Abstract
Not long after Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was in print in January 1948, Lewis M. Terman, the Stanford psychologist famous for his definitive revision of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, found himself anxiously writing a critical review of the new best-seller. Terman submitted his lengthy piece to a leading journal, Psychological Bulletin, which accepted it after some trimming. That Terman’s anxiousness stemmed not only from his ‘gentlemanly’ scholarly disagreement with Kinsey, a colleague at Indiana University, Bloomington, and arguably the most important sex researcher of the 20th century, but also from the ‘ungentlemanly’ sexual politics in the history of psychology is the main argument of Gentlemen’s Disagreement. Taking a cue from Terman himself, who once described his review of Kinsey’s volume as the ‘most difficult’ task he had ever attempted (3), Hegarty aims to show how the clash between this pair of giants in the history of the human sciences – one of intelligence, the other of sexuality – reveals a hidden relationship between sex and intelligence. The result is a highly provocative look at the recent history of psychology, which carefully attends both to spoken and unspoken matters. Silence is as important as articulated ideas for Hegarty, and although his wide-ranging, suggestive exploration of the ‘sexual politics’ in psychological thought may elicit as many questions as it answers for some historians, his book is a distinctively incisive, fresh look at the subjectivity underlying what we call science.
In the human sciences in the United States during the first half of the 20th century, sexuality and intelligence were indeed frequently brought up together. For instance, some psychologists and psychiatrists believed that excessive sex, especially masturbation, ruined a person’s intellect. This belief was often related to the scientific understanding of homosexuality as either a ‘diseased’ or an ‘immature’ sexuality. If a boy masturbated too much, he would lose his masculinity; the result would be a loss of intelligence, understood as an essential characteristic of masculinity. The boy thus becomes an underdeveloped homosexual. But some medical and social scientists disagreed. They argued that homosexuals frequently possessed better-than-average intellect and were culturally sophisticated. Despite the apparent inconsistency between these views, they had one thing in common: they both were based on the unspoken assumption that there is a linkage between a person’s sexuality and intelligence. Hegarty sees this assumption as a driving force of the era’s scientific discourse. Terman’s disagreements with Kinsey also were shaped by this assumption. Although historians of psychology in European and American contexts are familiar with this intertwining of sex and smartness, none has attempted to offer a systematic examination of how this intertwining has shaped androcentric, heteronormative and, in some cases, US-centric discourses in psychology. Hegarty’s exploration of the subject is the first of its kind, and his is a scholarship that takes the unarticulated subjectivity in science seriously with fascinating results. Indeed, Hegarty makes a full self-disclosure of a sort early on his pages, where he tells how he was trained in psychology at Stanford University in the early 1990s. A foreign and gay student, he found psychology’s rigid preoccupation with cognitivism and experimentalism alienating. That he was beginning to become familiar with Michel Foucault’s thought, as well as with feminist and queer theories, only enhanced his critique of contemporary psychology. Not surprisingly, then, Hegarty applies a similar critical attitude to the history of psychology and to Terman and Kinsey in particular as its major representatives.
How does one bring to light unspoken things and their impact on history? One method that Hegarty employs is to look at Terman’s earlier writings in order to delineate unarticulated reasons for his 1948 critique of Kinsey. For instance, Terman was taken aback by Kinsey’s idea of sexual precocity as a predictor of health and strength in part because the idea disturbed his understanding of the relationship between physical health, mental ability and sexuality. In mainstream psychology, it was believed that a robust body houses a civilized mind, hence making it a challenge and a duty for healthy and smart boys in western societies to refrain from sexual self-indulgence. This view, however, was critically revised in the first decade of the 20th century through a series of articles by Terman, who asserted that smart minds could inhabit bodies that do not excel in motor ability. Thus, Terman had a history of trying to ‘disembody’ smart boys, an attempt that Kinsey’s findings obstructed. Hegarty contends that Kinsey’s claim baffled Terman’s effort to ‘desexualize’ smart boys’ intelligence as well. Terman in his studies of gifted children during the 1910s insisted that the most important kind of smartness – the rational mind that scientists and engineers (not artists) possessed – could be measured by intelligence tests, which by definition do not assess emotions, memories, or the will. Smart boys’ sexual habits were one of these fuzzy elements of personality, thus they were beyond the reach of legitimate science. Kinsey’s claim, based on men’s reports on their history of ‘self-abuse’, disturbed Terman’s ‘deliberate strategies of silence’ (42) and brought back all the inconsistencies that he had encountered (and ignored) in his research, most notably smart adolescents who exhibited masturbatory habits. Instead of calling into question whether smart men had masturbated, then, Terman raised doubts about whether men could accurately recall their masturbatory experiences. In so doing, Terman attempted to protect his carefully crafted image of disembodied and desexualized children whose intelligence excelled, an image in which he had long invested. Thus, as Hegarty argues, Terman’s disagreement with Kinsey stemmed not only from intellectual disagreements laid out overtly in scholarly discourse, but also from a covert, unwieldy politics surrounding sex and intelligence.
