The New Hite Report

by Shere Hite

Shere Hite's ground-breaking Hite Report on Female Sexuality, first published in 1976, explores in detail women's feelings about sex and has had a profound and lasting influence on generations of readers all over the world.

The original Hite Report on Female Sexuality was based on samples of women exclusively in the USA. This new revised edition contains previously unpublished data bringing the findings up to date and includes a large sample of responses from the UK and Commenwealth.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Womens, Sexuality, Relationships, Psychology, Sociology

667 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Shere Hite (born November 2, 1942, Saint Joseph, Missouri) is an American-born German[1] sex educator and feminist. Her sexological work has focused primarily on female sexuality. Hite builds upon biological studies of sex by Masters and Johnson and by Alfred Kinsey. She also references theoretical, political and psychological works associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, such as Anne Koedt's The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. After attacks on herself and her work, she renounced her United States citizenship in 1995 to become German.

Hite graduated from Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Florida. She received a masters degree in history from the University of Florida in 1967. She then moved to New York City and enrolled at Columbia University to work toward her Ph.D. in social history. Hite attributes the non-completion of this degree to the conservative nature of Columbia at that time. She later completed a Ph.D. at Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and another Ph.D. in clinical sexology at Maimonides University, North Miami Beach, Florida.

Shere Hite has focused on understanding how individuals regard sexual experience and the meaning it holds for them. Hite has criticised Masters and Johnson's work for uncritically incorporating cultural attitudes on sexual behaviour into their research. For example, Hite's work showed that 70% of women do not have orgasms through in-out, thrusting intercourse but are able to achieve orgasm easily by masturbation or other direct clitoral stimulation. Only 30% of the women in her study reported ever experiencing orgasm during thrusting intercourse. She has criticised Masters and Johnson's argument that enough clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm should be provided by thrusting during intercourse, and the inference that the failure of this is a sign of female "sexual dysfunction." Whilst not denying that both Kinsey and Masters and Johnson have been a crucial step in sex research, she believes that we must understand the cultural and personal construction of sexual experience to make the research relevant to sexual behaviour outside the laboratory. She offered the criticism that limiting test subjects to "normal" women who report orgasming during coitus was basing research on the faulty assumption that having an orgasm during coitus was typical, something that her own research strongly refuted.

Reviews

[✨ jami ✨]

I picked this up at a random book sale not exactly sure what I was getting but it's basically a more in depth version of come as you are by emily ngoski. the personal stories from hundreds of women about their experiences/thoughts on sex were interesting in how much they varied and how many factors outside the literal sex impacted their feelings/thoughts toward it. I think the accounts from older women (ie, women who identified as being 50/60 at the time this book was written in 1978) were the most interesting. giggling madly that it ended with a chapter about how australians fuck nasty

[Leanne]

The whole issue about sex for women - nice women don’t like sex, women are bad if they are sexy - those old clichés which we might laugh at today, still linger around. In this book - the last in the trilogy - Shere Hite continues to debunk and question these societal blueprints and shows us that we need to continue to own our sexuality, own our bodies and never leave in shadow our desires.

[Sarah Hamilton]

Enlightening.

[Chinook]

Read in Edinburgh.

[kaan]

dikker dan de bijbel.

[Mingo Cerda]

recommend the questionnaire in the back of the book.

[RexJeff]

Lets women speak for themselves, literally. I wish a lot more books were written like this.

I haven’t read the other two books, but I think the idea of an all encompassing survey of hundreds of people by their own words put into a book is pretty much extremely enlightening and real rather than the assumption of what everyone thinks.
To actually put all of those thoughts out there. And the commentary is excellent.

Plus the statistical method and data collection - demographic matching, is also really great in not excluding certain people. Using open ended questions to let people speak for themselves. Especially for the time period. I recommend actually reading the methods section before the book itself because it gives a lot of legitimacy to not excluding people.

And it’s all still relevant today. Yes we are here decades later, but if someone told me this was written today I would still believe it (besides mention of events clearly dating it like the aids crisis), because a lot of people still go through this. Despite the change it’s really still been the status quo for many people.

It’s powerful to make this commentary on the status quo based on not just assumption but real data in THEIR words- such a massive survey of experiences. More books should do this.

Not to discredit the book as a piece of history. It is an excellent snapshot of history of collective experience.

[Jessica Pin]

Not as good as her other work. Way too many lesbians in the answers.

[Jennifer]

Overrated, and too repetitive. Some highlights.

[Elizabeth]

hard cover w dust jacket