The Sexologist Who Unlocked the Female Orgasm
In the nineteen-eighties, the sexologist Shere Hite was on TV a lot, uttering words seldom heard there before: “orgasm,” “masturbation,” “clitoris.” They tended to make her fellow talk-show guests rutch around in their seats. Take an interview Hite did in 1982 on “The Mike Douglas Show,” in which she was wedged between the genial daytime host and the actor David Hasselhoff. In 1976, her book “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality” had become a huge best-seller. Its main takeaway was the then startling revelation that most women achieved orgasm not by means of vaginal intercourse alone—or what Hite, to the sniggering discomfiture of many audiences, often referred to as penile “thrusting”—but through manual or oral stimulation of the clitoris. This was before Sally showed Harry how easy it was for a woman to fake a beguiling orgasm; before Seinfeld couldn’t remember the name of a date (Dolores) whose name sort of rhymed with a part of the female anatomy; and before sex toys for women became a multibillion-dollar industry. Reported sightings of the clitoris were rare enough that the New York Times, in an article on Hite’s research, felt the need to locate it for those still searching around with a headlamp: “a pea-sized hooded organ above the vagina that sexologists regard as the female sex organ equivalent to the penis of the male.”
Douglas asked Hite how the women’s movement had affected “the male’s sexual response.” She responded, matter-of-factly, that it could only help. Men, in her most recent survey, had told her that they felt “a lot of pressures on them to perform. They had to get an erection, you have to have intercourse long enough for the woman to have an orgasm.” Her feminist-inspired research—soliciting detailed, anonymous accounts of how people felt about the sex they were having—showed that “most women can orgasm easily from clitoral stimulation and not from intercourse so much.” In a way, Hite said, this finding “opens things up so that everybody can enjoy intercourse . . . but not worry so much about the woman’s orgasm then,” as long as clitoral stimulation was somewhere on the program. Many men had the unfortunate impression that a “real man” should be able to make a woman orgasm through intercourse alone, and that, “if he didn’t, there was something wrong with her, or him.”
Poor David Hasselhoff. He was there to plug “Knight Rider,” the television series in which he starred as a sleek crime buster partnered with an intelligent car. Hite, meanwhile, was fearless in her candor and disarming in her person: soft-spoken, strikingly beautiful, with a cascade of strawberry-blond curls, a penchant for scarlet lipstick, and an elegant, overtly feminine wardrobe. On this occasion, she wore a lacy black cocktail dress and smoked a cigarette with the languid assurance of Marlene Dietrich in “Shanghai Express.” (Hite loved the films of the nineteen-thirties and forties and the commandingly glamorous women who anchored them.) Hasselhoff looked as if he had wandered into one of those bad dreams in which you have skipped class all term and must now sit for the final. He cleared his throat. He tugged at his tie. His leather jacket creaked audibly. “I know a lot of women, though, that, that . . .” He trailed off, but Douglas pressed him to complete the thought. “That don’t, uh, uh—how do you talk about this stuff?”
It’s a good question, and for many years Hite was among the people most dedicated—publicly, humanely, earnestly—to helping answer it. Hite, who died in 2020, at seventy-seven, was, from the late seventies into the nineties, quite famous. The books she wrote not only sold in the millions but were translated into multiple languages. When she began the research for “The Hite Report,” she was a struggling grad-school dropout living in a basement apartment with faulty heating. After it was published, she could afford to buy an apartment on Fifth Avenue, in the same building as Gene Simmons, of Kiss. “You’re a headline in just about every paper in this country, Miss Hite,” the tabloid TV host Maury Povich told her, in the late eighties, in the midst of a hostile interview.
But, like a color snapshot from an Instamatic, Hite’s celebrity faded. Two recent projects try to explain why, and to restore her place in the history of twentieth-century sex. “The Disappearance of Shere Hite,” an artful documentary directed by Nicole Newnham, narrated by Dakota Johnson and powered by terrific archival footage, came out in 2023. Hite never really disappeared, though. Public awareness of her did decline, and behind that decline is a story of reputation, sex, and sexism. Now, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of “The Hite Report,” there is “The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared” (Melville House), by Rosa Campbell, an Australian academic and activist based in London. Campbell writes in her preface that, when she told friends she was working on Hite, they shrugged and said they had never heard of her. Without glossing over Hite’s shortcomings, both temperamental and methodological, Campbell’s compact book makes a persuasive case for why they should have.
