Is that a soap box or a thinking tree

So yea, I just watched the most depressing movie I have seen since De-lovely. The movie is Kinsey. It is one of those movies like A Beautiful Mind that takes the life of a scientist and makes it into a pop-culture hit. Alfred Kinsey was the first person to do a scientific study of the sexual behavior of humans. (By the way, I cannot recommend the movie. Due to the subject matter it is very graphic, not in the gratuitous way but graphic none-the-less.) Anyway, Kinsey begins his study in order help people who are harmed by a lack of sexual understanding. However, one can see a great correlation between his desire to study sex and the strict religious setting he was raised. I will not venture, in the forum anyway, to discuss this topic. What I want to talk about is a little more sociological than theological.

In the process of studying sex and promoting a less puritanical society, Kinsey found himself and those around him practicing what they preached. The close knit community involved in his research began to practice what we might call “free love.” (However, as he points out he is not studying love because love cannot be “measured” and therefore cannot be studying scientifically.) The practice began to destroy the lives of some of those involved. At the end the movie ends on an upbeat note because it points out that Kinsey did help many people. However, being one that does not too quickly want to shun my puritan ancestors, I must take issue with the movie.

Kinsey’s family is almost shattered when he has an extra-marital sexual encounter. In the end the only thing that saves it is the same thing that saves the marriage depicted in De-lovely: love. You see, his wife loves him enough to stay with and accept that his theories are correct. However, it is his inadequate love for his wife that threatens the marriage again. I really do not think that his affair was out of a lack of love; he believed that sex is what animals do and humans are simply animals. But when someone comes to him and his wife and asks for permission to sleep with her, he agrees. I think that if he honestly loved his wife he would have seen that she really wanted him to say no and not agree to it. He does agree and she begins to experience his world of informal sexual exploration. Their marriage does not end formally nor does their “love” but I think the fullness of their marriage, their relationship as human beings, suffered greatly as a result.

I think we can see this movie and his characters as a microcosm for society in the second half of the twenty century. Yes, I think that a fuller understand of sex and sexuality frees people from the quilt and pain caused by ignorance. However, I also feel that a society that acts as if it were settled by the followers of Bacchus instead of the puritans will suffer (has suffered) greatly. We will forget how to truly love one another, because we begin to see each other as objects and not human-beings. Moreover, and probably more damaging, we begin to see ourselves as sexual creatures instead of the image bearers of God. This happened to Kinsey. When his life, his sexual life, began to fall apart he began to seek pleasure in other ways that brought no pleasure at all, only pain. Our society (or should I say we, you and I, me) has forgotten what it felt like to be innocent and now we seek pleasure in ways that only brings pain. And his pain will kill us and steal from us a real life. Even if in the end we, like Kinsey, see the positive effects of what we have done we will not be able to escape the pain that our lose of innocence has brought us.

That is just what I think, but who am I.