Once you’ve seen a photo of Shere Hite, it’s hard to forget how beautiful this late twentieth-century self-trained feminist sexologist was. Tall, willowy, with tumbling curls, often photographed draped in gauzy blouses and shifts, Hite was born to be a celebrity. And given the controversy surrounding her blockbuster best-seller about women’s orgasms, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, it’s even harder to remember how smart and courageous she was.
Although not the first major sexology research directed and written by a woman (that honor belongs to paleobiologist Marie Stopes’s 1918 marriage manual), The Hite Report was the first popular sex manual to put women at the center of their erotic lives. Hite and her team of female research assistants drew from a survey completed by more than 3500 female respondents. They were not credentialed academics or physicians, a fact that was used to attack both their methods and findings. Hite had some training in the social sciences, but she centered her approach around radical feminist methodologies she observed in consciousness-raising groups.
In these settings, thousands of lay experts on women’s sexuality practitioners debunked long-held definitions of “good” or “mature” sex theorized by—and privileging—men. Hite’s findings were a collective portrait of the many non-penetrative routes, particularly masturbation and fantasy, that women took to orgasm. The premise of the book was simple: Women had plenty of orgasms—just not with men. Not surprisingly, many male readers found The Hite Report salacious and enraging (Playboy famously dubbed it “The Hate Report.”) But women, and undoubtedly some men, loved it. In the first year of its publication, MacMillen sold two and a half million copies.
The Hite Report’s instant and enduring popularity offers the intriguing possibility that there was never a unitary “sexual revolution,” but rather a complex transformation that unrolled over a decade or so, gradually pulling in different, overlapping demographics: men, queer people, and finally, with The Hite Report, women. More than 50 million copies have ended up in readers’ hands, making it among the 30 best-selling books of all time; it is still in print today. Yet, as we learn from historian Rosa Campbell’s engaging and deeply reported new volume, The Book That Taught the World To Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report, a book that brought women’s orgasms out of the consciousness-raising group and onto the page was nearly relegated to the rubbish bin of history. Hite’s publisher gave her an advance contract in the early seventies, when feminism was hot, but, by the fall of 1976, it had lost confidence in the project and cut the press run to 4500. “Female sexuality had been over-discussed,” Hite recalled bitterly, “and nobody needed any new books about it. Sorry kid.”
Hite was used to hearing “Sorry, kid.”
Born Shirley Diana Gregory in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 2, 1942, she was the illegitimate daughter of a teenager, also named Shirley, and an Army draftee who shipped out—permanently. Shirley deposited her firstborn with her Christian fundamentalist parents. They divorced in 1948, and in 1951, big Shirley, now married to Raymond Hite and toting a second infant, returned. A year later, “unable to cope,” she brought the child—now renamed Shere Hite, after her stepfather—to St. Joseph. (Shere is usually pronounced “share.”) Big Shirley returned for exactly one visit, largely remarkable for the fact that Hite nearly drowned in a public pool while her mother flirted with the men there. Then Shirley vanished from her daughter’s life; she was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, and cycled in and out of institutions thereafter. Hite appears to have seen her only once more, decades later.
Campbell and documentarian Nicole Newnham, who directed The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a 2023 documentary biography about the sexologist’s life and work, agree on more than the arguable assertion that Hite and her work have vanished. Both infer that her courage, independence, and sexual nonconformity were a consequence of childhood resilience in the face of persistent social shame and family chaos. At about 13, Hite became aware that she was beautiful. When she began to have sex, her grandmother could not tolerate it, warning her that boys only “marry the nice ones.” Eventually, Hite was exiled to Daytona Beach, Florida, to live with an aunt and uncle who, in a happy turnaround, provided a kinder and more normal middle-class childhood. Their expectations were that Hite “would date and be popular,” and she obliged, becoming a cheerleader and getting nominated for homecoming queen.
Besides kindness, Hite’s aunt and uncle gave her an even greater gift: the security and comfort to read, to understand that she was smart, and to dream of a cultured, sophisticated life. Graduating from the state flagship with an M.A. in history, Hite was accepted into a doctoral program at Columbia University to study intellectual and cultural history with Jacques Barzun. During her first meeting with the professor, Barzun cut her down to size, telling her that her M.A. thesis must be plagiarized, since he was “absolutely sure that they don’t have most of those books at the University of Florida.”
Sorry, kid! As Campbell notes, Barzun’s lack of respect for Hite was only the tip of the iceberg; after all, “what counted as history was hugely limited by sexism.” Although there were two women on the tenure track during her time at Columbia, Hite knew a bad deal when she saw one. She dropped out of the program, and, for the remainder of the decade, became a fashion photography and illustrator’s model. (Both women on the 1971 poster for Diamonds Are Forever are drawings of Hite.) Then there were the occasional, and far better paid, stints in pornography.
