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  • Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men by Peter Hegarty
  • Elizabeth Fraterrigo
Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men. By Peter Hegarty (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013) 182 pp. $75.00 cloth $25.00 paper

In 1948, Alfred Kinsey’s controversial landmark study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington, 1948) (hereinafter sbhm), prompted an unsolicited, lengthy, and negative review in the journal Psychological Bulletin by intelligence-testing pioneer Lewis Terman. Like other critics, Terman took issue with Kinsey’s interviewing and sampling methods and his reduction of human sexuality to a tally of sexual “outlets.” But Terman also scrutinized “some data patterns in SBHM that other critics were happy to leave alone, and he staked some odd claims in the course of challenging Kinsey on these points” (11). Terman’s particular objections to Kinsey’s work provided the impetus, and serve as a framing device, for Hegarty’s study of the mutually constitutive ways by which ideas about intelligence and sexuality were fashioned in the twentieth century. Their disagreements about the elusive relationship between sex and intelligence engaged other vital questions: What is “good science”? What is “normal”? Exploring how these queries were answered, Hegarty demonstrates, not surprisingly, that Terman and Kinsey were far from dispassionate researchers. He reads their pronouncements and silences for insight into how personal views and research agendas influenced current understandings of intelligence, sexuality, and normality.

Terman’s reception of sbhm was informed by his own research on gendered personalities, marital happiness, and especially his work on a long-term study of “gifted” children. Intent on “normalizing” the highly intelligent young people that he studied, Terman had a vested interest in some of Kinsey’s findings. Downplaying possible linkages between perceived sexual impropriety and a high intelligence quotient (iq), he challenged Kinsey’s conclusions about sexual precocity. Likewise, Terman’s interest in debunking the figure of the “queer genius” helps to account for his silence on a matter that many other Kinsey critics addressed—sbhm’s assertions about the prevalence of adult homosexual activity; the “queer,” gifted individuals in Terman’s study would seem less aberrant in a society where homosexual experience was not uncommon. In deciphering differences between Terman and Kinsey, [End Page 249] Hegarty calls attention to competing ideas about normal as meaning “average” or “ideal,” pointing to the contingent and malleable nature of this concept. Indeed, the interplay of Queteletian (average) and Galtonian (ideal) notions of normality in the co-construction of intelligence and sexuality forms one of the book’s central themes (17).1 Unfortunately, Hegarty frequently employs these terms in a shorthand fashion that obviates further explanation.

Although he attends to the intellectual differences between Terman and Kinsey, the basic narrative of what transpired between the two scientists is difficult to apprehend in early chapters. Not until Chapter 7 does Hegarty recount the events leading to the American Statistical Association’s audit of Kinsey’s research methods, inspired in part by questions raised publicly by Terman about Kinsey’s work.

Elsewhere, Hegarty’s wide-ranging discussion addresses numerous topics, from the nineteenth-century ascendance of statistics to the manner in which Kinsey’s and Terman’s research subsequently influenced the biographies written about them. Hegarty discerns links, for instance, between Terman’s findings that maladjusted women were largely responsible for marital unhappiness and biographers’ tendency to rationalize Terman’s marital infidelity. He presents a fruitful analysis of the continuity between Kinsey’s seemingly unrelated early research on the gall wasp and later investigations of human sexuality by foregrounding Kinsey’s ideas about variability common to both projects. He also offers an interesting discussion of cognitive dissonance in an effort to explain the willingness of participants in Kinsey’s study to reveal their personal sexual histories for the sake of scientific progress. Throughout the book, however, many themes pursued by Hegarty seem tangential, resulting in a meandering quality to the argument that undermines an otherwise intriguing and provocative study.

Elizabeth Fraterrigo
Loyola University Chicago

Footnotes

1. In the nineteenth century, statistician Adolphe Quetelet advanced ideas about “normal” distribution curves with most values clustered around...

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