I didn't fully understand how divisive Kinsey was until after this episode came out and the comments started rolling in. The pushback was intense, and a lot of it centered on a specific claim: that Kinsey's research was connected to pedophilia. That framing is incorrect, but it's also widespread, and working through it in real time was clarifying.
Kinsey did research into pedophilia as part of his broader study of human sexuality. That's different from being a pedophile, or from endorsing it. But for people who weren't ready to engage with open conversations about sexuality at all, those distinctions got collapsed together. The discomfort with the research became conflated with the research itself. It's a reminder that scientific inquiry into sexuality has always faced this kind of resistance, and that the resistance often says more about the culture than about the science.