Winckelmann (1717-1768), one of the most famous eighteenth-century
German philosophers and aestheticians who is considered by many to be
the father of modern art history. Analyzing Winckelmann's magnum
opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, Potts explains the fundamental
importance to art history of this eloquent account of the aesthetic and
imaginative Greek ideal in art.
"Flesh and the Ideal gives us a new look at one of the more complex
protagonists of the Enlightenment. . . . [Potts] deserves our thanks
for bringing Winckelmann back to the centre of current art-historical
thinking."--Bruce Boucher, The Times, (London)
"Potts monograph has been long awaited and keenly anticipated. . . . It
bears all the hallmarks of its author's empathic respect for his
subject's achievement, and it will surely be the major critical
discussion of Winckelmann in English for at least a
generation."--JAS' ELSNER , The Cambridge Review
"This book remains an outstanding study of a great and complex mind,
exploring fundamental issues of the interlocking of mind, emotions and
sexual preferences."--John Wilton-Ely, RA Magazine
"Among the many insights: the discovery of contradictions within
Winckelmann's ideas especially as they relate to issues of political
and personal freedom and the sensual and even erotic appeal of the male
nude, issues which he characterizes as 'central and explicit' in
Winckelmann's writings. The ideas treated in this book are sometimes
complex and it demands careful reading, but this is a significant
contribution to the understanding of one of the most important figures
in art history. This book will especially appeal to those with advanced
art historical interests."--Sally Schultz, Religious Studies Review
"This study of Winckelmann's magisterial contribution to the history
of art and his place as a founder of the modern discipline is the
result of a process of long distillation and careful thought. . . . A
fascinating and stimulating re-reading of Winckelmann."--Alison
Yarrington, Art History
"A fascinating case study of homosexual experience and identity
negotiated within the profoundly homosocial cultures on which
Winckelmann depended."--Christopher Reed, Journal of the History of
Sexuality
"Dr. Potts has written a most illuminating study of an important but
difficult writer and his book is to be thoroughly recommended."--David
Mannings, British Journal of Aesthetics
"The best monograph on [Winckelmann] in any language."--David
Watkin, Times Literary Supplement
Hearty
The will to look
by Ronald Gregg
from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp.
Review of Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Rim
>From Their Beginnings to Stonewall, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996.
Thomas Waugh's extraordinary Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in
Photography and Film From Their Beginnings to Stonewall provides an
important addition to both gay history and cultural studies. Waugh
astounds the reader with the weight and diversity of his photographic
evidence, his theoretical explications of these photographic texts, and
the history he provides about gay men's production, distribution, and
consumption of these pre-Stonewall photographs, mostly in periods of
stigmatization and policing of gay erotica and sex. Through his complex
methodology, which brings together both historical contextualization
and theoretical analyses of photographic evidence, Waugh demonstrates
the importance of gay erotica in the development of a collective gay
imaginary and its influence on gay political activism in the 20th
century.
The book's photographs, which densely populate the book, provide an
exciting and pleasurable history of the iconography of gay desires and
evidence of sexual acts by gay men. Such histories were once thought to
have been erased by police, families, politicians, and other homophobic
persons and institutions intent on destroying and suppressing the
photographic evidence of gay men's desire.
This book itself stands as a political reaction to conservative
pressures to closet the images it historicizes, and it argues for the
legitimacy of the author's and others' scholarship and desire. Waugh
has insisted on printing sexually explicit examples of what he is
analyzing, despite considerable resistance. "What shocked me in my
innocence with regard to the present project," he writes, "is how much
publishers, marketers, lawyers, and even archivists and technicians are
part of the apparatus of censorship." Waugh found that he couldn't use
certain photos either because archives withheld publication permission,
his publisher's lawyers recommended that he not publish them, or legal
restraints forced him to set aside erotic pictures containing subjects
under the age of eighteen. Also, because of his publisher's concern
with the privacy rights of some photographed subjects, Waugh was forced
to use computer camouflage to distort the faces. But Waugh has
persisted and has put together a remarkable visual record of gay men's
desire. Waugh was correct to insist on including the images. Through
visual evidence he shows the "slow emergence of a concealed and
repressed love, of its acknowledgment and declaration, of its
individual and collective fulfillment, and of its sharing" in the
pre-Stonewall gay world (5).
