There is nothing new under the sun. In the mid-20th century, the publishing industry was panicked by first the popularity and rapidity of radio, then film, then television. In response they needed to break new ground and create products that would motivate consumers to go to buy books instead of watching free television at home.
Publishers found a bonanza starting with
the disgusting work and career of one Albert Kinsey a "researcher" shunned by his colleagues for the statistical shoddiness of his questionable "research." Kinsey asked death-row inmates in prisons full of the most heinous of convicted sex criminals what their "sexual preferences" were. He wrote these up in a book labelled as research on Americans, and presented the premise that if you weren't interested in these practices, your desires were somehow dishonest because they didn't include the lurid "clinical" descriptions in the book.
Kinsey kept close with NAZI pedophile rings, too. But the media of the day seems to have taken a "don't ask, don't tell" approach.
Nobody likes to see their hero publicly soiled.
None of this could be done in the mediums of film and television of course, because the Catholic Church still had a strong, even if increasingly marginalized, hand in influencing productions away from the objectively and even subjectively, or even near occasions of sin, immoral. With books, no such limitations.
Judith Gelernter Reisman, Ph.D. has researched and written extensively to cut through the persistently believed lie that Kinsey was some sort of misunderstood freedom fighter in the "sane" cuturkampf against the Catholic Church's "restrictive" attitudes and "demands" against "healthy" human sexuality.
The fact is that from the beginning, the Consensus Content Kings, banded together for all their own best interests when they discovered how many books they could sell containing sexual perversions to a public that had decided the Church (in particular the Catholic Church) had no sensible advice on the subject.
Owing again, to a collective form of
ecclesial angelism, as identified by Fr. Robert Barron in his talk
"The YouTube Heresies" (q.v.) a chain of non-sequiturs ('Kinsey perversions popular, priests celibate, therefore Catholic Church's wisdom about nature of sin absurd') became "just
common sense" and everyone suddenly knew "the truth" that the Catholic Church was too (_fill in synonym for prudish_) to "accept" or "support."
But you know, growing up in that pointless soup of mid-20th century self-absorption we now call "the sixties" and the even worse "seventies" I can recall every time I came into contact with a justification for this bastardized ethos of pleasure, especially when it was expressed by someone significantly older, there was a guilt, a loss, a realization of wrong. An emotional commonality I can recall across many people without remembering who they were.
In a last, sort of, gasp at trying to give the culture of death's ultimate material proof of its triumphant wisdom about making the fevered preferences of death row sex crime convicts into "the new normal"
Hollywood's multi-million dollar secular canonization of Kinsey was pretty much a flop with only a
$17 million worldwide box office gross. In Hollywood, they call that "chump change."
Of course they nominated it for an Oscar, but that didn't work out. It was certainly no "
The Passion of the Christ," another 2004 film about a certain lone real-life figure, attacked by the establishment of his day for swimming upstream against popular tides, that worked out rather better both as a film. We shall all see about how it worked out for Kinsey in real life much later, of course.
The one positively demonic thing that has always struck me as radically indicative of the media's ground-floor complicity with Kinsey from before he even "broke" as a publishing superstar, was how Kinsey obtained the data in the infamous "
table 34."
It seems that at no time in Kinsey's entire career did any member of "the press" inquire as to how Kinsey collected this demonic "data." They were content to let that one ride, it seems.
Come to think of it, I've never heard "the press" ask the first black U.S. president why the most dangerous place in the universe for a black unborn human is the inside of the mother's womb, either. Lots of "professional" practice ignoring that sort of question, I guess.
Of course, the premise of this article's headline question
seems to me rather naive.