SHERE HITE

SHERE HITE DIED WEDNESDAY

She was only 77. 

I realize this puts me smack in geezerdom to say that's young, but really!

For you youngsters, she authored the THE HITE REPORT: A NATIONWIDE STUDY OF FEMALE SEXUALITY, published in 1976.

I belonged to the NOW Chapter in Manhattan where the project was hatched, and was among the several thousand women who filled out the questionnaires that were the basis of the report. In fact it may even have been at one of my meetings that she got the idea in the first place. Remember, this was a time of Consciousness Raising Groups, and other forays into an independent sexual understanding for women. Do I need to make a glossary for this post?

THE HITE REPORT was an immediate bestseller, over 48 million sold worldwide. After all, it was the first book that told women that they were all right, and that they ought to have at least a 50% say in how lovemaking was accomplished. This was at a time when scholarly psychological works questioned if women could really consider themselves real women if they didn't have the much-revered vaginal orgasm.

It also exposed the author to hatred, vitriol, death threats, and worse. She fled the US, giving up her citizenship, to live in Europe, where her scholarship was taken more seriously. 

The REPORT was more than revolutionary. It revealed that "Over 70% percent of women responding," as Erica Jong (FEAR OF FLYING, 1973) said in a review of it, "didn't have an orgasm by male penetration alone."  The upended expectations, which liberated women to ask for and get, even outside a heterosexual relationship--shocking!--the clitoral stimulation most find necessary, enraged men.

Think of all the faking. How could that be tolerated? Admitted to? The frail male ego was simply not sturdy enough for the truth.

 She concluded, in part,  "Most of of the respondents to the questionnaires thought that the sexual revolution was a myth. It had left them free to say yes but not to say no." In other words, women of the sixties and beyond could have many partners as men, but the so-called sexual revolution did little to change the male-centric dynamic in bed. 

Her next book, also extensively researched and based on questionaires filled out by over 7000 men between the ages of 19 and 97, was another screaming outrage. THE HITE REPORT ON MALE SEXUALITY, 1981, revealed that repressed anger and infidelity were common in US marriages. That men had fears of their sexual adequacy.

In the #METOO age, that about men is not so surprising, but then the hypocrisy was accepted as truth. By and large, the men who demanded fidelity were thought to owe it too.

Years later, I interviewed Ms. Hite on my radio show, and her husband, (I'm not sure if it was Friedrich Horicke, the German pianist) came along. When the conversation turned to the horrors of the attacks against her, he added, "You can't imagine anything like it. She is getting death threats and accosted in the street just for telling the truth."