Daily Inspiration Quote by Bill Condon

Kinsey and Freud: two brands of sexual modernity that are supposed to be on the same team. Bill Condon’s line snaps that comforting storyline in half. If Kinsey “thought that Freud in his own way was as dangerous as the Catholic Church,” the sting is in the equivalence. One is an institution famous for policing bodies; the other is the patron saint of talking about them. Pairing them implies that liberation can curdle into control the moment it hardens into doctrine.

Condon, a director drawn to charged biographies and the politics of respectability, is also telegraphing a very cinematic insight: the real antagonist isn’t prudishness, it’s certainty. The Catholic Church represents external authority, a moral monopoly enforced through shame and ritual. Freud represents a newer, sleeker authority: the expert’s gaze, the diagnostic label, the story of the self you’re trained to accept. Kinsey’s project was empirical and taxonomic too, but he framed it as description rather than destiny. Freud’s psychoanalysis, in Kinsey’s skeptical view, risks turning sex into a dramaturgy of hidden causes - a system where you’re never just doing something, you’re “acting out” something.

The subtext is a warning about how cultures swap costumes without changing the script. Replace priest with analyst, confession with session, sin with symptom: you still end up with a hierarchy deciding which desires are healthy, mature, normal. Condon isn’t dunking on Freud so much as stressing how quickly any sexual narrative can become another church.