Shere Hite

IN 1976, A YOUNG grad student from Missouri dropped a bombshell into the bedrooms of the world, and blew apart our preconceptions about women’s sexuality. The Hite Report on Female Sexuality challenged the sexual status quo and defied male dominance. It became a worldwide publishing sensation, and turned its author into a hate figure among some men.

Feminist and sexologist Shirley Diana Gregory – better known as Shere Hite – grew up in America’s bible belt, but her research into sexuality scandalised the whole country. In her report, she posited a radical and utterly far-out theory: that women didn’t need men to give them an orgasm. From the time of Freud, it was widely accepted that women could only climax through penetrative sex – “the great male thrust” – and if they couldn’t, there must be something wrong with them. For frustrated women faking orgasm, the report was a godsend, alerting women to their own sexual power, and informing men of the existence of the clitoris.

But rather than welcoming Hite’s book, a serious academic study based on interviews with more than 3,000 women, the American male population saw it as an attack on their virility. Hite was cast as the witch queen of feminism, out to steal men’s mojo and turn women into onanistic she-devils. Playboy magazine dubbed it the “Hate Report”, but those who dismissed Hite as a Birkenstock-wearing militant man-hater were in for another shock when they discovered that Hite was actually a bit of a looker, and had posed naked in Playboy while studying at Columbia University. She had also posed provocatively in a typewriter ad to earn money for her college fees, but when she read the ad’s strapline, “The typewriter is so smart she doesn’t have to be”, she joined a feminist protest against the very ad she had appeared in.

text from https://hiteresearchfoundation.org/biography-pg46  – click on the link to read the full biography