Read The Hite Report on Shere Hite Online
Authors: Shere Hite
The Hite Report on Shere Hite (17 page)
The macho reaction on the part of some male journalists astounded Bob, my editor. They engaged in sniggering and embarrassed remarks about the book. More thoughtful men were seriously interested, but some may have been afraid of appearing ‘homosexually inclined’ if they allowed themselves to speculate in print about these new ideas.
Many reacted as if they were personally threatened by the idea that the male ‘sex drive’ for intercourse is culturally exaggerated, not simply a biological given. Is coitus necessary to every sexual act? The 1976 study of women suggested that women would like to make
intercourse an option rather than a
sine
qua
non;
now the Hite Report on men showed that most men, contrary to stereotype, also had ambivalent feelings about the pressure to perform ‘the act’ (get hard …), and might prefer alternatives.
One interviewer asked me, ‘Is it true you are against intercourse?’ This question made me laugh. I answered, ‘No, it’s just that intercourse should become a
choice
during sex, not the ‘only way’.
Few reporters spoke about the important psychological and emotional issues raised, such as ‘Why don’t most men marry the women they most love? Why do they reject women they find sexually passionate? Is this good for them, “the right choice”?’ Instead, articles and interviewers wanted to focus on overly-simplified aspects, which then look trivial. They missed the point.
In interviews, I was asked not to use words like clitoris, masturbation or orgasm. One radio interviewer proclaimed, ‘Yesterday I interviewed Shere Hite. I was absolutely amazed, we got dozens of calls from people complaining about the use of the word masturbate, which absolutely floored me. I’ve got to be honest, why is it that masturbate sounds to a lot of people like a dirty word? It’s perfectly OK to treat ourselves lovingly.’
More male than female interviewers were uncomfortable discussing my work. As Dr William Granzig, Executive Director of the Association of American Sex Educators, Counsellors and Therapists (
AASECT
) explained:
Many men are uncomfortable because Hite’s findings imply that they should re-examine their own lives. And this is something men do not want to do. Hite has shown that male sexuality is not simply a biological phenomenon, but very much shaped by the culture, and that therefore, men have choices about how to construct it. Men are responsible for it.
Women’s responses were different. For example, a woman called to request that her local Detroit station repeat a show, so that her husband could hear the information together with her.
Sometimes media situations even seemed dangerous in their hostility. Two TV local news reporters in California took me out on the highway in their car (I had never met them before) to do a ‘news report’, with me standing in front of a lurid poster announcing a porno film. When I refused, they dumped me and would not take me back to the city, leaving me on the side of the highway, claiming ‘I had asked for it.’ My publisher then instituted a system of local chaperones and ‘companions’ in various cities, who would meet and go around with me.
The other issue which made some male reporters uncomfortable was the way I discussed men’s extramarital sex. Several said that going from woman to woman was men’s biological, reproductive destiny. These reviewers, including the
New
York
Magazine’
s first-out ‘scoop’ by an
ex-Penthouse
editor, accused me of ‘not listening to the men who answered’, since I suggested that stresses and strains in the marriage might lead to extramarital sex – rather than confirming the
cliché that men (more than women!?) have a built-in ‘biological’ need for variety.
The most frequent manner in which anger or discomfort with my findings was expressed was to restrict the entire discussion or article to talking about my methodology, how I did the study, rather than the conclusions. The idea seemed to be that if they could discredit those who had participated as not ‘normal’, not ‘average’, then they need not pay attention to the results.
As Dr Robert McIlvenna of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality explained:
Underlying the so-called ‘scientific criticism’ of Hite’s work is an unwillingness to listen to the important things men are saying in the book. Few women have criticized Hite’s methodology or research; most of the criticism comes from males who feel threatened. Men are attacking the methodology because the book is saying things they do not want to hear.
