MANNERS & MORALS: How to Stop Gin Rummy

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Missing Links. Far from justifying the grand inclusiveness of the book's title, this sampling has been denounced by British Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer as "so poor that the only reliable figures are those for [white U.S.] college graduates in six [northeastern and Midwestern] states." Kinsey himself admits that he has not yet assembled adequate data on men over 50, on infants and very young children, on the "rural population," on "a number of the religious groups," on factory workers, and on Negroes.

How did Kinsey, in his interviews, make allowances for boasting, covering up and lapses of memory? With adults, he depended largely on "looking an individual squarely in the eye, and firing questions at him with maximum speed." To many psychiatrists and pollsters, this seemed amazingly naive.

Wrote Columnist Dorothy Thompson: "While [the report] may be corrective of attitudes having no relationship to reality, [it] also hold the danger of being used to justify unbridled license. If this interpretation is drawn from a report so dubiously representative, its results may do more evil than good."