The greatest risk the movie takes is in attempting to deal frankly with its hero's own sex life without succumbing to prurience or easy moralism. Sometimes his scientific zeal shaded into obsession, and his methods went from the empirical to the experimental in ways that remain ethically troubling. "Is there a Mrs. Kinsey?'' wondered a scanda-lized matron in a famous magazine cartoon published in the wake of the best-selling Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Kinsey.
In undertaking his sex research, Kinsey set out to document what was normal, and discovered a universe of variation. In publishing his findings, he horrified some readers and titillated others, but the implications of his work, as presented in this humane and serious film, go far beyond mamma-lian physiology or human behavior. Each of us is different, and none of us is alone.
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