There has never been a perfect sample in sex research, including those of Freud, Masters and Johnson or Kinsey. The fiction of my ‘poor, sloppy methodology’ was repeated so often, that most US journalists, male and female, came to feel they must preface discussions of my ideas with the proviso that ‘the work may not be scientific but …’. In fact, my work has a better track record of accurate prediction than that of most polling organizations, my innovative methodology is more precise than that used by the vast majority of researchers. Most leading researchers and experts in the
field have spoken out in support of my work and its scholarship.
Other men liked my results: Otto Preminger who told Arthur Godfrey on the
Merv
Griffin
Show
that he should read my book! Michael Conrad, tough police-chief star of the television series
Hill
Street
Blues,
contradicted three other men on a talk show discussing my book, saying:
This work is a very human approach to a very complex problem. In it men reveal themselves on paper in ways I know it is hard for men to do. Some shared with us some of the torment they felt – it contains people who reveal their feelings very deeply and completely. The men talking about growing up, and the pressures to be ‘men’ made me think about my experiences as a child.
I agree with Ms Hite that, in sex, the pressures of standard lovemaking have taken away the ability for natural exploration between people – that is, carefully watching and listening to each other, caring about another human being, sniffing around and looking and watching and seeing the colours, the change of breathing … If people were more observant, and watched
carefully,
noticing how their partner liked something, instead of going by the stereotypes, people could love each other much better.
Finally, a wonderful repartee took place on a Nashville, Tennessee, daytime television show. It went:
Schwiet: I was surprised – I suppose it’s because it’s anonymous – how freely people talked about their innermost feelings. A subject that’s the most private of subjects and yet they just spill it all out. One thing I noticed was the anger that she found in many men against
women which, I suppose is their own insecurity feelings. It’s something that many men honestly told.
Bart: Yeah, they were guaranteed that they would be anonymous. The thing, Bernie, that to me was the most interesting was the part about the Women’s Liberation Movement and how it has affected men’s view of themselves and of women.
Schwiet: I agree. The men today, young men particularly, are on the cutting edge of this movement and it’s undoubtedly one of the things that’s causing divorce. It’s probably had to happen, and should happen, but men have seen, and this is in the book too, how their fathers were in marriage, what the home was like a couple of generations back, and now these young men today are being asked to take their turn washing dishes, looking after the baby. It seems unfair to them that their fathers didn’t have to do these things, and they do.
Bart: And when the man is sexually aroused today, the woman is just not automatically, you know, laying down.
Schwiet: No, no. She may be the one that’s going to work and finding some interesting fellow in the office. The whole thing is really a change of life. Change is always painful, even if it is change for the better, and so right now is the hardest time.
Bart: One thing, also, that came home is that so many men, even though they give the appearance of confidence and really having it all together, are very uncertain about who they are sexually and have some deep-down fears about their macho image and being a man and all those things we’re supposed to be.
Bart: Well, there’s enough in here to find out a whole lot about men’s views about sex, and I hope you’ll read it.
On the newspaper and magazine side, there was a troubling conformity in ‘reporting’ and one story was copied everywhere.
The
Hite
Report
on
Male
Sexuality
wasn’t even published when Philip Nobile, a reporter who used to work for
Penthouse
and was now freelance, wrote an early feature for
New
York
Magazine
‘about’ my book, without having seen it. (He wrote it before the publisher would release the MS to him, so he could have an early ‘scoop’.) This early story became more or less
the
‘news story’ on my book, and unfortunately was repeated, sometimes verbatim, by magazines and papers all over the US and the world. Since they didn’t have any other story, and did not want to be ‘left out’, they copied the first article that came out about
The
Hite
Report
on
Male
Sexuality.
I had no control over this, of course – neither the content nor the timing. It was my first experience with extreme distortion and misinformation in the media about my work, and was probably a turning point in media perception of my research. According to this piece, the book had no ideas, the sample of men was ‘not representative of men in general’, it was not ‘scientific’, and the book worthless (all 7,000 men’s statements?).