It is important to note that while the photographs elicit the
excitement of re-discovering a hidden past, this is not just another
picture book. Through amazing long-term persistence and detective work
which took him through many archives and personal collections, Waugh
documents the circumstances under which these photographs were
produced, individual photographers' backgrounds, photographic and
filmic practices, aesthetic and iconographic influences upon producers,
and legal and medical photographic documentation of "deviant"
homosexual practices. Waugh, in sum, finds and reveals for us a history
of erotica once thought lost, and in so doing, he elucidates the
sources of, influences on, and pressures upon past and more
contemporary gay men's erotica
Hard to Imagine expands on recent work by gay social and cultural
historians by illustrating how important gay erotica has been to the
gay world and its evolving activism under legal, moral, and political
systems which sought to repress it. Pointing to homosexual eroticism's
absence in many gay social histories, Waugh calls for reincorporating
the erotic into gay history because, as he argues, it has been "a
driving force in the gay imaginary" (6). Even under the threat of being
arrested, losing a job, and/or being ostracized by family, gay men have
continued to photograph the objects of their desire and their sexual
practices. Gay erotica has contributed much to gay men's evolving
identity, community and open activism.
Waugh casts a wide net in his search for gay male erotica. He defines
the "erotic" broadly as those images that elicit sexual arousal and/or
depict sexual behavior. Thus Waugh insists on depicting not only the
homoerotic, but also the pornographic, and he also deals with
photographs used by police and medical and psychological professionals
in their work of repression and stigmatization. Waugh describes four
socio-cultural "regimes" of the gay erotic:
"Art" includes representations by producers/artists marked as high
culture by their technical and aesthetic skills and location in the art
market.
"Physique culture" is marked by its kitschy, campy, low cultural
pretensions and athleticism and bold commercialism.
"The illicit" is defined by its illegality and thus underground
production and distribution networks.
The "instrumental" includes those images used by scientific, legal, and
political communities to describe, define, pin down what it is that gay
men do.
For each of these regimes, Waugh analyzes what we see in the photograph
or film still and discusses the historical context for that image. He
notes the analytical dynamics which appear in both the presentational
image, which shows the single model displaying himself to be looked at,
and in the narrative image, which suggests an interaction or story.
Waugh provocatively analyzes the complex dynamics of voyeurism and
exhibitionism, identification and desire, and active and passive sexual
practice. These dynamics help us analyze the production and consumption
of these images from various perspectives, such as how the producer
responds to and positions the model, how the model understands the
situation and acts and positions himself, and how the viewer reads the
presentation or narrative and attitude of the model.
Style and setting may evoke other tensions in a viewer's reading.
First, there are raunchy, in-your-face images vs. more subdued, elegant
ones, evoking classical artistic influences. Second, the erotic may be
displayed or produced in either public or private settings. Power
differentials also often create unequal relations between producer and
model or between viewer and model. Finally, differences such as gender
identification or performance, age, class, and race necessarily elicit
different readings or different kinds of production of the gay erotic.
Waugh shows how the production and consumption of erotica intersect
with a gay subject historically situated in a particular social,
artistic, cultural, legal, political and technological world. By using
a combination of historical and textual analysis, Waugh can compare how
models act in different regimes and historical periods. For instance,
during periods of extreme censorship, art and physical culture
producers placed models in poses that sought to copy classical statuary
and paintings in order to often camouflage explicit queer readings.
Without censorship, these strategies lose their necessity. In fact, the
regime of physical culture becomes almost obsolete when gay magazines
and films can legally depict the pornographic. In the illicit regime,
even in periods of public censorship of the gay erotic, models approach
the camera differently: some perform sexual acts aggressively for the
camera while other models shyly, embarrassingly display themselves. The
experience of state repression and gay community thus influence what
images are easily available, how producers and models construct the
image, how the consumer responds, and how we should interpret these
photos as historical texts.
Waugh demonstrates that our understanding should be complicated by
other factors as well. Given the police and family surveillance of gay
desire and sexual practices in most pre-Stonewall periods and locations
in North America and Europe, many gay men left their homelands to visit
foreign countries, especially Mediterranean ones, which seemed more
welcoming of gay sexual practices. Baron Von (Gloeden's
turn-of-the-century photos of Sicilian youth exploited the
photographed subject and liberated the "unlawful" desire of the gay
consumer. While white artists dominated art and physical culture and
often exploited men of color, new technologies such as the Polaroid
camera enabled gay men of color and young men to make their own erotic
images.
Both Waugh's photographs and text suggest important shifts in gay male
desire and identifications over the course of the century. For
instance, Waugh maps the iconographic shift in gay erotica from
idealized primitive, pre-modern settings and boys of color to white,
muscle men; from the "normal" sized, non-tumescent penis to the
fetishized organ of immense dimensions. These shifts suggest intriguing
changes in both the power of repressive authorities and the objects of
gay men's desires and identifications. On the other hand, photographic
evidence also suggests certain similarities in the iconography of gay
erotica for the past 100 years. For example, a 1900 Von Gloeden photo
of a boy on the beach resembles the 1930s young man on the beach in
Otis Wade's illicit films, who looks like sexual performers in recent
pornography from Eastern Europe, even down to the idyllic natural
settings.
