In the Battle of the Sexologists, Alfred Kinsey probably wins: He was played by an A-list movie star. Masters and Johnson got a Showtime series. Having survived the Holocaust, Dr. Ruth lived long enough to podcast.
Shere Hite? Even those who remember her influential book “The Hite Report,” a crowdsourced account of female sexuality published 50 years ago this month, are not 100 percent sure how to pronounce her first name: like Sherry but without the “y.”
One could be forgiven for assuming instead a charactonym, “sheer height,” that conjures both her champagne achievement — she popped noisily, then fizzled — and the plastic-shelled L’eggs pantyhose of her heyday.
The “Report” is one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time, having sold some 50 million copies, but a weird layer of disrepute — like the Saran Wrap women were once advised to wear when welcoming their husbands home — clings to its auburn-tressed author, who died at 77 in 2020.
A documentary three years later sought to redress this, and, this spring, the feminist historian Rosa Campbell published a slim and impassioned biography of Hite called “The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared.”
I would have workshopped that title a little longer. Men have rarely needed teaching on this front. “Orgasm” as a verb is blech, like “fun” as an adjective or “invite” as a noun. And “The Hite Report” has never really disappeared, having been kept in print by Seven Stories Press.
But it is certainly more of a curiosity than a classic, less fixed in the sexual-health-canon firmament than its earnest older sister “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” originally by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, or its hirsute, cringe-inducing older brother, “The Joy of Sex,” by Alex Comfort.
Though thin on interviews (a half dozen are cited in the acknowledgments) and heavy on the mea culpa of white privilege, Campbell’s book achieves transcendence in Hite’s groovy-sounding archive at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, and establishes her as a character not frivolous but extraordinary.
The original “Hite Report” was compiled from around 3,000 responses to anonymous survey questions printed in “rainbow ink on pastel-colored scrap paper and offcuts of old Bingo cards” and adorned — prefiguring Instagram — “with love hearts, cupid bows and arrows, and starbursts.”
Were her returns questioned for statistical bias toward the dissatisfied? Sure. But it’s not like that white-coated Harvard-Yale study about women over 40 having less than a 2 percent chance of marrying, so loudly trumpeted in Newsweek in 1986, held up to scrutiny.
Published first by Macmillan, “The Hite Report” was perhaps the peak in a wave of literature exploring women’s libido that included Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden” (1973), a collection of increasingly outré fantasies; and “The Sensuous Woman” (1969), by “J,” a.k.a Terry Garrity, which was more on the Cosmopolitan man-pleasing, Saran Wrap continuum.
These became mass-market paperbacks — one edition of Friday’s had a bouquet of flowers memorably adorning a mons pubis on the cover — passed around in consciousness-raising circles and lurking transgressively on the lower bookshelves of glamorous aunts. Hite’s book was reviewed in these pages by Erica Jong, whose novel “Fear of Flying” was itself a sensation, a match that Campbell says was brokered by Hite’s book editor (this would never happen today).
These were the women who walked so that Miranda July could crouch. Their aftershocks are felt in vibrators at the local mall and in recent fantasy collections gathered by Gillian Anderson, the star of “Sex Education.”
Campbell reports that the earth actually moved — a “local tremor” — on Nov. 2, 1942, the day Shere Hite was born Shirley Diana Gregory, to an out-of-wedlock teen mother, in St. Joseph, Mo. She was raised in genteel but chilly poverty by her resentful maternal grandmother, a Christian fundamentalist whose husband left her because of what is now known as a dead bedroom. Shirley’s mother, who was also named Shirley, returned with a new baby boy and short-lived husband, a truck driver from whom Hite got her surname, and then went in and out of mental institutions.
Somehow the girl who became Shere persevered. She went to live with an aunt and uncle in Daytona Beach, Fla.; became a popular cheerleader; listened to records and dreamed of being a composer “like Verdi or Wagner or Rachmaninoff! What a seriously gorgeous name.” After graduating from the University of Florida, Hite moved to New York to study the history of ideas at Columbia, but was rebuffed by the distinguished professor Jacques Barzun, in a preview of the scorn that would eventually be heaped on her by male thought leaders.
A colorful flower choked by the Ivy League, she survived by modeling for James Bond posters, Samsonite and Olivetti — the latter with the tagline “the typewriter is so smart that she doesn’t have to be” — and acting in pornography.
The experience of being commercially objectified helped radicalize her. Hite joined the National Organization for Women and began building on a 1968 essay by Anna Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” which had argued against Freud’s then-dominant ideas about what was healthy, mature and normal. A spokeswoman for the reality of female anatomy, Hite “stabbed the male gaze in the eye,” Campbell writes, “with her pink pearl hairpin.”
One grateful reader wrote Hite about being thrilled to discover her clitoris, and acknowledge her lesbian desires, at age 86.
Hite herself was bisexual, deeply sensual in all aspects of life, and ran a little hot under her lace collar. She once socked a limo driver when he broke the news that she’d tarried too long getting ready to make it in time for Sally Jessy Raphael’s talk show. Her romantic partners included Friedrich Höricke, a German pianist 20 years younger, whose teeth she enjoyed licking, an editor told Campbell, knowing they would survive his flesh post-mortem.
She also committed the unpardonable sin of enjoying being rich after a lifetime of being poor. Macmillan had capped Hite’s earnings at $25,000 per year, but she made a mint from the paperback and also took the publisher to court. She moved to Fifth Avenue and wrote Dada-sounding shopping lists: “Georgia O’Keeffe”; “diamonds, paintings, antiques”; “Can I buy a hotel suite in Paris?” Hite’s medium of choice was the Post-it note.
She was exposed for posing as her own secretary, “Diana Gregory” — shades of Donald J. Trump’s John Barron — and yet also pilloried pseudonymously in SoHo Weekly News by the writer Philip Nobile, who didn’t like her 1981 sequel, “The Hite Report on Male Sexuality.” She successfully sued him, too, with the support of, who else, Roy Cohn, but eventually could take the media heat no more and moved to Europe.
What lingers of the Hite-geist is not the statistics, nor the 20th-century idea of “normalcy,” but the stories she gathered — a genre living on in New York magazine’s popular “Sex Diaries,” or the confessions of Reddit. Consider it all the manicured middle finger she extended to shame.
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