This reporter, however, was not simply ‘an honest reporter’, but a man with fixed prejudices that he used aggressively: he wrote about me and other feminists he didn’t like not only under his own name, but also under such pseudonyms as V. de Foggia, in articles using violent and aggressive language, calling me ‘a bitch’ in the
Soho
News
and so on. He attacked Dorchen Leidholdt and the women who bravely established an anti-pornography storefront in the pornography district of
New York City. He also attacked Andrea Dworkin, fighting against pornography, for saying that if Jews were shown in shackles, being beaten, like women in many pornographic pictures, no one would allow it; such pictures would be considered an incitement to racial hatred.
Bob Gottlieb, my editor at Knopf, was surprised at his hostile attitude. After speaking with this reporter, Bob advised me never to talk to him. ‘He’s unreasonable. No matter what I said, he wouldn’t listen.’
When many stories were a carbon copy of this first one, I was amazed. Why would others in the press be so ready to copy the opinion (and often the exact words) of one journalist? It was strange, it was as if all that had happened in 1976/7 with publication of the first Hite Report had not really happened, as if I was not trustworthy. People seemed ready to believe that I was no good as a scientist, that my work was sloppy – and all based on this one story. It was as if his magazine didn’t want anyone to know about my ideas, and so led readers on a long and misleading goose-chase about side topics, mainly related to my research methods. The article went out of its way to misunderstand and belittle the research methods.
Although most psychological studies and market research are based on tiny samples compared to mine, they are not ridiculed. Freud’s samples consisted of under ten people. Yet today, the ‘truth’ related by this one reporter about my lack of ‘science’ – a reporter who knows nothing about ‘science’ – is perceived as
journalistic
wisdom: it has been repeated endlessly by the press,
and is in all their data banks, the sources journalists refer to when writing a story about me.
As this article was unexpected, I wasn’t prepared and didn’t have a strategy for doing anything about it. I tried to explain to other interviewers, but they began to write this up as me being ‘defensive’ about my work. From then on, I found journalists had a closed mind on the topic of my research methodology. This was to last for some time to come. Now, however, after more than twenty years, it is clear that my conclusions have proven accurate and stood the test of time.
After all the hype, I felt really embarrassed. Wasn’t there any way to correct the press statements? I felt sorry for the sensationalist things in the press (I couldn’t control them of course), and I hoped that women reading them hadn’t felt humiliated, yet again, by the way the papers portrayed it all, trivializing things a woman was saying, making sexual innuendos and so on. I hoped they could read between the lines.
I tried to take initiatives with good media, to show what the real issues were. I recorded a series for National Public Radio called ‘What It Means to Be a Man’, interviewing Floyd Patterson, the fighter, Roy Cohn, the right-wing McCarthy hearings attorney, and others.
I had always heard about libel suits and believed that in the US, if papers say something that is not true, a person has the right to make this public by sueing. This is part of America’s precious heritage of free speech, the ultimate safeguard. During the next year I did sue the
reporter who wrote in
New
York
Magazine.
I won an out of court settlement – not for money, but in principle: he could no longer write about me or say I was not scientific.
But how would this get into the press data banks? I sent this complaint, which detailed the copying of the same story from one paper to another, to fifty newspaper editors in the US. I asked them to place this answer to their articles in the same computer that carried their stories, so that the next time a reporter accessed the data base, that reporter would have access not only to the damaging story but also to this legal answer. Not one that I know of did this.
Harriet Pilpel, an attorney and friend, and the first woman graduate of Harvard Law School, talked to the
New
York
Times
for me about an article they ran called ‘Social Science Fiction’ by Robert Asahina which berated me and several other women for our ‘bad methods’, and called us all non-scientific. (The nightmare insult!) The
Times
agreed it had made a mistake, and asked Harriet to ask me to write an article about my methodology, which they would run in their letters column. I did this. However, it was published months after all the newspapers had run their stories, and since it was in the book anyway, any reporter wanting to understand it could have done so anyway. In short, this letter made no difference.