I haven’t sat down for the entire movie, but there’s a scene from Kinsey that keeps popping into my head as I consider the paper Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, John Holsinger, wrote for the United Methodist Church’s Committee to Study Homosexuality back in 1991.  Bear in mind that Holsinger wrote that paper, not as a fellow believer, but as a doctor of medicine.

The scene is a doctor’s office.  Kinsey and his wife are trying, uncomfortably, to discuss their unsatisfactory sex with him.  The couple is having trouble achieving sexual intimacy.  Kinsey’s wife Clara endures great pain whenever he tries to have sex with her.  The doctor holds up a ruler and asks Clara to indicate how big her husband’s erect penis is on it.  She seems befuddled.  But it’s more then simple embarrassment at discussing such an intimate detail.  The doctor moves his fingers along the ruler.  This big?  No?  This big?  No?   Eventually Clara works up a little nerve, reaches over, and moves the doctors finger to a point somewhere Past the end of the ruler.  The doctor nods.  No wonder you were experiencing pain, he tells her, and he suggests they take a somewhat different approach to intercourse.

The scene is intended as a bit of humor, but it has a point.  Clara thought that the problem was with her.  She had no way of knowing that it wasn’t.  Back before Kinsey began his famous studies of human sexuality, people lived in almost perfect ignorance of how humans actually have sex.  Oh most people thought they knew, certainly.  But what they knew, as the shock and outrage clearly revealed when Kinsey finally published, was mostly a collection of handed down folk tales and dirty jokes.  Real facts about human sexuality were few and far between because no one had actually rigorously and dispassionately studied it.  Before they visited their doctor, neither one of the Kinseys understood how physically mismatched they were, and that it meant they had to be a tad creative in their approach to sexual intimacy. 

Which leads to this other thing that leaped out at me.

The structure and function of the male and female human reproductive systems are fully complementary. Anatomically the vagina is designed to receive the penis.
–Pathophysiology Of Male Homosexuality by James W. Holsinger Jr., M.D.

A penis wasn’t designed for an anus.  The parts don’t fit.  Heterosexual intercourse is complementary…homosexual intercourse is physically damaging…  Gay men have had this thrown in our faces for decades now.  Never mind that many of us know from first hand experience that it isn’t true…the hate machine doesn’t want to actually hear from the people it’s talking about.  On and on and on like a broken record, they keep insisting that male homosexual intercourse is well nigh physically impossible, in contrast to heterosexual intercourse in which tab ‘A’ just naturally slides into slot ‘B’.  But that’s not true.  Male same sex couples have thrilling and blissfully contented sex every day and the only thing damaged by it are the lies bigots have been pounding into their heads for ages.  And even opposite sex couples sometimes just aren’t physically well matched for each other.

I don’t like discussing my sex life in public.  That’s not because I’m ashamed of it, or of anything I’ve ever done with another guy in my arms.  But those moments are precious to me.  And it’s not only my privacy that I have to consider.  But I’m living in a time when the sex lives of gay men are a cultural battle ground and our enemies shrink from no filthy lie about us they think they can get away with, so long as it incites fear and loathing and hatred.  If we don’t talk about our sex lives, the only people who will are the ones who hate our guts and want everyone else to hate us too. 

So let me say that I can relate to poor Clara in some ways.  One guy I dated once upon a time, was just simply too damn big for me to comfortably have sex with him.  And I’m not just talking anal sex either.  But I was in love, so I tried this and I tried that, because I wanted to make him happy, and let’s face it, I wanted to enjoy having sex with him too.  But it was a struggle.  And to this day I wonder how much that played a part in our breaking up.  Thing is, he had tried the ex-gay thing previously, and had been married, and he’d told me that his former wife had the same problem having sex with him.  I wasn’t at all surprised to hear it.

A penis is designed for a vagina.  No…It isn’t that simple.  The fact is, depending on any number of factors, intercourse can be physically very painful, even damaging, to a woman.  It can be a struggle for some opposite sex couples to achieve sexual gratification during intercourse.  Over the course of my many road trips I’ve probably stopped at hundreds of truck stops, probably beheld hundreds of those ubiquitous condom vending machines…

The anus and rectum, unlike the vagina contain no natural lubricating function…

…each one advertising pre lubricated condoms…

The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are inserted into the rectum…

…and an assortment of “french ticklers”.  Holsinger goes on a tear in his paper about gay men inserting things into the anus of their partners as though it’s someone everyone does, and conversely something opposite sex couples do not do to a vagina.  It’s a fact the sex toy industry would be greatly surprised to hear.  In the comments section of Atrios post on Holsinger’s paper, one commenter tells of a woman who went to the ER to have rocks removed…

I had to get an ER doc to remove my diaphram once. The damn thing was just stuck. I told the doc that I felt like an idiot and she said, "Oh no way. I take a lot more stuff out of there that shouldn’t be there." So of course I had to ask, "Like what?" And she told me that a few nights earlier she had taken a bunch of rocks out of some woman’s vagina. The woman and her partner apparently experimented with all kinds of objects to "enhance" intercourse.

Notice that the poster had to go herself, to get a perfectly common form of female birth control removed from Her vagina.  Now…the very thought of inserting a foreign object into my body, let alone the body of a lover, just completely disgusts me.  But that’s my own particular sexual temperament.  Don’t fucking tell me that opposite sex couples aren’t doing that to each other every night all around the world.  And don’t…don’t even think of trying to tell me that a motherfucking doctor doesn’t know this.

Which brings me to my point.  But first…let us pause for a moment and think of poor Clara Kinsey.  She’s in the doctor’s office with her husband, and the doctor is holding out a ruler for her to indicate the size of Mr. Kinsey’s erect penis, and she is confused.  The doctor is telling her with that ruler, that you can measure the size of most men with a ruler.  If you think it’s laughable nowadays that anyone wouldn’t know that men come in all sizes and shapes, let alone that most men don’t actually have foot long dicks, much as some of them seem to wish, strangely, that they do, thank the Supreme Court of the hated Earl Warren, which struck down all those obscenity and censorship laws back in the 1950s, to the absolute horror of American right wingers and fundamentalist kooks.  Probably the first male penis poor Clara ever saw, was that of her husband’s on their first honeymoon night.  That’s why she thought there was something wrong with her when sex became painful.

She didn’t know.  Her husband didn’t either.  It would be years later that he undertook to study human sexuality.  But their doctor knew.  Good thing for that couple.  But he had to know. 

And so does Holsinger. 

When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above. Therefore, based on the simplest known anatomy and physiology, when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself!

What speaks for itself clearly, loudly, sickeningly, are this man’s words.  When he sat down to write that penises and vaginas are perfectly mated to each other, he knew, he had to know, that it isn’t always so.  He knew…he had to know…that sex with the wrong partner, let alone with an uncaring, aggressive one, can be damaging to a woman’s body.  He knew…he had to know…that opposite sex couples resort all the time to lubricants, and sex toys inserted into the vagina to enhance sexual pleasure.  He knew…He Damn Well Had To Know…that sexually transmitted disease is easily spread during penile/vaginal intercourse, and that before the advent of antibiotics, it was often as incurable and lethal as AIDS was in 1991

But he also knew this: that he was writing for a bunch of sexually ignorant rubes who would believe it if he told them otherwise, so he could make the sex that gay men have look ugly and unnatural. 

He used his degree to give his lies authority.  And he did it in the name of God, and in the name of morality.  And that is why he’s George Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General.  His moral values, his instinctive sense of right and wrong, are those of the religious right, and the republican party.  Let’s hear it for virtuous men.

[Edited a tad…]