The researcher who upended views of sexuality
Shere Hite 1942–2020
Shere Hite changed the way people think about women and sex. In a 1976 book built on a survey of 3,500 women, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, she challenged traditional male views of sex, depicting a nation of women who found standard intercourse unfulfilling and achieved greater pleasure on their own. By depicting unsatisfied women as understimulated rather than frigid, the book “sparked a revolution in the bedroom,” said Ms. magazine, selling more than 48 million copies. Hite followed it with a report on male sexuality, depicting American men as riddled with performance anxiety. Critics assailed the lack of rigor in her methodology; Playboy called her “anti-male.” But she was hailed by women who saw her books as an extension of the 1960s liberation movement. “Male sexology was laboratory-based,” said Hite. “Mine focused on real women’s experiences.”
She was born in St. Joseph, Miss., to a serviceman father and a 16-year-old mother, said The Times (U.K.). They soon divorced, and her mother married a truck driver; after they split, Hite was “raised primarily by grandparents,” and later by an aunt in Florida. She studied history at the University of Florida, then pursued a Ph.D. at Columbia University, but left “when she was told that she could not write her dissertation on female sexuality,” said The New York Times.
A part-time model, she posed for a typewriter ad, “caressing the keys.” Horrified when she saw the tagline—“The typewriter so smart, she doesn’t have to be”—Hite joined a group of women protesting the ad, and took up with the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. A meeting where “the topic was the female orgasm” led to the research that would become The Hite Report. Hite married a German pianist in 1985 and, “dispirited by her reception in the United States,” moved with him to Europe, said The Washington Post. Eventually, “she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a German citizen,” later moving to London with a second husband. She lectured and wrote several more books, with the topic of women’s fulfillment continuing to provide raw material. “All too many men still seem to believe,” she said in 2011, “that what feels good to them is automatically what feels good to women.”