While these latter continuities in body and setting and the strategies
that gay men have undertaken to disguise their images can easily lead
to essentializing much of this history and the cultural study of these
images, Waugh draws our attention to important changes in the social,
political, economic, and technological factors surrounding these
images' production. He describes shifts in the intensity and
effectiveness of repression and the growing openness in photographers'
depiction of the male nude and gay sex. He also points out how a
changing technology has helped gay men subvert policing authorities,
particularly at the point of processing. Gay men have used the multiple
printing of photos, magazine publishing, 16mm film, self-developing
Polaroid, hand held cameras, super-8 film and now video to subvert
legal and moral restrictions
The images in this book raise many fascinating questions, some of which
Waugh addresses and many of which remain unanswerable. Do the photos in
Waugh's book and elsewhere try to represent a high ideal of male-male
love or do they represent the everyday sexual desires and practices of
the producers and models? Are these photos exploitative; was there an
exchange of money between model and producer? What is the power
relationship between photographer and subject? Does the subject know
that his image will be used for sexual stimulation? How are the
subjects posed in the image: are they looking back at us and openly
exhibiting themselves, are they uncomfortable or shyly looking away, or
are they narcissistically looking at themselves? How do genre and pose
position the consumer of these images: to identify with the model or to
possess him? Are the photos merely displaying the body for desire,
admiration, or identification, or is there a narrative that draws the
viewer into the performance? How do the categories of race, ethnicity,
age, nation, class, and gender play into this quotient of eroticization
and exploitation? As Waugh demonstrates through his analysis, our
understanding and enjoyment of these various histories must be tinged
with the ambiguities of exploitation and liberation.
Whether producers exploited models, found models who were willing to
perform, or participated in the presentation or narrative themselves,
Waugh claims that this will to produce erotic images and the will of
consumers to buy/to use these images for sexual purposes in a
repressive pre-Stonewall world helped gay men forge collective
identities not only around desire but around resistances to repression.
Throughout this history, those gay men who actively and knowingly
produced, distributed, and consumed gay erotic images-whether in
private or collectively-were engaged in political acts, both subtle and
explicit. As mentioned above, for instance, in the regimes of art and
physical culture, gay producers used classical imagery to depict the
homoerotic in public art or publish legitimate magazines. On the other
hand, in the regime of the illicit, gay men photographed themselves
having sex and shared these photos with friends. Gay men have used the
erotic imaginary as one important base for building a common visual
erotic culture and an activist culture.
Through the production, distribution, consumption and representation of
gay erotic images in the pre-Stonewall gay world, gay men resisted
dominant society's repression and surveillance of their sexual desire
and practices. Instead of the state's erasing gay desire, governments
and their policing agents actually became a driving force, leading gay
men either to turn to art and physical culture discourses to speak
about gay desire in the public sphere or to exploit new technologies of
photography and film to make private representations and share them
with other gay men.
At the same time, scientists and policing agencies documented gay sex
in a quest to know about or to provide evidence of illegal and deviant
behavior. The state's drive to control sexuality led in a Foucauldian
sense to a proliferation of new strategies for creating knowledge and
new erotic texts, both from the subculture's resistance to the dominant
culture and from the legal, scientific and political worlds'
"sociological investigation."
Waugh's study analyzes this complex interaction between repression and
resistance and shows how it works at various levels. For example, in
his discussion on the regime of illicit photography and film, Waugh
analyzes both the context and content of the erotic films made by the
pioneer photographer and filmmaker Otis Wade in the Los Angeles area
from 1935 to 1955. Waugh tells us that Wade's location in Los Angeles
gave him an immediate entry into the gay world and access to the many
willing sailors in the area for sex, performers and fellow spectators
who wanted to see his finished films, and the media-saturated world of
LA where he learned photography and 16mm filmmaking. Importantly, he
also had access to a processing lab through a friend so that he could
work around the institutional surveillance of mainstream processing
which caught numerous other gay producers. Otis Wade's filmmaking
illuminates how the gay underworld overcame repressive laws and
surveillance. We learn how surprisingly bold and subversive Wade and
other gay men were in depicting their gay desire under these
circumstances. We also witness Wade's various approaches to filming his
desire: he filmed men undressing without their knowledge, and he filmed
pickups who teasingly, knowingly performed for the camera. Thus Wade's
aesthetics encompassed the nervous verite of surreptitious filming and
also the controlled filming of men knowingly acting in front of the
camera with awareness. The ironic part of this history is that Waugh
found these films and photos in the Kinsey Institute, which collects
and catalogues sexually explicit photos in a sociological fashion in
order to document and detail gay sexual habits.
