Ostracized for her voice on female orgasms… Guess who!
- Mar 18
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 19
This week I wanted to draw your attention to sex researcher and author, Shere Hite. For most, this name will not ring a single bell despite the fact that her 1976 book, The HITE REPORT, revolutionized our understanding of human sexuality and the female orgasm while remaining among the top 30 best selling books of all time.
Introducing Shere Hite
Hite was a prolific writer, scholar, model, actress and charismatic business woman. She was a feminist by necessity. Her voice shattered cultural norms and upset the status quo when it comes to male and female sexuality.
A Midwest girl from St. Joseph’s, Missouri, Hite emerged from a turbulent childhood; an absent father and a mother who abandoned her twice. This did not slow her down. Instead, it built character and helped solidify her sexually charged, feminist voice.
After getting her masters degree in History at University of Florida in 1967, Hite headed to New York City to study for her PHd at Columbia University. A self starter, she would struggle financially most of her life. In New York she scraped by with modeling and odd jobs to put herself through graduate school.
By the mid-60's the Civil Rights movement overshadowed women’s rights. Despite “The Pill” hitting the market in 1960 it was still a 'man’s world' and women continued to take a backseat, especially in academia. Female sexuality and pleasure were considered taboo and not worthy of discussion, much less doctoral study.
To make ends meet, while studying at Columbia, Hite modeled and posed nude for Playboy Magazine, a move the moral establishment and powers that be could not handle. She would not finish her PHd due to the hostile and conservative nature at Columbia University.
Hite fought the patriarchy ever before it was fashionable. While she did not start out gunning to be a feminist it quickly found her. Her research and surveys were initiated while volunteering at the National Organization for Women. It was here she first confronted the absence of discourse around female pleasure.
The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality
Selling over 50 million copies, Hite’s most well known book, The Hite Report, was published in 1976. Hite believed that the ease by which women orgasm during masturbation contradicted traditional stereotypes about female sexuality. While Masters & Johnson conducted their research in a lab, Hite surveyed women nationally concluding that 70% of women did not climax through thrusting intercourse but, instead, achieved orgasm easily by clitoral stimulation and masturbation.
Hite believed that society influenced the cultural and personal construction of the sexual experience. Her large public surveys would expose cultural shame and misinformation around coital orgasms and female self pleasure.
Fast forward 50 years, self love and coital stimulation all seem very obvious to us now. It was Hite’s ground breaking surveys that would shake the very foundation of heterosexual pleasure.
Acknowledging the clitoris and female self pleasure would take the world by surprise. By her next book/surveys the patriarchy were ready and far less forgiving.
Hite’s next survey included over 7K American men and explored their feelings and experiences regarding sexuality, relationships, and various sexual practices based, again, on thousands of anonymous questionnaires and carefully digested analytics. This time the establishment was ready and would fight to keep the status quo entrenched. This time, exposing male vulnerabilities, Hite found herself subjected to vicious attacks. The media would turn on her, the hornets were freed.
Emboldened with the success of her first books and the noticeable change in the cultural zeitgeist, Hite pushed on.
This time she went too far, shaking cultural norms to their core. In 1987 she published, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress. In this survey Hite analyzed the emotional relationships between men and women based on data from 4,500 women. She aimed to shatter outdated notions about relationships and she did just that. Hite explored love, passion and emotional violence revealing that women also loved sex and it was married women that were having affairs with married men.
Wait… What? How could that be?
Women wanted sex as much as men?
This was a concept that enraged the outspoken and resulted in "vicious media attacks, doorstepping, public humiliation and death threats, all of which contributed to the loss of her American publishers and of her ability to make a living."
Like so many authentic voices of her time, Hite was run out of her Country. She fled to Germany in 1995 and lived the rest of her life in Europe.
This was a concept that enraged the outspoken and resulted in "vicious media attacks, doorstepping, public humiliation and death threats, all of which contributed to the loss of her American publishers and of her ability to make a living."
Like so many authentic voices of her time, Hite was run out of her Country. She fled to Germany in 1995 and lived the rest of her life in Europe.
Throughout this series I share my favorite female icons. Each voice defied cultural stigmas, each faced their sexuality and embraced it, each encountered innumerable challenges and were ostracized for their unbreakable stance. These women were able to free their minds from social constraints and, if we chose to listen, remind us that it is ok to be feminine and what that really means.
When breaking norms, one must think differently than the culture that has shaped us. To do so, expect society and powers that be to put up a fight!
Change is seldom welcome when protecting what is yours.
For women like Shere Hite, while the fight may have felt lost in her lifetime it is won over the passage of time only to be celebrated decades later as common sense catches up with culture.
Tanya Tip: Check out the biological documentary film: The Disappearance of Shere Hite. Directed by Nicole Newnham and narrated by Dakota Fanning, this enlightened film had its premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and can be found streaming via Amazon Prime.
During this month of March, as we celebrate women, I will continue to bring you the voices that stood up to misogyny and brought common sense to cultural norms.
Follow and share YestoSex weekly newsletter. oOYes.love/blog
Comentarios