Using a survey methodology, Hite found women required clitoral stimulation to orgasm. And while they knew about the clitoris because they masturbated, they rarely asked for it in straight sex. Instead, they gritted their teeth or faked it, the loudest way to be silent about sexual dissatisfaction.<\/p>\n
To understand why, Hite held sex up to feminism, and found it was shot through with power and inequality. Society insisted that women \u2013 like men \u2013 should find their greatest pleasure in penetrative sex: the man penetrating, the woman penetrated. Hite declared: \u201cSex is sexist \u2026 Women\u2019s sex lives clearly reflect their second-class position in society.\u201d <\/p>\n
The book exploded across the US. It was translated widely, became a bestseller in Japan, was banned in Brazil and smuggled into East Germany. To date 50 million copies have been sold, making it the 30th bestselling book of all time<\/a>. <\/p>\n For a time Hite was everywhere, and everyone loved the book. Erica Jong, author of the sex-forward 1973 novel Fear of Flying<\/a> wrote in the New York Review of Books: \u201cRead The Hite Report if you want to know how sex really is right now.\u201d The National Observer described it as a \u201cbombshell\u201d. Even Playboy praised her redefinition of orgasm from something that men \u201cgive\u201d to women, to \u201csomething she works toward herself\u201d. <\/p>\n As I found in my archival research for my recent book<\/a>, The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report, she received thousands of letters from readers<\/a>. <\/p>\n Women wrote to her from the suburbs, praising her for the way the book made them feel normal. Men working in factories, on oil rigs, and in prison wrote to her too. This was often the first book about feminism they had ever read. <\/p>\n Partly inspired by the plentiful fan mail, she began The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, which was published in 1981, but by this time, anti-feminist storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. Critic Philip Nobile argued in New York Magazine that she \u201cwhipped herself up into an antipatriarchal frenzy\u201d and \u201ctotally neglects biology\u201d. Men, Nobile claimed, were \u201cnaturally promiscuous\u201d.<\/p>\n This biological explanation for social inequality was one from the New Right, a grassroots coalition of right-wing figures including televangelist Jerry Falwell<\/a> and mega-church minister and bestselling apocalyptic sci-fi writer, Tim LaHaye<\/a> who entangled biblical and scientific explanations to fight the forces of feminism.<\/p>\n Right-wing women too pushed biological explanations. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly<\/a> and founder of conservative anti-feminist group Eagle Forum argued that \u201cthe man is orgasm oriented\u201d while the \u201cwoman is engulfed in romanticism\u201d.<\/p>\n The New Right also engaged in the politics of grievance, arguing that ordinary Americans had been left behind by civil rights and feminism. Any gains for feminists such as women working, especially in traditionally male professions, or improved laws and services around rape and domestic violence, were necessarily a loss for them.<\/p>\n This zero-sum explanation was particularly appealing at a time of economic downturn and unemployment which was caused by global oil crises, though as journalist Susan Faludi wrote in her now classic text Backlash, feminism got the blame<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ronald Reagan upheld this view, remarking<\/a> in a 1982 address on the state of the economy: \u201cPart of the unemployment is not as much recession as it is the great increase in the people going into the job market and, ladies, I\u2019m not picking on anyone, but because of the increase in women who are working today\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Right wing forces of the 1980s resemble the right today; the loops and echoes are striking. The misogynists of the manosphere today misuse evolutionary psychology<\/a> to argue that domination is men\u2019s nature and deception and promiscuity are women\u2019s. They also suggest that men\u2019s natural instincts are curbed by a world beholden to feminist interests.<\/p>\n Trad wives<\/a> \u2013 communities of right-wing, They, contrarily, were \u201ca little flock pitted against \u2026 the president, the federal bureaucracy, the mushrooming feminist organisations\u201d, as Rosemary Thompson, director of Schlafley\u2019s Eagle Forum put it.<\/p>\n Today trad wives sometimes incorporate an anticapitalist edge into their conspiracy theories. As one influencer<\/a> claimed, feminism is a \u201clie corporations created to get more workers and more money\u201d. In the 1980s as now, we see how ideas that began on the fringes of the political right became mainstream. <\/p>\n By 1987, when Hite published the third book in her trilogy, Women and Love, media vilification intensified. From the London Review of Books and the Washington Post to the New York Post and Penthouse, all reviewed her negatively. The tempest against feminism was in full swing.<\/p>\n Republican strategists had learned a lot from right-wing women and began to centre anti-feminism, gender and sexuality in their electoral platform alongside economic conservatism and national defence. Ronald Reagan\u2019s victories owed a lot to these women<\/a> and by 1987 he\u2019d been in office for seven years, pushing anti-feminist politics widely<\/a>. <\/p>\n Politics leaked into culture too. One of the bestselling books of the year was Donald Trump\u2019s The Art of the Deal and one of the most popular films was Fatal Attraction, where the feminist career woman \u201cpsycho\u201d is literally killed off by the stay-at-home mom.<\/p>\n With Fox TV camped outside her house and the media becoming increasingly harassing, Hite fled from the US, settling in Europe until her death in 2020. Her work largely disappeared from public memory. <\/p>\n The story of Hite and The Hite Report helps us understand how one woman lived the backlash and how she came undone. This shows us that backlashes are not inevitable, but political, that there is often period of real progress, followed by a clampdown by those who want to maintain their power. Shere Hite\u2019s story helps us all to see what they are up against. <\/p>\n This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org; if you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n Rosa Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1976, a Playboy model turned feminist sex-researcher called Shere Hite did hundreds of television and radio appearances promoting her book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. She went on Good Night America dressed in a high-necked Victorian white silk blouse, huge faux-pearl earrings and matching necklace, her face framed by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Anti-feminist backlash<\/h2>\n
\n\u201ctraditional wife\u201d women who advocate through social media for hierarchical gender roles \u2013 also suggest that women are not biologically built for casual sex or paid work, but monogamy, baby-making and submission. Both right-wing women of the 1980s and trad wives now tend towards the conspiratorial<\/a>. These right-wing women painted feminists as elites who had taken over the government by devious means.<\/p>\n
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