Across Waugh's four regimes, we find different strategies for depicting
and consuming gay erotic images as defined by cultural position and
location. For instance, in the regime of "art," Waugh describes a
variety of narratives and systems of thought employed to hide or
disguise gay desire and the erotic image. That is, gay artists often
engaged in both conscious and unconscious subterfuge, mystifying their
desire in discourses of art, mythology, and psychology as covers for
publishing gay male erotica in the public sphere. Waugh's book details
these visual and verbal strategies and their evolution toward openness
in the sixties when gay desire could finally be more openly declared.
Then filmmakers like Andy Warhol could produce such works as BLOW JOB.
However, while Warhol's patrons could see his film in a New York City
theater, past consumers had to be more innovative and surreptitious.
Waugh describes, for instance, how upper-class gay consumers at the
turn of the century purchased gay erotic "art" in the sexual
underground or traveled to more open sexual cultures where they could
sexually participate as well as look.
Likewise, individuals working in the regime of "physique culture" used
verbal and visual "alibis" to deflect charges of the illicit. These
supposed admirers of physical culture used discourses of naturism,
athleticism, narcissism, martyrism, and Greek ideals of male-male
friendship to disguise and legitimize their photos of male nudes. But
by the 1950s, many producers defied legal definitions of the licit and
began openly, without alibi, to depict a more visible erotic gay
desire. For instance, in the fifties and early sixties, Al Urban was
prosecuted on three separate occasions for distributing photos of male
nudes while Albert Heinecke went to prison in the fifties for using
underage models. Outside of the protection of "art" and "athleticism,"
gay men who filmed and photographed nude men dangerously challenged the
law and, as Waugh points out, "eroded the alibis" of previous images.
For these men, taking a picture involved both a sexual and political
act.
Waugh details this "slow emergence" of explicit gay sexual imagery
across these regimes, and he traces how this imagery has contributed to
gay political awareness through a community's collective desire and
through postal officials and policing authorities' reactive attempts to
contain and control that desire. In the 1950s, not only was Al Urban
producing more overt gay erotica, gay men joined him in political
resistance when they ordered, purchased, or made illicit images. They
transgressed the laws and dominant sexual ideology, moving from the
closet into the open with their consumption and production of illicit
desire and sexual acts. The images thus illustrate both the erotic
world of gay men and their social and political worlds.
To Waugh, all of these levels, from artistic photography to everyday
Polaroids of sex acts, illustrate the historical depiction of overt gay
sex as noble, beautiful, transformative and political (10). And in his
own visual essay in which he resisted a bowdlerized photographic
history, (10) Waugh legitimizes gay love, desire, and the practice of
gay sex not only in gay scholarship, but in the more general world of
academic cultural studies, and more radically, on the shelves of major
bookstores. Like his predecessors, Waugh insists on showing what it is
that these gay men and artists have produced and distributed, what
sexologists have produced to illustrate their work, and what police
have confiscated and used as evidence in a pursuit to prosecute and
erase this desire. This is an important part of Waugh's activist
agenda: to take what has been considered "voyeuristic objectification"
and to argue that these images illustrate "resistance, pleasure, and
courage" (5).
Waugh offers a complex reading of the production of the erotic and
gives us tools to deal with the present climate; we need to be able to
evaluate new technologies such as the Internet; new representations on
the web and in magazines, music video, fashion advertisements, and
other media; intimidations of artists, academics and consumers; and
attempts to draw new restrictive boundaries around erotic images in our
public and private worlds. Tom Waugh's Hard to Imagine not only
illustrates a less exploitative, more liberating historical use of the
erotic, but it makes an important political intervention, challenging
simplistic characterizations of pornography as exploitation. While
exploitative images of women, children, people of color, and others do
exist, Waugh demonstrates the history of a less exploitative use of the
erotic and offers a model for reconfiguring the erotic out of its
exploitative trappings.
Hard to Imagine is history, cultural analysis, a contemporary political
act, and an historical example of present censorship pressures and the
hysteria surrounding explicit images of sex and adolescent sexuality.
Waugh has bravely chartered new territory, insisting on pushing gay
male sexual desire and practices not only into the academic sphere, but
into the public sphere. Furthermore, what Waugh has accomplished
reminds us of the incredible race against time lesbian and gay cultural
historians must engage in since the erotic life of many lesbians and
gay men has disappeared and continues to disappear as families and
archives erase/ hide/ distort these lives. And it doesn't help that it
is still difficult to talk about, much less illustrate, much of this in
the public sphere.
