Media activist, sworn enemy of child porn, and archenemy of the Kinsey Institute, its clandestine agenda through its puppets, Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler (what, no Screw?) and its all-pervasive influence in the academic community to legitimize homosexuality, masturbation, and pedophilia, based on the work of Alfred Kinsey.
Born Judith A. Gelertner in 1935, her early life was peaceful, dedicated to scholarship and music, until the fateful year of 1966, when her ten-year-old daughter was found in a compromising position with a friendly neighbor boy of thirteen. "I tried to tell him no," said her daughter, "but he said he thought I'd like it. I mean, he read so in Playboy." Horrified at this sacrifice of innocence at the hands of someone she now considered no better than an underage serial rapist, her rage turned impotent after the boy moved out of the country, leaving a trail of similar broken hearts behind him. Turning to her relatives, they callously shrugged that she may have not been so innocent after all: "After all, children are born sexual." An old school chum from Berkeley echoed this sentiment, and she wondered why everyone seemed to be turning against her.
Her next brush with harsh reality came as she was readying some material to be shown on the Captain Kangaroo show in 1973, where she acted as a part-time musician and on-screen singer/songwriter. Apparently, although the good Captain and the show's writers liked her songs, they were flopping with the show's viewers, who preferred faster-paced material, similar to the cartoons popular at the time. Rather than compromise her artistic integrity to what she saw as a media industry increasingly devoted to violent entertainment, she took her severance pay, and used it on an advanced degree in Communications.
Henceforth, she styled herself as "Dr." Judith A. Reismanm, however, she felt a growing dissatisfaction with academic life, which to her seemed too abstract and philosophical to address life's painful realities. In 1977, witnessed a small skirmish between the cleaning staff of a small college in Wales with academics presenting a panel discussion of child and adolescent sexuality -- as long as they were going to host child molesters, the charwomen and cooks decreed, they would go on strike. Instead of being outraged at this subversion of academic freedom, she found herself strangely touched by the fact that these poor, uneducated women should choose to protect their children rather than listen to the college president's assurances that these were scientists and writers, a stand-off that mirrored her conflict between her role as a dispassionate member of the academic community and her own personal anguish.
It was on her way home from this debacle that a mysterious man spoke to her.
"Kinsey and Pomeroy -- one was a homosexual, and one was a pedophile." "Which is which?" she asked, surprised.
"Read and see." he replied, and left as mysteriously as he had arrived.
From that moment on, she states, her crusade began.
In 1981, she alleged that Playboy, et al. had published 6000 pictures, cartoons, and other materials depicting children erotically, and applied and recieved a grant of more than $700,000 from the Justice Department to research the links between this body of pedophile porn and Alfred Kinsey.
Unfortunately, her resulting paper was a mess: her definitions of "child" and "pornography" were so loose as to be almost meaningless (at one point, she refers to the love scene from Romeo and Juliet -- apparently in Zefferelli's film -- as child pornography) while her arguments inevitably led to the foregone conclusion that evil lurked in Bloomington. During the research, she blamed every setback on the evil Kinsey Institute, up to and including the refusal of her university to publish her findings. Neither did the Justice Department see her work as of merit: one critique of her work referred to her as having a "Disneyland attitude" towards children that was totally out of step with reality. For six years, her findings languished, then were finally published by a conservative small press.
Much of her case rests on Table 34 in Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, which details frequency of orgasms in preadolescents ranging from 5 months to 14 years. This table, she alleges, is a "smoking gun", which was derived from experiments by pedophiles directed by Kinsey, aided by a Nazi SS officer (experienced in the rape and torture of children) who regularly sent back progress reports from Germany, where Kinsey Institute-sponsored experiments were conducted using concentration camp victims. Where are these innocents, she asks, sacrificed on the altar of a Moloch-like Science? Why is there no discussion in academic circles of the militantly atheistic Kinsey's plans to dismantle marriage altogether in favor of eugenic breeding farms? Unfortunately, we may never know, if only because there were no experiments.
Kinsey's sole information-gathering tool was the interview, and of the nearly eight thousand sexual histories he gathered, only eight came from pedophiles, most of whom were already in prison. However, one individual, codenamed "Rex King", who claimed to have seduced several hundred minors, from infants on upwards from the year 1917 onwards, and had kept voluminous records of his conquests, and a good part of Table 34 was derived from these records. Other data was gathered from mothers making observations of their own children, a good deal was gleaned from people recalling their own childhoods and a few interviews were conducted with children themselves. (It is to be noted that under no condition were sexual histories taken from children without a teacher or parent in the room.) Moreover, Dr. Kinsey, throughout his life, was a staunch defender of marriage on emotional and practical grounds, if not religious, and believed strongly in protecting and nurturing children to their greatest potential. To cast him as a gay pedophile, cold-bloodedly ordering the death of innocents to fuel sado-masochistic "inner demons", is ludicrous.
Meanwhile, she had other fish to fry as a consultant for the prosecution in the obscenity case of the People vs. the Cincinnati Art Center in re. "The Perfect Moment" exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. When her allegations against the Kinsey Institute reached Bloomington, the Institute issued a polite response debunking her claims; and she in turn, sued them. In 1994, Reisman's case was thrown out of court "with prejudice" (meaning that she could never refile the case).
Nowadays, Reisman writes regularly for evangelical magazines, posing as a child psychologist and roundly denouncing the influence of the evil entomologist at every turn, and has been quoted at length by Laura Schlesinger and the National Review. If her smear campaign against the Kinsey Institute seemed likely to result in better and more ethical survey design or a better science of sexology, all this would be worth it. Unfortunately, even if her allegations were true, this is not likely to be the case. To her, the whole idea of sexology is to be dismantled: if it weren't for busybodies with scoresheets pointing out the inconvenient facts of life, venereal disease would cease to exist, marital infidelity (she appears to be divorced) would become unknown, and children would play innocently until a decorous sexual awakening in their early Twenties.
Most recently, she has promoted the concept of "erototoxins", hypothalamic hormones that cause addiction to pornography and masturbation, serial rape, and erectile dysfunction, but are suppressed in "normal" intercourse. We may not have heard the last of this troubled woman.