To appreciate Hite, it helps to think of her as a collector of first-person accounts and not as a scientist. Her own words don’t always make that easy. She spent a lot of time defending her work against the charge that the conclusions of her major studies—“The Hite Report” (1976), “The Hite Report on Male Sexuality” (1981), and “Women and Love” (1987)—were drawn from nonrandom samples and therefore could not claim statistical authority. Critics pointed out that her method gave undue weight to the unusual people willing to fill out the lengthy questionnaires she’d distributed, which covered everything from their masturbation habits to whether they ever cried themselves to sleep. But this was not quite the problem the critics—or Hite, as she rebutted them—seemed to think it was. Her work represented a legitimate trade-off. As she reasonably argued, a truly random sample was close to impossible in sex research, because a random slice of the population would not agree to answer such probing questions. In exchange for hearing from a self-selected group of respondents, she got remarkably intimate, frank, and detailed accounts from thousands of people.
Hite had wanted to call her 1976 book “Diana Rising,” after the Roman goddess. Her editor preferred “The Hite Report,” echoing the Kinsey Reports on human sexuality published in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties. Campbell writes that Hite even had letterhead embossed with “Hite Research.” There was no research institute, only Hite and a small group of assistants who took poorly paid jobs because they believed in the mission, all working out of her apartment. The solid, official-sounding “Report” in the title probably won attention for the book. It also encouraged expectations of scientific rigor that Hite was bound to disappoint.
Hite was not like other sexologists, with their academic affiliations and institutionally approved methods. She was not much like Alfred Kinsey, the primary author of the aforementioned reports and the founder of an actual institute, who died in 1956. Kinsey’s team of researchers conducted structured interviews about people’s sexual behavior, which famously revealed a far wider range of common activities and proclivities than had previously been acknowledged. (His research produced the so-called Kinsey scale, which proposed that sexual preference exists on a spectrum, rather than falling neatly into homosexual or heterosexual categories.)
She was even less like William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the husband-and-wife sexologists so often photographed in lab coats. Masters was a gynecologist, and the couple’s research centered on observing people’s physiological reactions during sex. Volunteers, initially sex workers, who came to, and in, their lab were connected by wires to monitors that measured heart rates and other metrics during partnered or solo sexual activities. Campbell writes that Masters and Johnson also deployed a dildo they called Ulysses, transparent and fitted with a miniature camera and a light, which allowed them to see inside the vagina during orgasm. In their defiantly bland textbook language, a couple in the throes was a “reacting unit.”
By contrast, Hite’s approach began with the survey she’d devised for her first study: some sixty pointed questions for women about how, when, and why they had sex. She printed them—at a gay anarchist print shop and commune in lower Manhattan—in rainbow ink on pastel paper, decorated with hearts and starbursts. As Campbell writes, they resembled a “teenage diary, not a clinical questionnaire,” a look that Hite hoped would invite unguarded replies, and probably did. Masters and Johnson, in their 1966 book, “Human Sexual Response,” defined orgasm as “those few seconds during which the vasoconcentration and myotonia developed from sexual stimuli are released.” Hite’s informants, precise in their own way, were more likely to offer a description like this: “a gradual tensing of my body which reaches a sharp peak then hits a thrilling plateau, a kind of screeching, sliding across a plane” that then “lets go in five to six fluttering convulsions.”
I remembered Hite, vaguely, as a slinky celebrity sexpert, a best-selling author of my youth, with Pre-Raphaelite hair and, I thought, a postfeminist brand. Until now, I had never read her books. I was surprised to learn, from Campbell’s account, how thoroughly Hite was formed by the women’s movement of the nineteen-seventies. Her books read less like sexology than like transcripts of the consciousness-raising sessions that were a hallmark of second-wave feminism—though the forensic specificity with which some of Hite’s respondents describe their orgasmic sensations and techniques remains pretty singular.
Hite argued, not always with analytical grace but with passionate sincerity, for a more egalitarian and empathetic world in and out of the bedroom. She published her most significant work at a moment when some of the fruits of second-wave feminism were newly visible: more women in the workforce than ever before, including in jobs long monopolized by men; a rising divorce rate, increasingly driven by women who had the financial wherewithal to leave bad marriages; a growing acceptance of the abortion rights then guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. Those shifts were also beginning to draw a backlash, including the rise of the Christian right and the conservative women’s movement led by Phyllis Schlafly, which Susan Faludi would later anatomize. Perhaps without meaning to, Hite’s first three reports, and especially the one about men, became messy, overstuffed real-time chronicles of intimate life being shaped by social change.