Waugh speaks to both an academic community struggling with how to
understand and teach erotic images and respond to wrong-headed
censorship and to a gay community interested in the history of their
erotic culture. For both, Waugh's book illustrates recent changes in
strategies to resist the censorship of gay sexual representations along
with the continuities and shifts in iconographic influences and
narratives on our erotic culture.
Film and cultural-studies scholars such as Waugh have rightly begun to
explore historically and theoretically the boundaries between the licit
and the illicit. Such studies complicate our understanding of images of
desires and sexual practices. In addition, some college courses now
openly analyze sexual imagery, both normative and non-normative.
However, in the recent climate, anyone who wishes to study and discuss
explicit representations of sexual practices in the academy must know
they are treading on dangerous, controversial ground. For example, in
autumn 1997 at SUNY-New Paltz, two conferences, "Revolting Behavior:
The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom" and "Subject to Desire:
Refiguring the Body," explored women's sexual culture, including both
heterosexuality and non-normative sexual behavior. These conferences
came under political attack by conservative columnists and politicians,
including Gov. Pataki, and the attacks focused on workshops on S/M and
sex toys. Also, conservative critics reminded the public that their tax
dollars funded these conferences which were open to "innocent" college
students.
Thus, the U.S. still finds itself defining, debating, and reconfiguring
legal boundaries between licit and illicit erotic images in public
spaces and deciding what sexually explicit representations can be made
available to private consumers. Without a doubt, conservative attacks
have stymied public erotic images and even academic dialogue about our
culture's sexual practices and pleasure.
Still, in the realm of film studies, since the 1980s, scholars have
opened up and continued a serious discussion of pornography.
Groundbreaking discussions on pornography in the 1980s in Jump Cut and
by others such as Linda Williams have gone far to complicate our
understanding of sexual representations and to challenge demonizing
tactics. In Jump Cut (March, 1985), Richard Dyer and Tom Waugh pointed
out that unlike the gender order in heterosexual pornography, gay
pornography could be progressive through its more egalitarian
relationship between producers, performers, and consumers. Thus,
instead of censoring all pornography, these critics' work might
encourage producers to make sexual representations which are not
denigrating, equalizing between genders and other social groups. In
Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, Linda Williams
points out that the conclusions drawn by anti-porn feminists,
conservative politicians, and religious leaders blaming hardcore porn
for women's exploitation are over-simplified and fail to take into
account the growing number of women who consume or make porn. Focusing
upon how pleasure is constructed and the power relations suggested by
gender, age, and racial differences between performers, producers, and
consumers in erotic images, cultural critics have offered a more
balanced discussion between considering exploitation vs. more
progressive images and they offer a discourse with which to
problematize and challenge the most reactionary critiques against
sexual representations.
Waugh takes an even more radical step in his scholarship when he tells
us from the very beginning that this book entailed not only an
obsession with research and a labor of love but also a labor of lust.
Waugh doesn't back away from his desire by designing a cultural or
philosophical alibi to cover nor does he hide from what he is doing. He
says that he enjoyed the visual material and found it sexually
arousing. He challenges other scholars to admit their own desire when
it is evoked by their scholarship.
Waugh has succeeded, but it has not been easy. Maybe in the future, and
I'm not optimistic about my lifetime, it will seem ridiculous for a
cultural historian to describe how the erotic was depicted
surreptitiously through the Polaroid, super 8 film, and later video in
prose, instead of with the actual visual evidence. We can be grateful
Waugh insisted on its visual representation. Without these pictures,
the history of the erotic would be left "hard to imagine" for many
scholars, students, and bookstore browsers
Hearty
A Biography. - Review - book review
Journal of Sex Research, August, 1999 by Vern L. Bullough
Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things; A Biography. By
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998, 514 pp.
illus. Cloth,
What a difference a biographer makes. Gathorne-Hardy is sympathetic to
Kinsey and what he was trying to do; thus, although he includes much
the same data as James Jones (1997) does, Kinsey appears as an almost
entirely different person. Gathorne-Hardy, who only found out that
Jones was working on a biography after he had started his, probably
found his task somewhat easier because of Jones' work. Certainly he did
not feel the need to devote the more than 25 years that Jones did to
the subject. He does retrace much the same path taken by Jones who, to
his credit, deposited much of his source material in the library of the
Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at
Indiana University. Interestingly, Gathorne-Hardy found that
individuals who had been somewhat careful in talking to him before the
Jones book was published were more eager to do so afterwards. Mostly,
he attributes this greater willingness to share confidences with him to
their desire to correct what they believe to be the misinterpretations
and alleged biases which they felt they found in the Jones book. This
is not to imply that Gathorne-Hardy did not do his homework; he did,
and his interview list is almost as comprehensive as that of Jones.
