The ethics of researching men’s room sex

Thanks, Henry. On a tangent, this might be the place to mention something that didn’t really fit in the article.

In the unfinished manuscript left at his death, Humphreys described meeting with a prominent Dixiecrat politician and his wife in 1948. When the politician left the room, she started to undo Humphreys’s tie so that they could all have a little party, as was their wont.

The biography of Humphreys explains that “this archconservative longtime segregationist served as U.S. Senator from South Carolina from 1954 until shortly before his death in 2003.” But the at least the authors don’t actually, you know, name him.

Scott – wow, just wow. How long did it take before you got that image out of your head?

John – in On The Road Kerouac describes going to a bar where the there were players of enough action of all kinds that Kinsey had visited professionally. Also that WB was a denizen. But why do you say ‘skewing the sample’, as opposed to ‘oversampling subpopulations’ which is entirely legitimate statistically, or even just ‘sampling’ full stop?

I think the issue of going undercover transcends just the ethical aspect as there is also the practical and the legal issues to consider.

For examaple, documentarians with their video lens in view can never be sure that the subjects are not playing for the camera. It’s as if the observation is not interferring with the natural occurance/behaviour in an almost Heisenberg manner.

This would suggest that announcing one’s intention to record the interaction would affect the outcome – not allowing for objective observation.

Also, the recorded interaction might just be artifice, which may be why many call such representations (studies/newscasts) stilted and biased.

The other aspect is misrepresentation. Undercover cops do it all the time. This brings up entrapment. Would events have followed with without prodding from the observer?

Then there is the legal issue of unauthorized snooping. Point in case, if a private investigator spies, befriends and tapes an ex-wife, lover, etc. it is legal. If I try and do it, it’s called stalking.

Morally, I think those distinctions may disappear as we move to the total surveillance society.

So ethically, did this grad student transgess the bounds between observer and participant, at a point in time when privacy is being overturned by government fiat, probably yes. Does it matter? Maybe not.

To end on a cynical note, I think we are at the end of privacy as we know it – Quo custodiet ipso custodes

Vivian: I don’t have a reference but my memory is that Kinsey’s sampling procedures were pretty erratic.

Scott,

It takes some effort, but sadly, I probably can imagine–better than I’d like.

11: Only the economists who worked for Enron…

13–

Injecting blue dye into the brown-colored contact lenses that blue-eyed people wear to make their eyes look brown.

“Yeah, Humphries’ book is a famous event within sociology, and it precipitated all kinds of hassle within (and for) the Wash U dept.”

Indeed, it is widely considered to be one reason the Wash U Sociology Department no longer exists.

The problem begins with the role of “objectivity” or objectification in observation. It’s the same problem with the journalism: useful or not it’s voyeurism based in unequal power relations.

I’m living for the next couple of months in a still semi-rural banlieu outside Beijing.
And shopping for vegatables by the side of the highway. My host is building a pleasure garden in a gated compound with a smokestack on the horizon. Two modern buildings, one designed by ai wei wei and one post and beam and ceramic tiled roof in the traditional manner, with logs cut an joined by a man with a table saw and an ax. If I were a photo journalist I’d be having a field day. The high tension power lines in the “backyard” are a sight. But the workers and the peasants I meet everyday are not data points. After a month or so I may ask permission to take some portraits of the farmers selling their produce or the food venders who gather along the road at the end of the day. Or the gatekeeper and his wife. To journalists people are zoo animals. These people are poor (but a lot less so than they used to be) but they deserve respect no mre or less than anyone else.
At the center of the ethic of anthropology is that of one person talking to another. That’s the moral foundation of the field, or at least it is suppposed to be, and it is supposed to weigh heavy on the mind of the human “researcher”. I’d vote to bypass the benefits of scientific objectification in the study of ourselves, in favor of the constant return to the moral and ethical question of conversation among equals; even equals who are in so many ways not.