Shere Hite, Groundbreaking Feminist Sex Researcher, Passes Away

LOS ANGELES—Shere Hite, a feminist sex researcher who challenged male ideas on female sexuality, has died at 77. Her husband (who was her third), confirmed her death on Sept. 9 in Tottenham, North London. She was best known for her sex study of 3,500 women, which was published in her bestselling book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, in 1976. The groundbreaking book sold more than 50 million copies.  Her shocking revelation at the time—which was the “real sexual revolution” according to the millions of women who read it—was that women were not having as many orgasms as men were having. Her candid study revealed that women did not have orgasms the majority of the time (70%) through penetration alone, because men were clueless about the clitoris. She was ahead of her time in pointing out that true sexual liberation for women was about sexual pleasure.  She followed in the footsteps of famed sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, and pioneering sex therapists Masters & Johnson. Hite was a “sexologist” (a person who studies sex in an academic setting) before anyone used the term, and was an pioneering “sex educator” as well.  She earned a Bachelor's and Master’s Degree, and while studying at Columbia University for her Ph.D, she posed nude for Playboy, as well as for a typewriter ad with the tagline: “The typewriter is so smart she doesn’t have to be.” Fed up with feeling exploited, she marched in a protest against the very ad she appeared in, joined the feminist movement, and the National Organization for Women. A radical feminist, she criticized Masters & Johnson for inferring that a woman’s lack of orgasms is to be thought of as “female dysfunction.” Although she admired their work, she saw this feedback as a teachable moment, and her mission was to further their research by including what real women wanted in the “revolution in the bedroom.”  One of her infamous quotes that got the men folk mad was, “All too many men still seem to believe in a rather naive and egocentric way, that what feels good to them, is automatically what feels good to women.”  Her one day gig at Playboy came to haunt her later, with the male editors at the magazine—the same bros who promoted the “sexual revolution”—turning on her and calling the book “anti-male” and the “Hate Report." Soon after, she received hate mail and death threats, no doubt by the same men incapable of giving a woman an orgasm. This led to her leaving the U.S. for good and moving to Europe in order to feel safe again. Hite had also once said, “Where there is lasting love, there is a family.”