The porn, readers will not be surprised to learn, came back to haunt her when she became a celebrity author. Sorry, kid.
As Hite was exiting graduate school, she was also finding her way to feminism. The tipping point seems to have been an Olivetti print ad with the legend “The typewriter is so smart that she doesn’t have to be,” which triggered a protest from the National Organization for Women. Hite, the model for the ad, went to a NOW meeting, and began attending consciousness raising sessions. There she noticed that women talked about every aspect of gender equality but “their own experiences and feelings about sex,” as Campbell put it, in part because they were embarrassed.
This wasn’t true of all consciousness-raising groups. As early as 1968, Anne Koedt had written “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” and numerous essays in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthology explored the erotic as a site for gender inequality. Although neither Cambell nor Newnham comment on whether Hite herself enjoyed sex, she was rarely without a lover, and one, Martin Sage, encouraged and supported her as she wrote The Hite Report. What we do know is that her private sexual life clashed with her experiences on pornography sets. Fashion modeling had given her “more spare time than a regular job,” she recalled, although it “took a lot out of me too.” In porn, however, she found the work “so violent, so depersonalized, and degrading.” The men who consumed these films either did not know, or did not care, about how they were made. Not surprisingly, shortly after her book became a bestseller, Hite became a founding member of Women Against Pornography, a fact that, oddly, Campbell does not mention.
Hite’s observation—that men often had no idea when women were or were not turned on, and that women did not know how to tell them—was the germ of what eventually became The Hite Report. Hite created an anonymous questionnaire, decorated “with love hearts, cupid bows and arrows, and starbursts,” and began handing it out. Although her sisters at NOW viewed the project as unserious, they let her distribute the questionnaires from their office. Feminist health activist Barbara Seaman got on board, introducing Hite to Knopf editor Regina Ryan. Ryan took the project with her to MacMillan, named it The Hite Report (after the 1947 Kinsey Report), and secured a $20,000 advance (or about $160,000 in 2026 dollars).
It was a shocking sum for a first-time author with no credentials.
Hite mailed out 100,000 questionnaires and got 3 percent of them back, a figure she explained in her methods chapter was a “standard rate of return.” The process took five years; when the money ran out, Hite borrowed from friends to finish the book. Both Campbell and Newnham emphasize Hite’s Zola-like existence in a crummy basement apartment that Hite fixed up in neo-Victorian style. The place was so small that researchers sometimes worked in the hall, turning answers to questions like “Please describe how an orgasm feels to you,” “What do you think is the importance of masturbation?” and “Do you like rectal penetration? What kind?” into data.
Success was not guaranteed. Popular sexology had always been produced by scientists and was often pilloried as obscene. Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, a pre-World War II pioneer in the study of gay and transgender people whose Institute for Sexual Research, in Berlin, was destroyed by the Nazis, were both physicians. In the United States, Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist before he began his groundbreaking research about human sexuality, lost his foundation funding after he began to publish and saw his work banned in several countries. If Virginia Johnson was not a credentialed scientist, her collaborator, William Masters, was an academic gynecologist who risked losing his medical license for the work that led to their 1966 book, Human Sexual Response.
Hite defended her research, method, and analysis as scientifically sound in the face of harsh criticism: Indeed, in 2023, one team of researchers praised her surveys as “a treasure trove of information about practices at the time.” I wish Campbell had dug more deeply here. Is it an accident that Hite’s method, which was to send questionnaires to people who asked for them, and encourage those people to send questionnaires to their networks, is a version of the snowball sampling method developed at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research in the 1940s to study hard-to-reach populations? Or that, at around the same time, Columbia was the first university to establish an oral history project—and that snowball sampling was an early methodology in the field?
When MacMillan tried to throw The Hite Report under the bus, its author became a one-woman book promotion machine. It was a matter of survival. Hite went to the publishing house at night, printing and mailing her own press releases. She sent copies to every important woman she could think of. She organized a press conference, a publicity tactic common in a women’s movement stacked with journalists and activists like Betty Friedan, Florynce Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Brownmiller. She organized nine months of personal appearances and interviews on afternoon talk shows. Most importantly, Hite’s editor, Regina Ryan, arranged for novelist Erica Jong (she of the “zipless fuck”) to write a review for the New York Times. “What Shere Hite has done seems very simple, but next to the inscrutable prose of Masters and Johnson, her simplicity is more than welcome,” Jong wrote. “The women speak in their own words and what they have to say is utterly fascinating and often surprising.”
Hite’s
growing audience agreed. The book climbed onto the bestseller
list and stayed there for over 20 weeks.
The Book That Taught the World To Orgasm and Then Disappeared is an odd title for a study that features women who used words like vulva, clitoris, and cunt, and knew exactly how to orgasm when they took care of it themselves. Using the word “masturbate” 271 times, Hite revealed that of the 82 percent of her sample who masturbated, 95 percent reached orgasm “easily and regularly.” Seventy percent did not reach orgasm from penetration minus clitoral stimulation. The clitoris, derided for over a century as a vestigial penis and an immature site for properly vaginal orgasms, turned out to be the star of the show.
