The Hite Report on Shere Hite (26 page)

‘Oh! Do you paint freckles on your face? How do you do that?'

After twenty-two years as a researcher, I arrive at a key interview for presenting 400 pages of research to the press, and this is the first question.

What would you make of it? Or, of an article about an anthology of twenty years of my work, ‘At age fifty, Shere Hite tottered down the stairs on remarkably high heels.' A little ageism, followed by a discussion of whether or not a
woman of ‘my age' has the right to ‘still' wear anything other than ‘practical clothing'. In one of the top three status papers.

Sexual harassment at work, I guess – in print. And the reader is left to drown in oceans and oceans of ‘information' about my persona, all ideas disappearing in an over-examined body description. Date rape.

Is it harmless? All this, of course, has an impact on the attitudes of publishers and reviewers to my work: they read these incessantly body-ized articles (why discuss a woman's ideas, when you can discuss her body?), feel the inherent trivialization, and don't always look further. They ‘know' who I am.

Which brings me to the topic of censorship. Surely, this trivialization, lamentable as it is, is not censorship. Censorship is political discrimination or punishment of those who have certain views endemic to the ‘establishment', those in power. But wait, for this trivialization is also evident in some of the editing of my work over the years, which books I have been ‘allowed' to write, i.e., for which I have obtained contracts. Trivialization also exists when editors try to keep the ‘beautiful voices' in my research, while removing my own (beautiful or not is
not
the point): by removing my conclusions and comment, they would effectively silence me.

As Christine Battersby noted in her brilliant book,
Gender
and
Genius
, men are called ‘geniuses' and women are not. But, one always wonders, perhaps the editors are right, and my words are not profound. This is not to say that I am anxious for that label. But I do wonder, when I have mapped a completely different territory than Freud saw when he traversed the same route (though my research is based on thousands of people, whereas he spoke
with only a handful) whether people will he able to hear me. Or will they insist on locating me within the confines of ‘sex and women's topics', ‘women's relationships stuff' – whereas they believe Freud made profound comments about the nature of human reality, metaphysical in depth?

The very attitudes about women and men which I am fighting in my work are the attitudes which everywhere confound and confront my ability to speak and write freely – in media, publishing, press (but, fortunately, not often to readers). Together they converge to form an invisible net of possible entrapment and ghetto-ization. Women's ideas and theories are seen through a filter, as Dale Spender explained in
Women
of
Ideas
and
What
Men
Have
Done
to
Them.

I looked up with a start at the interviewer who asked about the freckles. She can't be serious. But she
is.
She is peering at me intently, trying to fathom the secret of
the freckles. Should I act insulted and leave? I stammer something like, ‘But – I haven't even got any make-up base on, I haven't got any make-up on!' I feel small, as if I were having to justify myself to my mother, not unlike the girls in some of my research. Still the silent peering, pen in hand. I offer, ‘I guess I've always had them.' ‘But why are they only on your cheeks, and not all over your face?' A question I cannot answer. I panic, ‘Well, maybe it has something to do with the changes in hormones as one grows older …' This seems to be an unwelcome topic (interviewer is the same age approximately as I am), and the subject is changed.

Was I silenced by the person who asked me these questions? Could she really hear anything important in my work, if her mind was geared to perceive me in such a way? Of course, this is not ‘intentional' censorship -but it can be worse than an official form of censorship, as it operates
just as surely to stop ideas from reaching other people, but no one sees the repression, it is invisible. It is not glorified by the noble martyrdom attached to the word ‘censorship'.

I am not the only woman to experience this, by any means. Susan Faludi, Andrea Dworkin, Diana (of British royal fame), Kate Millet, Erica Jong, Dale Spender, Germaine Greer, most of the nineteenth-century feminists (or any woman who speaks out) – all of us are called ‘colourful', ‘dramatic', details of our bodies and appearances hashed and rehashed in the press, while we write and write and talk and talk, hoping to be heard. Sometimes we are, even through all the smoke.

The invisibilizing of women's thought is a form of censorship. Simone de Beauvoir mused from time to time on the fact that, without being aligned with Jean-Paul Sartre, would ‘the canons' have seen her? Accepted her?

Margaret Mead did a service to society with her ground-breaking research on Samoa. Yet the
New
York
Times
frontpage obituary a few years ago felt it correct to state prominently something to the effect that ‘although she was never a scientist, nevertheless …'. This would never have been said about a man who achieved what she achieved, namely to put an entirely different culture on the map in the mind of the West, give them a comparison with how they lived. Her work was as scientific as that of any other anthropologist, though what do these labels matter, finally?

At the end of the twentieth century, are we going to canonize mostly men again? Will including ‘women's rights' on the
BBC
end-of-century programmes mean only showing the reels of the suffragettes over and over, valuable as these are?
Censorship feels confusing to an individual. Some entries from my diaries show how this new, unacknowledged silencing works on the individual:

25 November 1993

I am nauseous, I cannot speak, my throat is so blocked I begin to think I must have cancer. Someone, a friend, says to me, ‘Maybe you feel like you are being strangled, because they are cutting your words.' My throat clears up, but my nausea remains, to remind me of my revulsion. I can't swallow what is happening. I stay up most nights and sleep little, writing endless faxes to keep my words intact. Wondering, always wondering, if my work is really ‘so valuable' (a woman's question about her worth), wondering how much is ‘right' to fight for. I feel alone.

