The movie "Kinsey," now showing in Honolulu, has sparked new interest in the pioneering sex researcher. The Fox Searchlight film, a sympathetic portrait, stars Liam Neeson as Kinsey and Laura Linney as his wife, Clara.

"He broke the taboo of silence. ... He was a visionary," says psychologist Julia Heiman, director of the 57-year-old Kinsey Institute.

Kinsey, who was a zoologist at Indiana University, worked with his staff to collect more than 18,000 interviews about Americans' sexual experiences. His findings became public in 1948 and 1953.

It was a time when people rarely talked about sex; women were often thought of as asexual; oral sex, even within marriage, was illegal in many states; and schools taught that masturbation was harmful.

No wonder the public reeled when Kinsey reported:

• Half of women had premarital sex; 2 out of 3 said they'd had orgasms before marriage.

• More than 9 out of 10 men masturbated; so did 3 in 5 women.

Kinsey's critics note that he didn't have a random sample: participants were disproportionately college educated and from Indiana. He also included male prisoners, which may have inflated his findings on homosexuality.

Liam Neeson portrays the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in the film "Kinsey." Twentieth Century Fox

Kinsey was basically a "counter" of sexual acts. Scientists today are focusing more on how emotions and the brain affect sexual function. Heiman specializes in the mind-body link and will take the Kinsey Institute, based at Indiana University, into new, high-tech directions.

She has studied physical changes during arousal, such as blood flow and heart rate. MRIs that show brain and pelvic changes in aroused, healthy adults may help in the development and testing of treatments for those with sexual problems, Heiman says.

People are more open about sex than in Kinsey's time, experts agree. And the Internet has had a "myth-busting" quality, says Joy Davidson, a Seattle sex therapist. The Net offers "reams of good information" for enriching and improving sex lives, she says.

Still, some signs suggest we've not become all that "liberated" in the past five decades. Most plastic 3-D models of women's genitals in sex education classes don't even have a clitoris, says Judith Seifer, a sex therapist for 29 years and faculty member at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.

In the '90s, "a rebound effect, a backlash" started against the sexual liberation of the '60s and '70s, adds Barnaby Barratt, a Detroit psychologist and president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. In the late '80s, 90 percent of U.S. medical schools taught human sexuality and there were 25 clinics for sexual problems; now 15 percent of medical schools teach sexuality, and there are about five clinics, Barratt says.

Funds for sex research are drying up, scientists say. And federal grants requiring "abstinence only" sex education for teenagers are making it harder to teach "safe sex" to the majority of kids who are sexually active, Barratt says.

Meanwhile, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States is five times higher than Europe's, where sex ed is often compulsory, Barratt says. Most heterosexual women with HIV are infected by their male, bisexual partners. Kinsey pioneered a 7-point scale for sexual orientation, from 100 percent gay to 100 percent straight, with many falling in between. "We still don't get it, and that's hurting us," Barratt says.

Kinsey also was far ahead of his time in emphasizing how different people were in their sexual behavior, a reality that aging baby boomers are trying (unsuccessfully) to deny, many sex experts say.

"Everyone thinks they should want sex three times a week till they're 70 or they must be abnormal. We all have to be alike, or we're just not 'normal,' " laments Leonore Tiefer, a New York sex therapist. Many older people don't crave a sex life like they had at 18, or they may enjoy going slower, with greater appreciation, Tiefer says.

Even 56 years after Kinsey, sex generates plenty of guilt and secrecy, she adds. "As a therapist, you hear it 10 times a day — 'I've never told this to anybody before.' It's because there's so much shame."

Kinsey had more than his share. His parents were "fire and brimstone" evangelicals, and he was not allowed to date. Ignorance was not bliss. He and his bride were virgins who could not have sex on their honeymoon because she had an anatomical problem that a physician needed to fix.