Shere Hite - The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality

Table of Contents

... fascinating, eye-opening, rewarding... a must for everyone, male and female.

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

Women have come a long way in the last half of the twentieth century, from a time when the existence of the female orgasm was doubted and when women were effectively owned as property in marriage to landmark victories such as the 1995 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Women, signed by 140 countries, which proclaims a womans autonomy over her own body. However, despite todays shrill insistence that women have all their rights now and sexuality is all over the place, there is still some way to goas is plain from what women continue to write to me.

Myths about female orgasm have long prevailed: that women have difficulty having orgasm, that female orgasms (if they exist!) are much weaker and not as real as mens, that women are blocked from having orgasm during intercourse (as men do) by either their own psychological fears and neuroses or by mens haste in having orgasm themselves. These ides fixes have endured despite being full of nonsense and error.

Some real research into what women truly think, feel and experience seemed necessary.

When I started this work I was at university doing graduate study in history. I discovered feminist activism; my friends and I attended demonstrations together, wrote pamphlets about womens rights, and talked about our personal lives. Gradually it became clear that knowing the truth about our sexuality is just as important as demanding equal pay. After earning two degrees I left university and devoted myself fully to preparing this book.

The Hite Report, first published in 1976, presents the testimony of over three thousand women of all ages and backgrounds, and it was the first to state the case for a fundamental redefinition of sex, based on equality. Not only did the book present a new theory of female sexualityand of sexuality itself (asserting for the first time that what we know as sex is culturally created and not simply a biological given)it documented in detail, in womens own voices, the ways that women masturbate and copulate/make love, classifying, based on a large and diverse sample, the differences and similarities.

The facts are clear: most women can orgasm easily during clitoral or pubic area stimulation (either by themselves or with another person using hand or mouth, if they feel comfortable with that person). Only one-third of women orgasm easily during the actual act, i.e. penetration. (By the way, why is the beginning of intercourse almost always described as vaginal penetration couldnt one as easily say penile covering?) For most women, the stimulation during masturbation contrasts with that of coitus. There is rarely penetration of the vagina during masturbation, and there is much more regular direct, soft, rhythmic pubic area stimulation, sometimes cushioned with a soft cloth.

Society has long known that it is easier for women to orgasm during masturbation than coitus, and that masturbation is clitoral and exterior, not vaginal. Yet society condemned women as if their sensations were wrong, incorrect. Though both Freud and Kinsey knew that women could orgasm much more easily with clitoral stimulation than vaginal penetration, neither drew the logical conclusion. Instead of seeing that societys definition of sex was oppressive to women, these experts expected women to change. Freud believed women should mature and adjust to sex, while Kinsey thought that when a woman had been married longer, had more experience sexually, she would achieve orgasm through coitus. My conclusion was different.

It is in fact normal for women to orgasm from clitoral stimulation, not immature or dysfunctional. The way women orgasm is something to celebrate, not derogate. It is not that women have a problem sexually, but that society has a problem accepting and understanding womens sexuality. (This is not to say that the vagina is not highly erotic and sensitive, or that it cannot bring intense satisfaction to a woman with the right partner; there is something very symbolic about being penetrated by another, as men too can experience.) I conclude that since sex is a historically and culturally constructed institutionnot strictly a matter of biology or mechanicsthe definition of sex can be changed and indeed should be changed.

Unfortunately a great distance remains between the private lives and public images of how women experience sexuality and orgasm. Hollywood films, like the vast majority of sex videos and internet pornography, do not show a woman reaching orgasm via clitoral stimulation by hand from a partner. Instead, they continue to show women imitating men sexually, or acting like male fantasies of women: having orgasm from the same stimulation men do (coitus), behaving as The New Sexually Active Woman, exhibiting lust for stereotypically male-pleasing activities, dressing in clichd sex-tart provocative clothing, and, of course, being ever young. The assumption has been that intercourse (The Act) is the only real way to have sex, and that a normal woman should orgasm during penetration, just like a man. Men still often indicate by their actions that they assume a woman will orgasm from intercourse unless she tells me something different, putting a woman in the awkward position of asking for something with no name that must be special since it is not ordinary in the mans experience, not automatically offered (as women during sex expect to offer coitus). Thus there is an ongoing gap between mens idea of women, and womens realityand an undercurrent in sex that makes emotions even more fragile than they would normally be in love and relationships.

One of the reasons that this misunderstanding still exists is the invention of the mythical g-spot just a few years after The Hite Report was published. The idea that women have a special spot inside the vagina that can cause orgasm if stimulated in the proper way became popular in the 1980s when three clinical researchers published a book based upon scanty research claiming just that. They did not explain why this spot had never been identified before and why there was little evidence to support its existence, but the point of its publication may have been to delegitimize womens desire to change the meaning of sex, as they had so eloquently voiced in