The result is a more sympathetic portrayal of Kinsey and, in spite of
the fact that Jones is a historian, a better setting of the man in
historical perspective. Because Jones' comprehensive work appeared
first, Gathorne-Hardy can also be more selective in where he puts his
emphasis. Thus, Kinsey's childhood and early career receive far less
space than Jones gives them, but the essentials are covered.
Kinsey was a sickly boy, raised by a demanding and dominating father
and a somewhat cowed mother, in a very fundamentalist Methodist
household where the dangers of sin were emphasized. As he approached
his teens, his health improved, and he found refuge in music (he played
the piano well enough to consider it as a professional career) and
hiking. Scouting was also important to him and he was one of the first
Eagle scouts. He rebelled against his father by choosing to leave home
and go to Bowdoin College instead of attending the nearby engineering
institution where his father was employed. He blossomed at Bowdoin,
graduated magna cum laude, and went on to Harvard to get his Ph.D. in
zoology, spending much of his spare time and summers in Boy Scout work
and summer camps for boys. From Harvard, he joined the faculty at
Indiana and remained there for the rest of his life, first studying
gall wasps and then sex.
The outline of the career is the same in both biographies, but Jones is
far more detailed about the early years and less analytical about the
later than Gathorne-Hardy. One of the major differences between the two
is that Gathorne-Hardy is much more comfortable dealing with sexual
issues than Jones, who appears to have real hangups about such issues
as masturbation and homosexuality. This enables Gathorne-Hardy to
better place Kinsey in the context of his times. What does appear in
both biographies is that Kinsey was more of a crusader for sexual
liberties than he himself would admit, and that his reports and graphs
of sexual activity were influenced by what he chose to include or
exclude. Though most of us knew this intuitively, it is documented
particularly well by Gathorne-Hardy.
Both biographers imply that Kinsey was getting bored by gall wasps, and
that he wanted to leave a more important mark on the pages of history
than having some species of gall wasps named after him. Both emphasize
that Kinsey had always been interested in sex, but it was only after he
had weaned himself away from the strict religious prohibitions of his
youth that he felt able to seriously study it. Jones makes much of a
Bunsen burner and brush handle minus the bristles which he found in a
hole covered by a piece of tin in the room Kinsey had occupied as a
teenager. Although others have lived in the house over the fifty years
since the family left, Jones felt that this was Kinsey's hiding place
and that the brush was inserted into his urethra as part of a
masturbatory activity which involved pain and punishment for his sinful
activities. This unsupported speculation became a central pillar of
Jones' interpretation of Kinsey, and from it, Jones claims that he had
strong masochist tendencies. But the brush handle found with the Bunsen
burner could have been used to stir solutions being heated on the
burner. While there is evidence that Kinsey did, as an older adult,
insert items into his urethra, none of them are the size of the brush
handle found by Jones. Moreover Kinsey, who was fairly open about his
sexual activity to his colleagues, never defined himself as a
masochist.
This claim of the youthful masochistic Kinsey, which Gathorne-Hardy
dismisses out of hand as psychologizing without data, is one of the key
points of Jones' analysis of Kinsey. Similarly Jones' emphasis on
Kinsey's nudity and the Kinsey family's nudity is played up by Jones as
a kind of voyeuristic homosexuality, but such a view fails to deal with
the role of nudism in America in the 1930s. In fact, the insistence on
swimming in the nude by the managers of YMCA pools and, for that
matter, in university segregated swimming sessions was standard
practice in the United States, if only to cut down possible
contamination in the pools. Kinsey's youthful homosexuality, repressed
or not, is one of the key points in the Jones biography. To
demonstrate, Jones has to imply that Kinsey's interest in Boy Scout and
youth camps satisfied his homoerotic leanings. This is also a claim
which Gathorne-Hardy is unwilling to credit.
While Kinsey, increasingly toward the end of his life, would be classed
as a bisexual on his own scale, there is little evidence for any such
activities earlier in his career. He entered marriage a virgin at 27,
and was frustrated at the difficulties he had in consummating it until
his wife had a minor surgical procedure to free up her clitoris. Jones
makes much of this operation, Gathorne-Hardy emphasizes its triviality.
