'She Began The Real Sexual Revolution For Women': Shere Hite Dies, Aged 77
Source: The Guardian
By Matthew Weaver.
Reviled by Playboy, her 1976 study of 3,500 women challenged male assumptions about sex. The pioneering feminist Shere Hite, known for her research on female sexuality, has died at the age of 77. She was best known for The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which has sold more than 50m copies since publication in 1976.
Based on the views of 3,500 women, it 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 didnt do anything for women and that got some people terribly upset, she told the Guardian in 2011. She added: 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. Hites husband, Paul Sullivan, confirmed that she had died at their home in Tottenham, north London, on Wednesday.
Hite was born in the socially conservative US state of Missouri, to her 16-year-old mother, and was raised by her grandparents. While doing postgraduate research at Columbia University she posed nude in an advert for an Olivetti typewriter in the early 1970s. When the advert appeared in Playboy under the caption: The typewriter so smart, she doesnt have to be, she backed protests against it. Sustained criticism of her in the US, much of it highly personalised, led Hite to renounce her US citizenship in 1995...
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/10/she-began-the-real-sexual-revolution-for-women-shere-hite-dies-aged-77
littlemissmartypants
(22,418 posts)niyad
(112,435 posts)Sad losing Dame Diana Rigg and Shere Hite at the same time. The
appalachiablue
(41,055 posts)Time is passing faster now.
sinkingfeeling
(51,279 posts)R.I.P.
Solly Mack
(90,740 posts)Thank you, Ms. Hite.
JudyM
(29,122 posts)RIP
niyad
(112,435 posts)MicaelS
(8,747 posts)Amazing how many men she interviewed were sexually attracted to their mothers.
BumRushDaShow
(127,312 posts)I haven't heard her in the news in a long time... So much that feminists were trying to do to bust the myths, were couched as being "salacious" by the media and it was always (and still is) an endless battle. Just like the earlier compiled publication - "Our bodies, Ourselves".
R.I.P.
CTyankee
(63,771 posts)She gave lots of women validation for what they knew to be true.
Delphinus
(11,808 posts)As did Nancy Friday.