Commemorating Shere Hite

In 1976, Shere Hite published a study that shook the beliefs of modern society dubbed, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality. Liberating female pleasure came with devastating personal and professional costs. Her findings went against what patriarchal ideals were being taught at the time, triggering an immediate backlash on her findings. Despite the ground-breaking research and studies that she conducted, the fallout she received has rendered her largely omitted in today’s list of note-worthy feminists. This work, and her others, should not be forgotten and largely unknown, like they are today. As college students, it would do us good to put into practice what Hite worked so hard to accomplish.

Shere Hite was an American-born German feminist born to her 16-year-old mother in 1942. In the 1940s, women were under the ruling that their pleasure must stem from her husband’s anatomy, basically meaning that she was only “allowed” to orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. This idea is supported by Sigmund Freud’s belief that orgasm via clitoral stimulation was “immature” and that it represented a childish stage of psychosexual development that a woman was supposed to grow. He further labeled women who couldn’t achieve orgasm via vaginal stimulation as “frigid” and “hysterical.” 

This is obviously problematic today because it is now known that women have little to no nerve endings within the vaginal canal and it is very uncommon for a woman to orgasm based solely on vaginal intercourse. 

Growing up directly under the pressure and standards of these patriarchal ideals, Hite set out to effectively bridge the gap between feminism and women’s sexual freedom. 

In 1971, Hite was working with Wilhelmina Models, one of New York’s top modeling agencies, when she posed for a nude photograph that was published in the December 1971 issue of Playboy magazine. For Hite, this was purely for money, as she used the funds she received to fund her early research into female sexuality. 

When Hite published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality in 1976, she reported the results from approximately 3,000 of the 100,000 questionnaires that she distributed to women aged 14 to 78. The questions she asked were predominantly dedicated to women’s thoughts on intercourse, masturbation, and social attitudes regarding female pleasure. 

One key issue brought up in The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality is sexual slavery. Participants were questioned on sexual coercion and the use of force in sex. According to The Conversation, one respondent stated, “I’m not supposed to say ‘no’ since I’m legally married.” 

Hite used this, and similar responses, to state that toxic gender stereotypes are the major factor for sexual violence, challenging the belief that a man’s sex drive is something that women are obligated to satisfy. 

She also researched women’s way of orgasm through the clitoris and the number of women who have faked orgasms for their husband’s pleasure. She explicitly declared that previous sex researchers Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson had constructed female sexuality as essentially a response to male sexuality and intercourse. Hite worked to demonstrate that female sexuality has its own, complex nature. 

Many women who read her findings felt vindicated by reading other’s opinions on sex as it wasn’t something that was spoken of much at the time, at least publicly. Understanding that they weren’t alone in how they were feeling about intimacy within their relationships helped many women feel more confident in themselves and their own bodies. 

Despite this, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s was reaching its peak. While trying to celebrate sexuality and pre-marital sex, the revolution had primarily liberated men and left women sexually unsatisfied and under increased from their partners to submit. Basically, women were compelled to say yes whenever their partner wanted sex. This fundamentally preserved the androcentric framework that had been the norm for the decades before The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality was published. 

By publishing the responses of women who felt unsatisfied, Hite faced backlash from threatened traditionalists and the men who had benefitted from the so-called “revolution.”

Critics of her findings utilized the nude photographs seen in Playboy that she had taken years before to launch campaigns meant to smudge her reputation as a credible person and researcher. They dismissively labeled her as a “bimbo” and an “airhead” to attempt to discredit her pioneering research on female orgasm and sexuality. 

Ironically, Playboy, the magazine that published her photographs before, publicly shamed Hite and referred to The Hite Report as “The Hate Report.” As a publication centered around male pleasure, it’s not hard to see how Playboy saw Hite’s research as anti-male or “sexist” because a main point of her findings was that women could have sexual pleasure on their own and didn’t have to rely on a man for an orgasm. 

Due to the amount of media-harassment and threats she endured following the publication of her study, Hite moved to Germany in 1989. She further renounced her U.S. citizenship in 1995 and became a German citizen in 1996. 

While in Europe, Hite had much more freedom to do her research and publish more of her findings due to a more open-minded, receptive audience, and a publishing company that would not suppress when her books would be published. 

In 1994, Hite furthered her want for feminism and equality by publishing The Hite Report on the Family: Growing Up Under Patriarchy. This directly attacked the idea of a traditional nuclear family and addressed how the “normal” family archetype creates inequality in the expectations set for male and female children. Her stance was that females were often shamed by their family during puberty and punished for things that the males in the family would get off easy with. 

Shere Hite was a revolutionary figure whose fearless dedication to women’s sexuality has permanently shifted the landscape of feminism today. By prioritizing women’s actual experiences rather than medical diagrams, she gave millions of women a voice and the confidence that they needed to declare their desires not only to their partners, but to themselves as well. Remembering Shere Hite and her accomplishments is essential to safeguarding the reproductive and sexual autonomy that feminists continue to fight for today. Not only did Shere Hite help women with confidence in the 1960’s and 70’s, but she can also help us today! Her ideas that women can say no and don’t have to have a man to give them pleasure and don’t have to submit is something that we must remember, too, as we go through daily life as college students and women.

• equality
• feminism
• sex education
• women's rights