Shere Hite - The Shere Hite reader: sex, globalization, and private life

Table of Contents

Women who read it will feel enormously reassured about their own sexuality.... If enough men read it, the quality of sex... is bound to improve. Read The Hite Report if you want to know how sex really is right now.

Erica Jong, The New York Times Book Review

A remarkable book... opens new vistas and new insights into where females are at in the 1970s... I highly recommend it.

Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, co-author with Dr. Alfred Kinsey, The Kinsey Reports

One of the greatest causes of my success in sex.

Peter Ustinov, Daily Telegraph

Shere Hite has changed the way we think about sex.

Barbara Walters

Every woman should read this book.

Gloria Steinem

Hites books have caused a sensationand keep arousing passionate controversy.

Tom Brokaw

The only honest book about sex.

Marlon Brando

This groundbreaking study of female sexuality opens new vistas.

American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and
Therapists (AASECT)

Hite has devised a brilliant new methodology letting women speak for themselves.

Laura Tanner, Women in Psychology

A valuable demonstration of what women themselves truly feel and think about it all. Jeweled with the voices of thousands of individual women who speak movingly about their experiences and feelings during sex, through their eyes we experience the inside track of how female orgasm worksand much more.

Laetitia Cox, Glamour

Here women speak, out of the privacy of their own sexual lives, not only from the present but from their prememory days and into the eighth decade. The whole rich variety of female sexuality is spread out in panoramareal, significant, and poignant.

Mary S. Calderone, M.D., President, Sex Information and Education Council of the United States

The Hite Report belongs on your shelf along with Masters and Johnson and Kinseya classic work.

Barbara Seaman

Absolutely first rate.

Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, S.U.N.Y.

Women who read the report are likely to be reassured by how many women share their own attitudes and sexual experiencesand men should be pleased to have so much specific information about what women really want.

Jean Seligman, Newsweek

A scholarly and meticulously researched work, which may ultimately be the catalyst for a major revision of existing scientific conclusions regarding female sexuality.... To date, The Hite Report is the best source of information on female sexuality.

Dr. Leah Schaefer, Society for the Scientific Study of Sex

A confessional wherein the reader learns the dark secrets of female sexuality, those things that partners seldom tell each other. Men who read the study are astonished at the diversity of sexual response.

There are many people who have helped in these research projects over the years, so that it would hardly be possible to name them all. Yet I wish to name those who were or are most central.

Most importantly of all, I am grateful to those who participated in my research, giving so much of themselves to me, to others, and to the world. As they were asked not to sign their questionnaire replies, written in the form of essay answers to approximately 150 questions, their anonymity is protected completely; not even I know their names.

I would like to pay special tribute to members of my family and friends and those who have helped me finance and complete these projects over the years, including Cecile and Paul Rice, Rick Kwiecinski, Howard and Christine Wilson, Steve and Marina Kaufman, Martin Sage, Virgilio del Toro, Iris Brosch, Joyce Gold, Regina Ryan, Sydelle Beiner, Joyce Snyder, P. Trainotti, and many others.

I would also like to pay tribute to those who have gone out of their way to support my research in terms of professional help. Foremost among these is Barbara Seaman, of whom I wrote in 1996 (in the preface to the United States Edition of The Hite Report on the Family), Some things, like the Statue of Liberty, we take for granted. Barbara Seaman, one of the most influential women in the twentieth-century womens movement, is something like that. It was Barbara who made sure that this bookalready published in ten other countrieswas also published in the United States, as it was Barbara who had earlier introduced me to the editor of the first Hite Report, Regina Ryan. A woman of great personal charm and energy as well as a seminal author, Seaman has written such books as Free and Female and The Doctors Case Against the Pill; she is the cofounder of The Womens Health Network, and her work has led to congressional hearings and procedural changes on the part of the worlds physicians and pharmaceutical companies. As Jane OReilly of Time magazine remarked on meeting her, Do you know who that is? That woman has saved thousands of lives!

Also invaluable to me, I would like to thank for their help in getting The Hite Report on the Family published in the United States several important writers and intellectuals who put their own reputations on the line to defend mine when it was under attack. Since the previous Hite Report had sustained harsh personal attacks in 1987-1988 (often falsely drawn on methodological groundsas the methodology was new, later winning awards, few at the time understood it, although today it has proven accurate, standing the test of time), some United States publishers seemed intimidated and appeared to fear publishing my new works. For example, the research on the family was published in the United States only two years after it appeared in forty-nine other countries and eleven languages, with the first publisher, Dutton, cancelling its contract after, in effect, blocking publication for two years; this situation was resolved when a petition published by Ms. Magazine alongside an article by Jennifer Gonnerman, as well as an in-depth fifteen-minute NBC interview by Tom Brokaw and Katie Curic, done in London, broke the silence and challenged nonpublication. The Dutton contract with the originating United Kingdom publisher, Bloomsbury (Liz Calder), was nullified, and Grove-Atlantic published the book in 1996. For their courage and support at that time I would like to express my profound gratitude to Phyllis Chesler, Naomi Weisstein, Jesse Lemisch, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kate Millett, Ruby Rohrlich, Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, Stephen Jay Gould, Barbara Seaman, Karla Jay, and Kate Colleran, who wrote and put forth a statement in my defense. I would also like to thank Marcia Gillespie, Janet Wolfe, Jessica Velmans, Morgan Entrekin, Allison Draper who edited the book, Gillian Taylor, Lin Crouch, Victoria McKee, Friedrich Hoericke, my husband, and many others for their support at that time.

I would also like to thank the group of famous writers who spontaneously defended me against the painful and startling personal and methodological attacks of 1987-88 (leading up to the 1994-95 situation), which included an attack on the cover of Time magazine; they wrote a statement which they read out at the American Studies Association annual convention of 1988, including the words, Terribly important issues that concern womens lives and health... are being obscured and trivialized by the medias assault on Shere Hites new book,