Both biographies emphasize Kinsey's work ethic, dedication, and total
commitment to any project in which he became involved. The man was a
workaholic with a passion for collecting, and the man who collected
more varieties and numbers of gall wasps than anyone else approached
his sex interviews in the same way. Kinsey was also controlling, did
not tolerate much disagreement, and dominated his staff. His recreation
was listening to music, giving musicals, gardening, and hiking. In his
monthly musicals he selected the records, commented on them, and played
them to a group of friends (as well as to his captive assistants) and
he was the authority. Gardening allowed him to relax, but even here he
was compulsive in the flowers and bulbs he planted and collected. In
the faculty, he did his share of scut work early in his career but was
not particularly popular with most of his colleagues--he was too
dominating. But when he wanted to do so, he could be surprisingly
helpful and friendly.
The essential difference between Kinsey and most of his American
contemporaries who touched upon sex in hygiene classes is that Kinsey
thought that sex was good, one of the joys of life. It was this belief
which led him to challenge the hygiene establishment which had control
of the teaching of sex, and to begin to offer classes on sex to
undergraduates independent of the hygiene classes. Others must have
felt Kinsey offered a breath of fresh air because faculty members and
their spouses also attended his special lectures, and although the Dean
of Women and the professor of hygiene continually fought him, he had
the backing of the university president, Herman B. Wells, which
ultimately was all that mattered.
Kinsey threw himself into sex, not only in sex theory but in observing
sexual activities and even participating in them, especially homosexual
ones, justifying it as necessary in order to ingratiate himself with
his subjects. This becomes a controversial part of Jones' biography,
but less so in Gathorne-Hardy's book. He also insisted that his staff
view and participate in as wide a variety of sexual activities as they
felt comfortable with: Gebhard, for example, refused to participate in
any same-sex activity. Kinsey held that only by such activities could
his interviewers be alert to every nuance of their subject's response,
and if they could do this without actual participation then it was okay
with him. Jones implies that Kinsey distorted his studies by including
interviews from a disproportionate number of gay men. As Gebhard later
demonstrated in a rerun of the Kinsey data, excluding prisoners and any
data which seemed to be derived from a totally gay sample, this was not
the case. Certainly, he did interview a disproportionate number of
gays, but it might well have been an attempt by Kinsey to understand
homosexuality since he felt it was so stigmatized by society.
Gathorne-Hardy excels in recounting the publicity and reaction of the
media and the public to the publication of the two volumes which
reached print while Kinsey was still alive. The media demands were
exhausting, and overnight Kinsey became both one of the most celebrated
and most despised men in America. No academic event before or since has
matched it. All that was missing was the television coverage only
available to a later generation. The hostility toward Kinsey increased
among religious conservatives, and many of the establishment types who
had supported him began to distance themselves. Though his royalties
mounted, his funding was threatened, and an overworked and exhausted
Kinsey continued to try to solicit funds, lecturing everywhere. By the
early 1940s he had adopted an exhausting schedule, traveling weekends
for interviews, returning to Bloomington, and then leaving again almost
immediately. His wife grew used to being alone but continued to support
him and do everything she could to ease the burden. He took no real
vacations after he began studying sex in earnest, compulsively pushing
himself to do more and more interviews, speeches, and presentations,
even rising from his sickbed to do so, until his heart gave out. He
died a bitter man, feeling he had been betrayed and abandoned although
he had supporters everywhere.
In a personal assessment of Kinsey, Gathorne-Hardy writes that his
contributions were seminal but often ignored because society itself has
changed. Many of the things he tried to bring about have become part of
the climate, conventions, and good sense now surrounding most sexual
activities. Like most of those who have been deceased for any length of
time, many have never heard of him. Some of the changes brought about
in recent years were probably inevitable, but if any one individual can
be said to have contributed the most to the change, that individual
would be Kinsey. Gathorne-Hardy says he challenged the psychoanalytic
model of sex and replaced it, at least in part, with a biological and a
social science model. Gathorne-Hardy believes that the Kinsey team was
one of the major, if not the decisive factor, in challenging
traditional ideas about homosexuality. He gave sex research a new
direction and a strong foundation. Most of his failings were personal.
Gathorne-Hardy feels he did not share some aspects of his sex life with
his family and that by he and Jones bringing it into the open, some of
the family members have been deeply hurt.