But The Hite Report was about more than orgasm. It was about how women struggled to be sexually desirable beings, a problem that the contemporary industry in vaginal sculpting, rejuvenation, waxing, and deodorizing still promotes. Hite’s respondents struggled with anxiety that their vulvas were ugly and smelly, “like a gaping wound with dirty brown edges.” This sense of shame intruded even on sexual activities designed to give maximum pleasure, such as masturbation (“I always feel cheap and dirty”) or cunnilingus (“I am always self-conscious that I might smell or look disgusting”).
When these feelings
were put aside, women also described being multiorgasmic, the many different
parts of their bodies and minds that engaged as they masturbated, and how they
made love to themselves. “Sometimes I dress in erotic costumes and view myself
in the mirror,” one respondent wrote. “Usually I smoke a cigarette, and
sometimes put on makeup. If there is time, I lubricate my breasts and genitals
with oil or cream.”
These insights were not exactly new. French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir prefigured Hite’s work in The Second Sex (1953), arguing that for women, orgasm “radiates throughout the whole body” in vaginal contractions, “a system of waves that rhythmically arise, disappear and re-form, attain from time to time a paroxysmal condition, then sink down without ever quite dying out.” In 1971, before Hite began her work, feminist journalist Lucy Komisar attributed women’s difficulty in finding pleasure not to women’s ignorance about their bodies, but to the double standards of a patriarchal society in which men were taught that they were entitled to have fun with sex, while women found it difficult to escape the idea that sex was “something dirty and evil.”
What The Hite Report did was make what women knew discussable, particularly with men. Some female readers wrote to Hite to say she made them feel “normal.” One woman described watching Hite on a talk show, and experiencing her husband say: “Is that all true?” When she said yes, they leaped into bed, and she was orgasmic with him for the first time. “My husband and I are ecstatic,” she concluded, claiming that Hite had saved their marriage. A list of New York Times holiday book suggestions billed The Hite Report as titillating entertainment for commuting husbands, with a cover “sufficiently plain” that it could be “read on an airplane without undue embarrassment.”
This was the mildest insult Hite would be subject to. As the book’s sales skyrocketed, Campbell writes, “critics in the media accused Shere and the women she surveyed of being abnormal,” and sought out experts who derided The Hite Report’s research and methods. The most personal attack came from Larry Flynt’s Hustler, for whom feminism was the misogynistic gif that kept on giving. (Andrea Dworkin eventually sued him for lampooning her.) In 1977, the magazine printed a review of The Hite Report that characterized the book as “feminist bullshit,” attacked Hite’s grooming and hygiene, and suggested she was sexually frustrated. They also reproduced six nude photographs taken in 1968, an act Campbell rightly characterizes as analogous to revenge porn.
The clock was ticking on Hite and on feminism’s capacity to hold the stage. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan made patriarchy great again, Hite’s critics took center stage, and, despite the book’s being reissued in 1994, 2004, and 2011, its cultural influence receded. The erosion of Hite’s authority was linked to the medium she rode to success in 1976: the television talk show. In Hite’s 1981 sequel, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, she, a feminist, claimed to speak with authority about men, so naturally talk show producers mustered audiences of angry men to tell her she was wrong about everything. In a particularly harrowing scene, Oprah Winfrey herself seems overwhelmed by a panel of men (several of whom openly admitted they had not read the book), subjecting her guest to savage criticism, and Hite wilting under the pressure. Eventually, after simply walking out of an interview, Hite became media kryptonite. By the 1990s, unable to get a contract in the United States, she moved to Germany. She spent the rest of her life in Europe, where she died in 2020. Sorry, kid.
In a way, Hite did disappear: One of the neighbors Newnham interviews says that he came home one day and she was gone. But was she, or the book, forgotten? Perhaps only in the sense that her insights are now so commonplace that we no longer attach them to a particular author. Hite’s legacy is everywhere: in Christian sex manuals, in vibrators evaluated in Wirecutter, in Taylor Swift’s lyrics, in self-help Instagram accounts, and in the most recent series of Bridgerton, which features an entire episode of discussions about reaching “the pinnacle.” In the 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, about a group of foul-mouthed boys fighting for freedom of speech, Stan is in despair that he will ever succeed with a girl he likes. Taking pity on him, Chef, the male school cafeteria cook, advises him that he must “find the clitoris.” As the town of South Park descends into war and chaos, Stan wakes up in the woods outside town to see a large, glowing pink dome. “Be not afraid,” it says. “Behold my glory. I am the clitoris.”
If Shere Hite became just one voice among many in popular sexology, her project—breaking the silence around women’s sexual pleasure—succeeded.