28 August 1994

I can't sleep. I can't eat. I calm myself with work. I work such long hours that I don't take time to go to the grocery store. I eat leftovers and develop food poisoning. Or is my stomach just rebelling at what I am having to swallow? Distortions and inexplicable changes in my work are hard to swallow.

10 September 1994

It is easy to lose my bearings. Why? What is the point of cutting my ideas? To present me as a ‘sex author' with no politics? Yet, that is not possible. Better to stand and declare oneself than have an attack for all the wrong reasons …

Who
are
the
censors
today?
How
do
they
work?

Censorship today is not a man in a suit with a big red pen. There is no formal bulletin on the six o'clock news which says, ‘Your news is now being censored' so that those
watching can conveniently decide if they are prepared to do something about it. It just creeps around you, like a vaguely unpleasant feeling. You have to be alert to see what it is before its mists engulf you.

Censorship happens in small ways, gradually. Only eventually does it amount to a big problem, stifling a way of life.

How serious a problem is it now in the West? Rushdie has the profile, many others have the problem. We have our own ‘disappeared' here, they are the authors and other political dissidents, who are disappearing from public sight, going down for the third time without a sound, only a gurgle or two here and there, an anonymous fax, troublesome for a day or two, about some author who was foolish enough to do away with her or himself. Questions of ‘is it all worth it?', ‘how long can I carry on?' surface daily in the lives of many who take a stand (what the Soviet Union used to call ‘political dissidents'), those who are enduring political persecution in the press and elsewhere.

In 1990 I attended a meeting of the Women's Committee of
PEN
in New York. Many women were describing not being able to get or renew publishing contracts. They lamented they did not make big enough profits, saying ‘only the real money makers get published now.' I said that a financial explanation is not sufficient: after all, every day hundreds of books on obscure topics are published. Further, though my books have a track record of making money for publishers, publishers tend to be nervous and do not always accept my projects (unless they are about ‘sex'); indeed, feminist books have trouble for political reasons in this reactionary climate.

The agenda of many large publishing conglomerates is not only financial but also political. These politics range
from ‘don't upset anybody, publish only safe books', to pushing a particular political philosophy, such as a back-to-basics agenda. Finance also plays a part: at one large conglomerate, the feminist book division, no matter how much profit it makes, is not allowed to plough this money back into its own division, and is not allowed to give advances to authors (even those who make money) of more than around £5,000. Even if a book has chances of selling well, if it expresses radical political opinions (such as Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, feminist activists or Rushdie), its publication may be hampered. But not overtly.

Perhaps the most recent overt example we have of censorship was during the McCarthy era in the US when a witchhunt was carried out by some members of Congress to find and destroy those Hollywood screenwriters, actors and others who were ‘Communist sympathizers', the ‘red menace', and not ‘loyal Americans'. Some were jailed, most lost their ability to make a living in the industry. Thus one went from complicated and interesting Bette Davis female film characters in the 1940s, for example, to the 1950s happy-girl or ‘innocent' characterizations of Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. Simplistic characters – women and men.

Censorship is increased by the consolidation of publishing, magazines and television into a few hands. Decisions are often by committee, not a committee working on the basis of majority decision, but requiring unanimous agreement: if even one person on the editorial board strongly disagrees with taking on a book another editor wants, it cannot be published. One person can blackball it. I do not know the rationale for this corporate policy, but new opinions and radical ideas almost never make it past these editorial boards. I would highly recommend to
anyone who has not read it, the Ben Bagdakian book
Media
Monopoly,
published by Beacon Press in Boston.

Many large media firms are now actively engaged in combat over territories. These media conglomerates have bought up book publishing, not because it is so profitable, but because books and their reviews are part of the creation of public opinion. There is a growing secrecy and paranoia on editorial and marketing committees. (In fact, editorial offices are increasingly guarded by armed security people at the entrances.) It used to be that editor and author had an artisanal relationship: they presented a work of art or well-crafted non-fiction to the corporation for which the editor worked, to then be marketed. Now, in many cases, there are endless secret consultations and shapings to which the author is not party, perhaps to maintain the ‘corporate image', and/or please distributors and the bookstore chain buyer. (Or, perhaps bankers holding title to company financing?)

Another cause of decreasing diversity is that the majority of bookstores are owned by chains, who cut prices to a level with which the independents cannot compete. New publishing does spring up, but new small presses hardly have the distribution to enable them to compete or reach large numbers of people: they do not have the connections and the financial ties with the chains that larger publishers do.

Why should a publisher stick up for an author, no matter how much money s/he makes for the publisher, if a powerful person at, say, the
New
York
Times
decides to tell a publisher that if he persists in promoting certain out-of-favour authors, then why should he kindly review or even review at all their many other books? Publishers must keep him as a friend, not an enemy. One book is not worth it
.
To them.

As Noam Chomsky explains in
Manufacturing
Consent,
modern ‘democracy' is closely linked to media politics. The first action in military coups in foreign countries is usually to take over the radio and television stations by force. Was it a coup in the West, behind the scenes, by financial interests when they bought up the media during the eighties? Who needs guns?