The Hite Report on Shere Hite (22 page)

My meetings with such ageing power-men were macabre yet funny. My talk with Paley was like my conversation with Ben Bradlee: both laughed and totally failed to understand what the whole thing was about or how, as liberal Western men who believed in ‘democracy', they were both shooting themselves in the foot, by being untrue to their principles. Either there was some other card game going on here, between newspaper and TV owners, or else they were very much out of touch with the meaning of modern political movements.

Towards the climax of all this fabricated media hysteria,
Newsweek,
carried a page about me, basically a nightmarish attack on my ‘emotional stability' and my entire person. (Believe me, if what they were doing hadn't destabilized me by now, probably nothing ever could!) Of course, the public in general, not knowing
Newsweek
and the
Washington
Post
are jointly owned (though they probably know now, after the Clinton vs. media revelations), was supposed to imagine that the
Newsweek
piece was an independent confirmation of the
Post
's ‘totally objective' piece. In fact, I never met the
Newsweek
reporter or anyone there. But that page really hurt me, it was so vicious. It was extremely violent and crudely written, slashing, terribly painful for me.

I wondered how many people believed
Newsweek
's nonsense.

With hindsight the piece in
Newsweek
was a form of sexual harassment. In fact sexual harassment in press coverage of me has been so overt that the language used has close parallels with the language associated with rape trials. Some of the press has put everything in my life on trial, from my clothes to my hair to my apartment to my habits and my friends, even going so far as to say, just as in rape cases, ‘It's her own fault if she's not taken seriously.'

Newsweek
spent a whole page telling their readers, ‘Hite is frantically dithering away her credibility', then using lurid adjectives and verbs to piece together half-truths to make me seem incredibly strange and untrustworthy. This was to have been the page, I believe, in which the ‘withdrawal of the book', and my ‘nervous breakdown' were to have been announced, following
the combined efforts of
Newsweek
and the
Washington
Post
reporter. They had saved space for this story, and then had to fill it somehow. So they used even more exaggerated and lurid repetitions of things already said elsewhere several times (
Newsweek
article, ‘Men Aren't Her Only Problem', late 1987), adding for good measure, the old
Playboy
photo, trying to push me into the category of ‘sexual and trivial – shouldn't be taken seriously'.

The physical descriptions of me in the press – journalist after journalist describing my hair, my body, my face, my skin, my voice (usually in a tawdry way) – eventually made me feel ‘pawed' (as my grandmother would have said) all over. A sort of public rape in newsprint. I stopped doing interviews. A few years later, I wrote about these articles in
Index
on
Censorship.

Another side of the endless derogatory attacks was to focus on my supposed methodological flaws, ‘show' that the women in my research are not normal women. Why? Because then they would not have to listen, or take seriously what these women are saying. They can tell themselves, ‘She's weird, her sample is weird, all those women saying these things are weird.'

Yet the methodology, though criticized in the popular press, won praise from many scholars, both praise for being a new feminist methodology, an advance over previous social science methods for studying private life and emotion, and for being exceptionally well done. I received the Distinguished Service Award for my work from the largest association of sex counsellors and
therapists in the US (
AASECT
). Over the years, the trends of most of my major findings and conclusions have been borne out by other research, including by the US Department of Labor Statistics, and UK Government population statistics. In short, I am a good researcher and scholar!

I learned that ‘interviews' were not a viable way to say anything. After a while, there began to be a dreary, violent and repetitive quality to the articles. The London
Sunday
Times
(March 1994) followed a predictable scenario: first, tired old clichés about methodology were trotted out (completely misunderstood), then endless discussion of my hair-do and physical appearance, a few quotes thrown in from outside sources, and this about summed up its coverage. Nothing about the ideas or theories, not even the basic statistical findings were repeated. I wondered in despair, when would there ever be a serious review?

The articles felt like a kind of psycho-terror. They usually contained (often cribbed verbatim from other articles) character assassination, sloppy, inaccurate and misleading discussions of the methodology, in the end concluding that I and it were ‘unscientific' (i.e., my sample was ‘poor', ‘too few respondents', the women in my study could not be ‘normal women'). An article will appear, one never knows in what kind of twisted way, without any warning or knowing how or on what day. All kinds of decisions about pictures, layouts, tone of article, are taken by committees of people one never meets, or even hears the names of. These are corporate secrets under the name of ‘freedom of the press'.

These events left me stunned. This was America. This was a democracy. How could a person's speech be twisted so fundamentally? I felt very confused. It was hard to think clearly. But, as my work challenges the system to change fundamentally, it is attacked.

Friedrich and I had many conversations, trying to understand, ranging over the history of Germany, the Roman Empire, France, the American Revolution, and so on, trying to get some sort of handle on events. Also involved in these discussions were friends from academic and feminist circles including Jesse Lemisch, Ruby Rohrlich, Naomi Weisstein, Phyllis Chesler, Barbara Seaman, Stephen Jay Gould, Lois Banner, Herb Klein and others.

