"Hite did not create the clitoris or discover the female orgasm, but she pointed a lot of women — and men — in the right direction."

"The Hite Report, published in 1976, examined surveys completed by 3,000 women and concluded that, for most women, conventional sexual intercourse was an ineffective means of achieving orgasm and that they did not need men and penetrative sex to find sexual satisfaction. For many women, her findings were a comfort and a potential liberation; for many men, they were shocking and outrageous. Inevitably her report was compared with other landmark sex studies, such as those by Kinsey or Masters and Johnson, although some saw little new in her findings.... Hite was inevitably criticised by male, moral-majority America, which always had a problem with her message. Some declared that her work did not survive serious scrutiny.... She then turned her attention to men, with The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (1981), featuring an analysis of responses from 7,239 men to questions about rape, pornography, homosexuality, adultery and male-female relations. The answers led her to conclude that repressed anger and infidelity were common characteristics of American marriage. 'There is a gut feeling that something is wrong — that although there are beautiful elements to sex as we know it, somehow there are unnecessary problems, too,' she wrote, blaming 'patriarchal culture” as the root of the problem.... She was born Shirley Diana Gregory in St Louis, Missouri, in 1942... She died from complications of dementia on September 9, 2020, aged 77."

From "Shere Hite obituary/Groundbreaking if controversial sexologist and feminist who shed new light on the female orgasm and once posed for Playboy" (London Times).

I was one of the women who completed the original Hite Report survey! I don't know why the survey got to me, but it did. I was living and working in NYC in the early 70s. I thought I wrote a lot of interesting things, and I read "The Hite Report" very carefully hoping to find something of mine, but no, I'm not in the book, other than as part of the statistics. I didn't feel much connection to the findings in the report, and the failure to use any of what I thought were my excellent quotes made me suspect that the quotes that were used were picked to fit a preexisting framework. The book certainly made a big splash back in the 70s.

Here's Hite exploring male sexuality with Mike Douglas and David Hasselhoff in 1982:



Wait. This is better, with Geraldo Rivera in 1977:




And here she is with Oprah: