Shere Hite - The Hite Report



There is a recent documentary about Shere Hite, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who wants her to be remembered. I've been trying to access it but it isn't available in Australia yet. 

Journalist, Suzanne Moore, has written about the documentary here. 

Shere Hite's book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, was published in 1976. It reports the results of surveying over 3000 women between the ages of 14 and 78 about their sexual experiences and desires. I read it in the mid 1980s. I recall the boy who lent me his copy - a nerdy young man who I worked with on the Census. It was a six month contract doing the coding and data entry of the national census and threw together a large range of people who were happy to work a six month contract doing boring work. Most of us listened to tapes on our Walkmans as we worked. There were punks saving for a new guitar amp, stay at home mums returning to the workplace, retired older people who just wanted to keep active and young adult me. The nerdy boy showed me how to alter my keyboard to hack the system, and yes, I got into trouble. He is probably a wealthy tech genius now. I forgot his name when the contract ended. Anyway, he handed me The Hite Report. It was an eye opener, that's for sure. I hadn't read women writing about their own sexual experiences like this before. What I recall is the imagery and the expression of the women's writing. That the spiders in their webs would shiver in accord with the women's pleasure. And that is why I bought the book myself recently; to collect women's writing. 

I think about the book now in other terms as well. I wonder how women's experiences have changed due to the widespread consumption of pornography. I wonder about young adult women who want to chemically castrate themselves and cut off their breasts and if they could read this book to make a more informed decision. And I wonder about the turn taken towards 'sex positivity' that celebrates a certain brazenness that appeals to the male gaze (Stutwalk! Free the Nipple!) but has left behind the experience of the average woman living her private life with quiet dignity, and how these women might be like the women who contributed to The Hite Report. Women, the ones we never hear from,  who describe their experience as: 

' Like an awakening and the beginning of life.'

'My body becomes soft and fluid,  and completely in harmony with the universe.'

'Being aware of all parts of my body, wanting to give caring touches - in touch with my cosmic energy, and my partner's - there is no past and no future.' 

'Alive everywhere.'

'A feeling of power, strength.'

'Suspended animation, like an eternity in one second.'

'Somehow it gives me the chance to climb above myself - to wake up from the fogginess of daily existence.'   

'A strange feeling, another dimension of myself, melting away from my anchors.'

'A sense of well-being. I am radiant...' 

And I love that the women said they showed their responses to their husbands or partners. The information about what they want and their glorious, joyous expressions of womanhood. And it wasn't assumed that all the women were straight, no. An observation: women wrote about teaching their male partners when they were unsatisfied. Women with female partners? Not so much!

Shere Hite went on to survey men on their sexuality. I haven't read that report. Apparently it shows that men were unhappy too. But it is available on Amazon.



 






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