Another way in which Hegarty approaches the relationship between sex and intelligence is to combine an analysis of the scientists’ publications with that of their biographies. Terman disagreed with Kinsey’s claim that the rates of premarital sex were stable across generations. Kinsey’s belief was that there was ‘no sound basis for the widespread opinion that the younger generation had become more active’ (46) in pursuing sex before marriage; some youths had always engaged in premarital sex. Terman in response asserted that what Kinsey found was not a story of similar behavior across generations, but a profile of ‘uneducated men who were dissolving the norm that legitimated sex through the bonds of matrimony’ (47). In other words, premarital sex was the problem unique to lower-class, not-so-smart men. Hegarty contends that the hidden origin of this disagreement can be found both in Terman’s Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness and in his personal life experiences, especially those related to his marital and extra-marital relationships. In this 1938 study, Terman indicated that premarital sex could lead to unhappy marriages, unlike Kinsey who considered sexual experiences before marriage to be potentially a positive factor in marriages. For Terman, what made marriages happy was husbands’ high intelligence and their expectations of ‘adequate’ sex, rather than a pursuit of ‘ideal’ sex as some contemporary marriage manuals would have it. Hegarty suggests that this argument reflected Terman’s personal defensiveness – after all, he was a smart man who had had extra-marital affairs, and who apparently did not care much about his wife Anna’s sexual satisfaction – as well as his intellectual commitment to keeping heteronormativity and androcentrism in psychology undisturbed. Regardless of what they did in their marital bedrooms, smart men of a well-to-do social class could not be less-than-ideal husbands. Such reasoning was not articulated by Terman explicitly, of course, and Hegarty’s analysis of Terman’s biography as a critical factor in his ideas may strike some historians as overreaching. But Hegarty’s approach is much more desirable than the once-frequently practised alternative – scholars ignored or downplayed personal lives of intellectual giants as irrelevant or insignificant. At the very least, Hegarty’s use of Terman’s biography is forceful in showing how scholars might make visible the normally invisible.
In some cases, Hegarty directs his critical attention to what Terman did not say about Kinsey, suitably so for a book that unearths the unspoken dynamism in science. Terman did not mention Kinsey’s most frequently cited finding that same-sex sexual experiences were widespread. What does this silence reveal? In Hegarty’s reading, it again reveals Terman’s desire to protect his particular understanding of sex and intelligence. Specifically, the prevalence of queerness in America’s general population helped, not hindered, Terman’s concept of gifted children as ‘masculine’, a concept that he had suggested in his 1936 work Sex and Personality. This book about smart boys included those who became homosexual, notably the renowned composer Henry Cowell. To fit Cowell into his cherished idea of ‘desexualized’ gifted children, Terman referred to Cowell as ‘not a “true homosexual” but [a person who] merely had delayed heterosexual adjustment’ (89). This strained argument was in effect facilitated by Kinsey’s findings, which Terman took to mean that a majority of those who engage in homosexual conduct become heterosexual. This, combined with Terman’s belief that gifted children’s ‘masculinity’ (conveniently measured by his own Masculinity–Femininity test) is correlated to their intelligence, allowed him to maintain the façade of theoretical consistency. Thus, as Hegarty argues, Terman’s silence about Kinsey’s finding was a quiet approval of it because it ‘occulded … epistemological relationships between intelligence and sexuality’ (77).
In these ways and others, Hegarty keeps in play a number of insightful observations about the ways in which scientists form their ideas. One outstanding observation concerns the ‘question of the relationship between … a scientist’s character and the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge’ (91). As a way to approach this question, Hegarty delves into Kinsey’s interview method, which varied based on his assessment of interviewees’ mental abilities (including those measured by an IQ test), and yet failed to record how such variation might have influenced the contents of the sex histories he collected. Not surprisingly, then, Terman disagreed with Kinsey because he ‘could not imagine … the sex histories without the undue influence of the interviewees’ (97). While Kinsey might well have responded to this critique by reiterating the validity of ‘educated intelligence’ – the knowledge about sex that informants bring to science, inspired by trusting relationships that they establish with scientists – Terman still preferred to keep the idea of such intelligence at arm’s length. Hegarty argues that, as such, their disagreement suggests ‘how norms of disinterested, impartial, chaste gentlemanly conduct’ shaped not only the ‘objects of knowledge’ on which Terman’s critique of Kinsey was based, but also the ‘dynamics of trust’ that Kinsey’s method tried to expand (104). This observation illuminates the tension between different modes of scientific inquiry that coexisted at the time and adds usefully to the recent studies of Kinsey by Miriam Ruemann and Sarah E. Igo, which have explored why Kinsey’s research attracted such an unprecedented number of informants (Reumann, 2005; Igo, 2007).