I had the most questions. I had grown up believing in America, in the glory of our system, our guarantees of basic rights, the inviolability of the right to free speech, the beauty and justice of the system. What was happening?

In the Midwest, where I was born, things like this were just not supposed to happen. I – a good girl, a good citizen always honest – believed that I would get fair treatment from the world. I never thought that people could lie so flagrantly, or that I could be considered any of the things said about me in the papers. I didn't think that people in responsible newspapers could be so dishonest. Yet everything I said in the book was completely blotted out in the press. What little was left was
distorted. Radio hosts tried to push and shove me, covering their microphones, and then broadcast any reactions to make me appear hysterical.

These events tested my belief in democracy and what the US is all about. I had grown up never doubting that my country was a great democracy, the best on earth, but what I experienced was not democracy. I was shocked. What did it mean? Was it indicative of bigger problems in the US? Were others finding this lack of free speech? If it was happening to others and no one would speak out.

Today, we have heard many speak out, from Hillary Clinton to General Westmoreland, to Professor Ben Bagdakian to say that political power groups can control the media and thereby control public opinion.

Democracy in today's society is different from what it was for the ‘founding fathers', because technology has created a super-powerful global media. This media and now the Internet is very little regulated by governments (that would be censorship, people say), and so the media is not governed by the rules of democracy. Media is privately owned, and therefore governed by whoever owns it. Whether an individual or a corporate board, it is not democratic. Yet media today is almost a fourth branch of government, it has become so influential and ever present. There is an increasing lack of freedom of speech in the US, although difficult to see, as a cacophony of voices is shouting from all sides of the media at any given moment – so that it even seems that there is too much free speech. In all this shouting, real ideas and
diversity of opinion can be completely lost. This is hard to notice, amidst all the noise. I kept thinking of all of this watching the Clinton Impeachment tapes and trial in 1998/9.

Then, I was in a crisis of how to understand the world. I also had to defend myself. Somehow. But how? Newspapers would not listen when I and others tried to present facts they were overlooking or suppressing. None of my ideas were being heard – though I was every day on television and in the papers.

As a public figure, I could not really sue any of my detractors, those who libelled or misquoted me. Why? In the US, the libel laws are so constructed that a public figure (a legal category meaning you appear in the papers a lot) has to prove so many things (including beyond doubt, the intentionally malicious motives of the newspaper writer!) before being able to think of sueing. Also this takes years and costs a fortune, and in the end, even if you win, the newspapers will either not write about the lawsuit (scoundrels' agreement) or distort it, so it never sets the record straight. So counterattack or changing the direction of the ‘story', once it is started, is virtually impossible.

Harriet Pilpel, my friend and attorney informed a very surprised me of these facts. ‘Shere, you have to prove they
intended
to hurt you, maliciously,' she told me. ‘Harriet, I thought the law would protect me. It doesn't feel like America to me if I have to live in a country in which I can be so awfully attacked, and have no way to defend myself. I don't understand it, or how the laws can ever have been made this way.'

Then something wonderful happened. I was told that twelve women had drafted and signed a statement, expressing their disgust at this media campaign of villification. They thought that a good place to organize a press conference to present the statement would be at the American Studies Association annual meeting, before a speech I was scheduled to give. I was still very active in my academic and scholarly organizations such as the American Anthropological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Historical Association, the American Psychological Association and so on.

The following statement was read out:

The press conference these distinguished women held at the
ASA
annual conference, heavily attended, was
reported by the
Chronicles
of
Higher
Education
(but not the national press, except Liz Smith's
New
York
Post
column).

Chronicles,
the major news source of what's going on in academic and scholarly circles, reported the solid, academic support for me. (Immediately the popular press kept on and still keeps on declaring that I am ‘not scholarly' though it is not scholars who lash out at my work, it is members of the popular press in the US who do not understand at all issues of scholarship and methodology. And don't give any appearance of wanting to.)

At the time of this press conference – several months into the press campaign and media attack – the press violence escalated, from verbal and written abuse, to physical threats. Two reporters (?) from the Associated Press had been calling and leaving snide and threatening messages on my answering machine, daring me to appear at this
ASA
conference.

‘Would you
really
try to come? Are you
really
thinking of still giving your speech? Really? Don't forget, we'll be there, we'll be there,' they taunted.

I still have the tapes of the calls these two guys made. I say two, because they were together when they called me, there were two voices together. They did not call me in separate phone calls. They called me more than once, and always together. They did attend the conference, and turned out to be stocky, street-fighter looking types, who then threatened me physically with their very large black metal tape recorders (for
AP
radio, they said). They aimed these menacingly towards my head,
while making taunting and abusive remarks. (Were they
really
from
AP
? Another
AP
reporter later queried this. I don't know.) Standing behind the podium, where the audience couldn't see them, they continued as I tried to begin my speech, until someone evicted them.

Chronicles
of
Higher
Education,
covered the mêlée that day at the press conference in their next issue of 9 December, 1987: