Shere Hite: remembering the feminist sex researcher forgotten by time
Depending on your age, you probably either have some feelings about Shere Hite or know nothing about her. In 1976, Hite, an independent researcher of qualitative experience, sparked a “revolution in the bedroom”, as Ms Magazine put it, with her anonymous surveys on female sexuality. Namely, as she stated often and without equivocation, that women knew how to have orgasms when and how they wanted, with or without intercourse.
The Hite Report was an immediate bestseller – it has sold over 48m copies worldwide – and turned Hite into a media fixture. She was a frank interviewer and thus a lightning rod for criticism, having committed the cardinal sin of promoting female pleasure, which many took as demoting men, and then, in subsequent books, describing how men really felt (lonely,