Hegarty’s perspective as a non-US scholar studying US psychology contributes to his critique of Kinsey and, to a lesser degree, Terman, as they produced subtly but surely US-centric ideas. As Hegarty notes, Kinsey’s science of sexuality, though often characterized by historians as ‘liberal’ and ‘inclusive’, was dismissive of Judaism. This was because Kinsey considered it to be an example of the influence of an ‘ancient’ culture, ‘unnatural’ and outdated in the American context. In this way, Hegarty contends, Kinsey excluded a nuanced understanding of European culture from his studies so that the data discovered by American scientists would become singularly authoritative. Terman engaged in the ‘othering’ of Jewish culture as well, albeit in different ways. To be sure, he did not believe religiosity to be necessarily regressive. And yet, as with homosexuality, Terman deemed religion as linked to femininity, something that did not usually coexist with high intelligence. For both men, then, religion with strong ties to non-US cultures was looked at with suspicion. In this light, Hegarty offers a particularly strong critique of Kinsey. Hegarty argues that the scientist in fact ‘might be similar to ancient people … because we have all been inclined to look back in time to religious forms of life that we understand so poorly to invent metaphors and practices to orient our own collective lives’ (130). Along the same lines, Hegarty offers another astute critique of Kinsey in a discussion of Kinsey’s famous research on gall wasps. In wasps, Kinsey found something similar to what he would discover later in human sexual behavior – that all wasps in the ‘natural’ environment of the American West were distinct from each other or ‘queer’. In Kinsey’s mind, then, it was wrong to split insects or men into separate species such as homosexuals and heterosexuals. Especially ‘in certain of the most remote rural areas’, Kinsey argued, ‘there is considerable homosexual activity among lumbermen, cattlemen, prospectors, miners, hunters’ (76). In such an environment, it was more appropriate to assume that there are countless variations in American life, ‘whether [among] wasps or WASPS’ (77). Here, Hegarty calls attention to how an image of the American frontier is underpinning Kinsey’s studies of both insects and humans. Such an idealized image, Hegarty warns, assumes that queer individuals are those who ‘evolve[d] a distinctiveness from their European forebears’ (ibid.). As with Judaism, the ‘othering’ of queerness or non-queerness can become a dangerous rationale for exclusion.
The fascinating way in which Hegarty offers a range of analyses also invites the reader’s curiosity about the more unsettled elements of his discussion. For instance, Hegarty seems to blur premarital and extra-marital sex and their potentially different impacts on marriage. Cultural sources of the 1950s such as Playboy magazine suggest that premarital affairs became more acceptable for men after the Second World War. As this reviewer sees it, this shift occurred in part because the war seemed to compromise American masculinity by producing ‘psychopathic personalities’ and post-traumatic breakdowns. Scientists of the era increasingly recognized these ‘imperfections’ in masculinity and, at the same time, tried to find ways to repair them. The progressively permissive attitude toward bachelors wanting sex was one consequence of this effort. The tolerance of extramarital affairs, in contrast, was more muted. In this light, seeing pre- and extramarital affairs in continuum is not wholly persuasive. At least, it would have been useful if there were a discussion of how the specific historical setting of a wartime society played a role in the sexual politics of psychology. Along the same lines, this reader could not help but wonder how the changing understanding of sexual identity among ordinary Americans might have contributed to aspects of the scientific culture that Hegarty discusses. The US public’s understanding of sexuality was not static in the era that encompassed Kinsey and Terman. Indeed, as scholars such as Wendy Kline and Johanna Schoen have shown, different meanings of sexuality were lived by countless Americans, ranging from millionaires to poor immigrants and people of color (Kline, 2001; Schoen, 2005). To take an example, some Americans experienced eugenics-inspired policies of forced sterilization as coercion, while others considered them to be the best available option for pursing their sexual integrity. How, then, did their perspectives shape scientific concepts of ‘adequate’ and ‘ideal’ sexuality? And of ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ environments for sexual behavior? Was popular thought irrelevant to science? If so, why? Social and cultural inquiry of this kind does not always inform Hegarty’s analysis.
However, these critiques are what Hegarty’s fascinating story provokes, not about shortcomings of what he intends to accomplish. His narrative is distinctively interdisciplinary and will doubtless appeal to readers with a wide range of scholarly interests. His book not only offers new perspectives on Kinsey and Terman, but it also places them in the important dynamism that powerfully shaped the early- to mid-century US culture of science. It is a creative work of scholarship that should inform and inspire anyone interested in histories of psychology, sexuality, intelligence, queerness and normativity.