But how will he stand in history? Paul Robinson (1989) felt he did not
belong in the company of Darwin or Freud, but times have changed; while
Kinsey, in Gathorne-Hardy's mind, cannot match Darwin, he has certainly
challenged Freud and might now be on par with him. People who achieve
as Kinsey did are not usually the pleasant, genial persons that many of
us would like to be. They are often driven, irascible, dogmatic, and
domineering. Kinsey was domineering and compulsively driven, and not
easy to get along with. Once he had made up his mind, it was difficult
to change. Perhaps this is what it took to challenge so many ideas in
human sexuality. After all, Darwin retreated from his battlefield,
leaving Huxley and others to fight his battles for him. Freud had his
coterie of disciples, and those who did not fully believe as he did
were often excommunicated. Kinsey had to fight his own battles, strong
in his belief that his data would vindicate him. Gathorne-Hardy makes
an excellent case for Kinsey, which I believe will grow stronger over
the years. His biography is a good antidote to Jones, and the
differences between the two biographers emphasize the complexity of
Kinsey the man.
REFERENCES
Jones, J. H. (1997). Alfred C. Kinsey: A public/private life. New York:
Norton.
Robinson, P. (1989). The modernization of sex. New York: Cornell
University Press.
Reviewed by Vern L. Bullough, Department of Nursing, University of
Southern California, Center for Health Professions, 1540 East Alcazar
St., Los Angeles, CA 90033; e-mail: vbul...@csun.edu.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Hearty
Evening Standard (London), June, 2004 by TOM LUBBOCK
Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy
by Ruth Barcan (Berg, Pounds 17.99)
IN the Metropolitan Museum, New York, there is a bronze figure by the
neo-classical sculptor Houdon. It is called La Frileuse, the chilly
girl. It is an allegory of Winter, and shows a woman, standing,
shivering, hugging herself, pulling a blanket around her head and
shoulders. But below that, from waist to feet, she is quite naked, a
nude, as allegorical figures often are.
Strange. What La Frileuse makes you feel is that the confident,
impervious nudity of a classical statue (where climate is never an
issue) has suddenly caught cold, lost its immunity, become sensitive
and exposed and truly bare-skinned. Two kinds of nudity are grafted
together. The result makes you shiver slightly, too.
Two kinds of nudity? Oh, there are many, many kinds. If you want to
know how many, try Ruth Barcan's Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy. Barcan is
an Australian cultural studies academic, and her subject is both
embracing and inviting. We are all potentially naked, and we're all
pretty interested. In a way, that's the point. The nude body is never a
matter of indifference, and "never naked - if naked means stripped of
meaning, value".
Nakedness is covered with all sorts of taboos. It is "the world's
oldest metaphor". And it can mean such different things, depending on
whether it occurs in art or in life, whether it's men or women who are
naked, whether or not sex is involved.
We take a rather switchback tour through Western culture and the
contemporary world.
Lots of books are read and digested. There's a bit of " fieldwork",
interviews with beauticians, naturists, pornographers.
We hear about Adam and Eve, and the Ancient Greeks, the nude in art,
the ambiguous status of swimwear, striptease, the public nakedness of
children, the metaphor of "naked truth".
Everywhere, it turns out, "nudity is caught up in a web of
contradictions and paradoxes".
Nudity is honest. Nudity is shameful. It is innocent. It is obscene. It
is noble, bestial, strong, weak, lordly, destitute, heroic, ludicrous,
penitent, scandalous. The relationship between nakedness and clothing
is especially fraught. The naked body can be seen as complete in
itself, with clothes as an unnecessary and corrupting excrescence. Or
it can be seen as lacking, deficient, badly in need of clothes to make
a whole person.
Take the current fashion for total "down under" pubic waxing (so much
"cleaner", say its practitioners). Or take colonial opinions about
naked aboriginals or the nudist movement, or flashing, or streaking.
Whatever the topic, it turns out that our attitudes to baring it all
are ambivalent and paradoxical.
Depending how you look at it, nakedness can seem authentically human or
savagely subhuman, natural or unnatural.
Barcan is keen to say that we can never get "back to nature" - as some
nudists believe - by taking our clothes off. Human nakedness is always
part of human culture, packed with values and symbolism. Nudism, with
its highly artificial cult of "healthiness", is just one more way we
cover ourselves in confusions.
She is perhaps over-surprised by the fact that humans have such strong
and mixed feelings about their own bodies. And though she doesn't say
this outright, you get the impression - as ambivalent taboo is
pointedly piled on paradoxical metaphor - that she finds it all a bit
much. Why do humans get so worked-up and mixed-up about nudity? Why is
this area so "dangerous"?
Wouldn't it be better if there was just less fuss?
There may be some "back to nature" tendencies in Barcan herself - or
back to beasthood.
After all, the animals don't get exercised about nudity, or plenty of
other things that bother us. It is humans who are the world's fuss
pots.
Culture is fuss. This book is one chapter in our great history of time
wasting.
(c)2004. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information
and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.