"... published 50 years ago [last] month, are not 100 percent sure how to pronounce her first name: like Sherry but without the 'y.'... The original 'Hite Report' was compiled from around 3,000 responses to anonymous survey questions printed in 'rainbow ink on pastel-colored scrap paper and offcuts of old Bingo cards' and adorned — prefiguring Instagram — 'with love hearts, cupid bows and arrows, and starbursts.' Were her returns questioned for statistical bias toward the dissatisfied? Sure. But it’s not like that white-coated Harvard-Yale study about women over 40 having less than a 2 percent chance of marrying, so loudly trumpeted in Newsweek in 1986, held up
to scrutiny. Published first by Macmillan, 'The Hite Report' was perhaps the peak in a wave of literature exploring women’s libido that included
Nancy Friday’s 'My Secret Garden' (1973), a collection of increasingly outré fantasies; and '
The Sensuous Woman' (1969), by 'J,' a.k.a Terry Garrity, which was more on the Cosmopolitan man-pleasing, Saran Wrap continuum.... Hite’s book was reviewed
in these pages by Erica Jong, whose novel 'Fear of Flying” was itself a sensation...."
I'm reading
"50 Years Later, a Hit Book on Women’s Sexuality Deserves Some Love/Its author became a pop culture celebrity, and sometimes punchline, but 'The Hite Report' helped make way for frank discussions about pleasure" (NYT).
I like to blog articles about "The Hite Report," because I was part of the crowd in that crowd source, one of the 3,000 respondents, though I don't remember any strange rainbow-ink printing or "love hearts." It was a normal multi-page stapled xerox. I think!
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You have to say that she won, since most women’s literature, which is almost all of it, is written to be read with one hand under the covers.
----- I don't remember any strange rainbow-ink printing or "love hearts." It was a normal multi-page stapled xerox. I think!
Is it your faulty memory -- or is it a faulty source? Yeah, yeah, bingo cutouts with glitter hearts and stuff, c'mon, we're talking the '60s babe, although the Sixties were by then continuing on as much as possible in the '70s.
And Hite or Gregory was embarrassed by the eventual scrutiny of her methodology. But print the legend. All good. Pass the micromescaline, please.
Althouse: The Looking for Mr. Goodbar years.
I was 25 when I filled out the survey and had been married for 3 years. Many of the respondents were married.
Oh, for the good old days of self-reported, completely unverified and unverifiable surveys in sociology! Kind of like today's political polls, data that is used heavily but is at the same time so very heavily unreliable.
Back in the Nixon era, as a 9th grader in a very whitebread suburban school, my class was given a federal survey on drug use. Anonymous, of course. So every kid in my classroom, and probably most of the rest of the 800 kids in that school, reported everything from heroin abuse to sharing weed with the teachers. All fabulously fictitious, of course. Why do I suspect the Hite Report contained a similar amount of make-believe? Because of course it does.
And if you're gonna throw Erica Jong in here, too, please include the equally lurid Wifey by Judy Blume, which has a much more sensational opening scene.
The responses describing the pleasures of group sex while snorting ketamine were dope. An attention-getter to this day so I hear.
our professor says that she ".. was part of the crowd in that crowd source, one of the 3,000 respondents.."
makes me wonder how many of the 3,000 were 20 year old New Yorkers?
actually;
makes me wonder if ANY of the 3,000 WEREN'T 20 year old New Yorkers?
--- I was 25 when I filled out the survey and had been married for 3 years.
A proper young matron, no doubt....! How many of your comments could you find when you read the book?
"more on the Cosmopolitan man-pleasing, Saran Wrap continuum...."
Saran Wrap?
Doesn't your wife meet you at the front door naked, except wrapped in Saran wrap? She must have forgotten the technique.
"Were her returns questioned for statistical bias toward the dissatisfied? Sure."
These "reports" are notoriously unreliable, but this one gained cultural cache regardless. (That said, I'm not above citing such surveys when they support my worldview.)
"Saran Wrap?"
You had to be there. It was 1973, and one Marabel Morgan had a book called ''Total Woman,'' which referred to a mode of femininity much like today's "trad wife." She was supposed to devote herself to sexually pleasing her man, and one piece of advice was unforgettable: when your husband comes home from work, and you greet him at the door, it would be really sexy for you to be wearing only *Saran Wrap.*
"Total Woman" was considered anti-feminist, but "Sensuous Woman" was consistent with feminism, but both are about sexual pleasure. Unlike TW, SW was about the woman's pleasure. I remember that SW had the advice that a woman, to get in touch with her sensuality, should lick an ice cream cone — paying a lot of attention to the pleasure of the experience. Step 1! You've got to start somewhere, and everyone loves ice cream.
I tried to read some of those feminist handbooks. They didn't work for men. There's something prurient about the sexual fantasies of a hot girl, but it doesn't translate to the written word so much. Anyway, Shere Hite got very rich and had a comfortable life. According to the article she had a lover who was twenty years younger, and she liked to lick his teeth. More power to her, but, as noted above, not every woman's fantasy invites the male gaze.
"I was part of the crowd in that crowd source"
Are we just finding out about this now? To think of all your posts over the years that we could have responded to with "And you, a Hite survey respondent!"
And The Fugs had a bit of a different take on wearing Saran Wrap...
"The Story of O" was part of that zeitgeist. It was written by a woman, and you can't call her insights liberating. The libido is connected to an id that is connected to some dark, primal urges that aren't as necessarily life enhancing as celebrating your golden wedding anniversary with the grandkids.
RAAT culture?
There are minotaur, vampire and werewolf prince romances now. Celebrating your golden wedding anniversary with the grandkids flicks the bean even less than it used to.
The Sensuous Woman author, "J," seems to have had emotional problems after producing that book in her 30s.
For Tradwife reference, see "Yesteryear," by Caro Claire Burke. This novel is very up-to-the-minute in its details but quite far away from secular liberation in other respects. I'm within 50 pages of the ending and still can only take wild stabs at how it will resolve. Warning: not always sympathetic characters (in fact, almost never), and not always pleasant reading.
As I recall, she later did a "pictorial" for Playboy. It was the first time I had seen pubic hair extend around the anus.
"Tradwife" has the same woke and pejorative meaning and intent as cisgender in urbane semantics. Feminism is a class-disordered ideology. Abort, sequester your liberal license, and progress no more. LOL
Porn destroyed feminism
Feminism destroyed feminism...at least until the next "wave".
This is another one of those books that I know that I read back in the 1970s. But it was so long ago, that I don't really remember it.
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