 |
|
| Shere Hite | |
Shere Hite, best known for The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which has sold more than 50 million copies since its publication in 1976, died September 9. She was 77. The Guardian reported that The Hite Report "challenged male assumptions about sex by revealing that many women were not stimulated by sexual penetration. It also encouraged women to take control of their sex lives. It was dismissed as 'anti-male' and dubbed the Hate Report by Playboy."
"I was saying that penetration didn't do anything for women and that got some people terribly upset," she told the Guardian in 2011, adding: "I was the only sex researcher at that time who was feminist. I tried to extend the idea of sexual activity to female orgasm and masturbation."
Sustained criticism of her in the U.S., "much of it highly personalized, led Hite to renounce her U.S. citizenship in 1995," the Guardian noted. She subsequently lived all over Europe before settling in north London with her second husband, Paul Sullivan.
Writer Julie Bindel, who interviewed Hite in 2011 and stayed in touch afterward, told the Guardian that Hite's work "was groundbreaking--in many ways she began the real sexual revolution for women in the 1970s after the abject failure of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. In the '60s, women didn't ever feel that they had the right to sexual pleasure. Shere Hite put women's sexual pleasure first and foremost for the first time ever. She centered women's experiences as opposed to seeing men as the default position and women as secondary. That really spoke to a lot of women about their own bodies, their own sexual liberation and sexual pleasure."