The future Shere Hite was born Shirley Diana Gregory in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1942. It was not a promising or privileged start. Her mother was a restless teen-ager, and her father was an Army conscript who was out of Shere’s life from the time she was an infant. Shere spent most of her childhood in the care of her grandparents, fundamentalist Christians who had rejected their daughter when she got pregnant. Hite remembered their home as very quiet, decorated mainly by images of Christ on the Cross. (As an adult, she would surround herself with ornate beauty—oil paintings, grand pianos, silk and velvet—whenever she could afford it.) Her mother turned up now and then. At one point, she brought the nine-year-old Shere to live, briefly, with a stepfather (whose last name, Hite, she kept) and a baby brother. Campbell writes that Shere’s mother spent many of her subsequent years in and out of psychiatric institutions. After “The Hite Report” was published, she wrote to her daughter to apologize for “all my wrongs I’ve done to you personally,” and to ask for her help publishing a book of Bible stories for children.
Her grandparents eventually divorced, and when Hite was a teen-ager they sent her to Daytona Beach, Florida, to live with a kindly aunt. Eager to secure her place, Hite tried, as Campbell puts it, to “perform poise and popularity,” joining the cheerleading squad at Seabreeze High and learning to navigate the double standard—to be sexually alluring but apparently innocent of sexual desire. At home, she lay on the floor listening to music and dreaming of a more exalted life.
After she graduated from the University of Florida, in the late sixties, Hite’s future took on a definite shape. She would move to New York, enroll in the history graduate program at Columbia, and write a thesis on women’s sexuality across time. Her dream was shaken by an early meeting with the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, with whom she had hoped to study. He told her he had read her master’s thesis but doubted that she had written it; he did not believe the University of Florida library could have held the books she cited. Hite experienced the encounter as an instance of “class prejudice in addition to gender prejudice, overtly expressed.” In any case, the Columbia doctoral program felt staid. She left after a year or so.
Hite wanted to remain in New York, but how to afford it? Friends had suggested she try modelling, and, for a while, she found it an easy enough way to make a living. She posed for illustrators who drew racy paperback-cover art and the poster of the James Bond movie “Diamonds Are Forever.” She did nude or seminude work for sex shops, skin magazines, and playing cards, and, Campbell learned, she once acted in what Hite described as a “grade C” porno film. Hite remembered that last experience fondly, as an opportunity to “see so many naked bodies, all kinds and shapes.” What began to chafe was the upkeep—hours devoted to hair, makeup, nails—when she longed to be reading and writing and thinking.
It was not an underground nudie job that finally pushed Hite out of modelling and into the women’s movement. It was a respectable, and flagrantly sexist, advertising campaign for Olivetti electric typewriters in which she was cast as a fetching secretary. As she recalled it, the tagline was to be something like “The typewriter that’s so smart that she doesn’t have to be.” When she learned that women were protesting such ads, she gathered her nerve and attended a meeting of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. At one point, she leaned over and told the woman beside her that she was the model in one of the offending advertisements. Her seatmate promptly announced this to the room. The reaction, Hite recalled, was “You see! Even the women in the ads don’t like them!”
Soon, Hite was going to marches and consciousness-raising meetings. “The conversations we had in the movement, and the esprit de corps, were wildly intoxicating,” she wrote in her memoir. “The movement’s intellectual debates made Columbia University’s look pale and anaemic.” The one letdown was that her new friends were not more willing to talk openly about what disappointed them sexually, and about what rang their bells. For Hite, understanding how sex actually worked for people, or did not, offered a key to understanding gender relations more broadly. “A woman’s place in sex,” she wrote, “mirrors her place in the rest of society.” Perhaps, she thought, an anonymous survey would yield the revelations she was missing.
By 1972, Hite was riding around Manhattan on a motorbike, her “vintage lace gown streaming out behind her,” as Campbell writes, stopping to hand questionnaires to any woman who would take one. She mailed surveys to NOW chapters and university women’s centers, and placed notices about them in church newsletters and in such magazines as Mademoiselle and Bride’s.
