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Hite’s Sex Study that Aroused Feminists
American-German sexologist Shere Hite was born on the 2nd of November 1942 in Missouri, U.S.A. In 1976, at the height of a second feminist wave in America, when she was still a young, unknown graduate student, she published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. The book sold some 50 million copies worldwide. Although the study was deemed as limited by the methodology Hite used to collect data, there were groundbreaking discoveries in her book which changed the direction of research on female sexuality thereon. Hite wrote that, “Our whole society’s definition of sex is sexist, oriented around male orgasm and the needs of reproduction. This definition is cultural, not biological.” The main idea of her book was the shattering of the myth, established by sexologists Masters and Johnson, that women received sufficient stimulation during basic intercourse to reach climax. A popular anecdote reveals the motivation behind Hite taking up this research:
Her conversion to feminism happened almost by chance when she was sent to take part in a TV commercial for Olivetti typewriters. “They were teasing my hair into some ridiculous beehive thing,” she recalls. “I said I thought I’d got this commercial because I could type well – and that’s when I found out.” Hite had been chosen not for her typing skills but her looks; the company’s new slogan was “the typewriter that’s so smart she doesn’t have to be”. “It made me into a feminist,” says Hite. “I read about a group of women picketing Olivetti and I joined them (…)Soon she started attending meetings of the New York chapter of the National Organisation of Women. At one of the meetings, the topic for discussion was the female orgasm…” (The Independent, 30 April 2006).
Perversely, she became the face of the Olivetti advert and also posed nude in Playboy, so Hite did indeed choose to use her image to get by – she supported herself through university by modelling. Instead of fighting the system, she staged her protest against the objectification of women through her writing. Hite’s beauty equally disarmed and alarmed her critics; the stereotypical figure of the butch feminist had now acquired the face and figure of a desirable young woman with a mind of her own and clear needs which she wasn’t afraid to express. Religious groups were appalled by her endorsement of female self-pleasure and conservative social groups accused her of contributing to the dissolution of the family unit by allowing women too much independence sexually.
“Six years earlier Germaine Greer had told women they were female eunuchs; now here was another brilliant young woman explaining why.” (The Independent 30 April 2006). Hite collected data from 3500 women, controversially, through essay questionnaires rather than multiple choice ones, which would have fed the subjects predetermined answers. These proved that women do not have a problem reaching orgasm, but, rather, that society has a problem in accepting how they reach it. 70% of Hite’s subjects admitted not achieving satisfaction through intercourse, but had no problem climaxing through self-stimulation. “Shouldn’t we just rethink the idea of what sex is and what equality is? That’s what I went around the country saying” Hite proclaimed. In The Case of the Female Orgasm (2005), Elisabeth A. Lloyd, continued this line of enquiry, criticising Masters and Johnson who diagnosed women incapable of intercourse climax as being frigid, or rather suffering from ‘sexual dysfunction’.
Hite showed that there was nothing wrong with women themselves, but the cultural assumptions about them. “I was saying that penetration didn’t do anything for women and that got some people terribly upset. Men heard (…) that they weren’t doing it right in bed, and that made some media moguls angry”, she said. Ironically, Playboy, among others, named her book ‘The Hate Report’, claiming it was “anti-male”. (Julie Bindel in The Guardian, Friday 13 May 2011). The reaction of U.S. media, including Time magazine and protest groups was so vitriolic that Hite ended up renouncing her American citizenship and moving to Europe. The claims that her research methods were unscientific angered her most. It seems that in the 1970s, the credibility of women was far from satisfactory even over a century since being labelled hysterical. “I feel I have contributed significantly to methodology. None of the media read the long explanation in my report of how I did the research,” says Hite. “After all, Freud only interviewed three Viennese women.” ( The Guardian, Friday 13 May 2011).
So, stick this in your pipe and smoke it, Dr Freud!
A R T L▼R K 
Awesome post
Thank you
Sadly, the misconception still is alive and well about orgasms
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Wonderful post! And I second your closing line. Stick it up your pipe. And keep smoking!
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Hite was criticized for her methodology but I think the nonsensical results of Masters and Johnson are a good example where this “scientific” method leads to when applied to the human psyche in an unrefelcted way. Human sexuality is not an exclusively biological phenomenon but also cultural. Cultural phenomena are the result of historical processes involving human creativity. Humans are able to produce novel phenomena. A multiple choice questionair would only show what the researchers expect and thus “prove” what are actually the researcher’s biases.
The idea behind the multiple-choice questions and similar methods in psychology is that the human beeing must function according to fixed laws, and psychology, in order to qualify as a proper science, must find these laws. The creative nature of humans and of human culture, on the other hand, means that such fixed laws do not exist. What comes out of such research then is just the prejudices that had been put in initially. What looks like science is actually pseudo-science. So Hite not only exposed the sexist nature of the common concept of sex at the time but also the questionable methodology of some of the science.
The open, non-restrictive questions of Hite, on the other hand, produced a lot of interesting new insights. So indeed I think that she also made an important contribution to methodology. The reactions of some people to her work had to be expected since, as you cite her, the societies concept of sex was a sexist one.
Those people should better open-mindedly read her books!
I find it a very good idea to bring her work here back into focus.
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If her book sold 50 million copies while she was still an undergraduate then she must have been a millionaire before even graduating and would have been richer than Freud himself in his 80’s. Yet she still used her looks to make a point and posed for playboy magazine, now I am curious I would love to know how she ended up in a big ranch some where in Europe with a big family or a died alone in a studio in France or Germany.
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