![]() Intent on “normalizing” the highly intelligent young people that he studied, Terman had a vested interest in some of Kinsey’s findings. Terman’s reception of sbhm was informed by his own research on gendered personalities, marital happiness, and especially his work on a long-term study of “gifted” children. He reads their pronouncements and silences for insight into how personal views and research agendas influenced current understandings of intelligence, sexuality, and normality. Their disagreements about the elusive relationship between sex and intelligence engaged other vital questions: What is “good science”? What is “normal”? Exploring how these queries were answered, Hegarty demonstrates, not surprisingly, that Terman and Kinsey were far from dispassionate researchers. Terman’s particular objections to Kinsey’s work provided the impetus, and serve as a framing device, for Hegarty’s study of the mutually constitutive ways by which ideas about intelligence and sexuality were fashioned in the twentieth century. Like other critics, Terman took issue with Kinsey’s interviewing and sampling methods and his reduction of human sexuality to a tally of sexual “outlets.” But Terman also scrutinized “some data patterns in SBHM that other critics were happy to leave alone, and he staked some odd claims in the course of challenging Kinsey on these points” (11). In 1948, Alfred Kinsey’s controversial landmark study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington, 1948) (hereinafter sbhm), prompted an unsolicited, lengthy, and negative review in the journal Psychological Bulletin by intelligence-testing pioneer Lewis Terman.
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