In the end, she received responses from more than three thousand women, in nearly every state. Selection bias aside, it was an impressive haul for an X-rated essay exam that nobody had to take. Women answered questions on everything from their first sexual experiences to how aging affected their sexuality. As Campbell notes, Hite had little to say about race in “The Hite Report.” But she did include an upbeat chapter on lesbianism, a bold choice for a late-seventies book aimed at a wide audience. (According to Campbell, Hite was bisexual.)
The big eyeopener from “The Hite Report,” though, was that seventy per cent of women in her sample did not orgasm regularly from heterosexual intercourse, while many reliably did from various forms of clitoral stimulation, including masturbation. This testimony challenged a still dominant set of assumptions: that women’s orgasms were harder to achieve and inherently weaker than men’s, and that failure to climax from vaginal intercourse signalled a neurotic block, best treated through psychological intervention. That last notion came, in part, from Freud. In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” he had argued that a woman reached sexual maturity and normalcy when her infantile “erotogenic susceptibility” was transferred “from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice.” His American followers helped keep that turn-of-the-century doctrine respectable, and for many women shame-inducing, well into the nineteen-seventies.
From their laboratory observations in the late fifties and early sixties, Masters and Johnson had reached a different conclusion: that all female orgasms were, in fact, clitoral. They still thought women should be able to achieve clitoral orgasms through the “mechanical traction” of heterosexual intercourse. (Hite acknowledged that this worked for some people, and could be plenty of fun in its own right, but as a means to female climax it struck her as a bit of a “Rube Goldberg model.”) Anne Koedt, of the New York Radical Women, published an important essay in 1968 titled “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” But that work circulated mainly among committed women’s liberationists. Hite had the receipts. And she had a best-seller.
In the years after the book appeared, women of all kinds wrote to Hite to express their fervent appreciation: suburbanites and city dwellers, housewives and former nuns, “stewardesses” and students. (Campbell spent some fruitful time combing through such letters in Hite’s archive, which is held at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library.) Over and over, women told Hite that they had felt there was something wrong with them sexually until they read “The Hite Report.” “When I recall all the ridiculous apologies I’ve made and the doctors I’ve seen, I could scream,” one woman wrote. “You have changed my life forever.” Men wrote to her, too, and many were grateful for a book that had taught them more about mutually pleasurable sex than, as one man put it, all “the B.S. stuff you heard behind the garage or in the gym.” A taxi dispatcher told her he kept “The Hite Report” on his desk as a sort of public-service announcement.
Sexologists since Hite have identified a persistent, gendered “orgasm gap”: women report fewer orgasms during partnered heterosexual encounters than men do. The pattern has been replicated often enough to count as what social scientists call a robust finding. In a 2010 study, for example, the disparity held in both casual and familiar encounters, with ten per cent of women reaching orgasm versus thirty-one per cent of men in a first-time hookup, and sixty-eight per cent versus eighty-five per cent with a familiar partner. (Lesbians typically fare better than heterosexual women on the orgasm count.) Probable explanations offered by the authors of a 2020 paper, “Orgasm Equality: Scientific Findings and Societal Implications,” include a “cultural overvaluing of intercourse,” a tendency for women to feel less entitled to sexual pleasure than men do, and lousy sex education. Researchers analyzing the content of pornography, from which many people get that education, have found that women are shown having orgasms far less frequently than men are; when they are, it is most often through vaginal or anal intercourse. Women also report, in the authors’ poignant formulation, “higher levels of both overall cognitive distractions” and, more specifically, “appearance-focused cognitive distractions during sexual activity” than men do.
These were the kinds of obstacles and mismatches Hite’s informants wrote about. The fact that they persist, even as so much old hooey about women’s sexuality has, thank God (and Hite), been dispelled, suggests how right she was to insist that the problem lay not in women’s bodies but in the cultural scripts surrounding them.
Still, if “The Hite Report” remains Hite’s most important book, and the one that changed the most lives for the better, what happened to her in the wake of her next two books is, in a way, more revealing about the gender politics to come. In 1981, she published “The Hite Report on Male Sexuality,” again based on questionnaire responses. Much of it concerned men’s sexual desires and experiences, predominantly, though not exclusively, heterosexual. But it also contained a great deal about men who had no close friends, who felt flummoxed, and in some cases angry, at the changes feminism and the modern labor market had wrought. Some felt trapped, too, in constricting gender roles. As one man wrote, they were expected to be “a cross between John Wayne, the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Hugh Hefner. We are only human for christsake.” This “women’s lib thing is good,” another wrote, “but it is going too fast for most men to adjust to. It becomes very confusing at times because it’s so hard to understand a woman’s way of thinking.” One man offered this counsel: “To really understand male sexuality, women must be constantly aware of the very destructive effects of personality defects of the woman upon his desire.”
In Hite’s 1987 book, “Women and Love,” overwhelming majorities of female respondents said that they gave more emotional support than they received in their relationships with men, and that they longed for more “verbal closeness.” Hite remained hopeful about social transformations that would improve intimate life, but this is a sad book, full of women who felt that their partners neither listened to them nor spoke openly about their own feelings. Hite rarely entertained the possibility that people might be answering her questionnaire on a particularly bad day, or that anonymity might encourage exaggeration. Even so, some comments carry a bleak, unadorned force: “I’d like to talk more, but I feel like I bore him when I talk too much.” Another woman said that her partner will “whistle and sing and slam doors when I try discussion.” “You may disagree with Shere Hite’s methods and with her conclusions,” the novelist Hilary Mantel wrote, “but no one could believe she has seriously misrepresented what many women feel about their lives.”
Both books made readers more uncomfortable, and drew fiercer attacks, than “The Hite Report” had. Talk shows continued to invite her, often in order to ambush her. She was susceptible to the lure of exposure, though she frequently appeared to endure these appearances rather than enjoy them. The dynamic had the quality of a folie à deux: neither Hite nor the producers could quite let go. Some critiques were fair. As before, Hite’s statistics, and the confidence she placed in them, marked her weakest point. She reported rates of marital infidelity far higher than those found in most studies before or since. In “Women and Love,” more than in her earlier books, she drifted toward essentialism, describing women as less competitive and more empathetic, if not by nature then by deeply rooted culture. But even the more substantive criticisms of her work had taken on a nasty edge. Hite sued one particularly dogged detractor, a journalist named Philip Nobile—securing the legal services of the malevolent Joseph McCarthy consigliere and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn. (To her credit, Campbell includes this detail; the more unambiguously admiring documentary does not.)
She began receiving hate mail and death threats, though almost certainly fewer than a public figure would receive in the internet era. She had a widely reported altercation with a limousine driver who was sent to pick her up for a television appearance; she had kept him waiting for an hour, and he addressed her as “dear.” She walked out of interviews, which were becoming increasingly confrontational. A clip in “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” shows a late-eighties appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in which she faces an all-male studio audience, stocked with men openly hostile to feminism, who jeer at her. In the nineties, weary of the costs of fame, she renounced her American citizenship and moved to Cologne with her husband, Friedrich Höricke, a German concert pianist two decades her junior whom she had married in 1985.
Hite’s subsequent life isn’t actually a tragic story. She and Höricke eventually divorced, but she had other partners. She lived out her days in London and Paris, indulging her eye for beauty whenever she could and publishing books in Europe, including a memoir, “The Hite Report on Shere Hite.” And this is not a story of an unjustly neglected masterpiece; neither “The Hite Report” nor her other books are brilliantly written works of analysis that demand to be reread.
What her career does offer is a story of missed opportunities to see certain fault lines in the culture more clearly. Yes, there is still an orgasm gap, though it was surely wider before Hite and other sexual iconoclasts went to work on it. Selling the pleasures of more egalitarian sex, however, was easier than confronting the simmering disaffection of men who felt left behind. In the decades since “The Hite Report,” many people have reaped the benefits of feminism; it has enabled them to live freer lives of greater amplitude, with more respect and understanding between genders and fairer, if not equal, divisions of domestic labor. At the same time, some male grievances have hardened into bitterness, some women have retreated into ostentatiously traditional roles, and, in the Trump era, the whole subject has become more instrumentally politicized than ever. Reading the testimonies in Hite’s book on men, or watching the rage she inspired, one can see early drafts of today’s resentment politics: incel culture, online misogyny, the anti-feminist pro-natalism of J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, and others in the MAGA orbit.
Before Hite left for Europe, leading American feminists, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Kate Millett, Ntozake Shange, and Gloria Steinem, signed a statement arguing that the attacks on Hite were aimed less at one woman than at “the rights of women everywhere.” To a complacent, be-cool-and-get-over-it nineties sensibility, this might have sounded like overwrought posturing. The intervening years have made it read more like a warning. ♦