In Memory of Shere Hite— Speaking Truth to Power for All Women
Nov. 2, 1942 to Sept. 9, 2020
Source of Photo: "Then & Now: Shere Hite, sexologist" by Kevin Courtney - The Irish Times - Sat, Jun 25, 2011 from Shere Hite Official Website. Photograph by Linda Nylind/The Guardian
Though I don’t know if Hite ever said this, I believe (and I think she would agree) that a woman’s power to speak her truth comes from her power center—her vulva. Look how much her speech center, the vocal folds, looks like her vulva!
Our vocal folds
A woman’s vulva
They are almost twins, a body double that troubles some males and even some females, so they try to lockdown both her vulva and her vocal folds in the jail of “Lock her up!” These chants and rants are the modern-day equivalents of chastity belts in the middle ages—they try to repress women’s sexuality simultaneously cutting into the flesh of their fresh ideas and creativity! They threaten a woman’s speech for fear it might leech out, move about in the world, unravel when she travels.
Years ago, I began to link my creativity with my communication center when new ideas for writing fashion ads came to me when I was experiencing the pleasure of a hot shower. As the years progressed, I’ve noticed new thoughts for writing coming to me after feeling pleasure of all kinds, especially orgasms.
Chants like “Lock her up!” inhibit a woman’s speech and keep her from speaking out. They keep her from finding and revealing new shores, new doors to open or old ones to open in new ways—places she cannot know about until her toes step into the wet sand of the new land she has found, unbound, and unchained from that eons-old reign of terror—the fear of being shamed.
Shame and a woman’s external genitals, originally called the pudenda, stem from the same Latin derivation, the neuter plural of the gerundive of pudere, ‘be ashamed.’
Shame and blame are the twin legacies of Eve. What if we could instead glory in the gift of Eve as progenitor—the one who came first, the curious woman who led man out of the same old, same old into the full human experience, the big bang of “truth is complex,” or as Jean Cocteau said,“I am a lie that tells the truth.”?
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. —F. Scott Fitzgerald
Shere Hite (Photo from Nexttribe September 12, 2020)
Sadly, this week, we say farewell to a true gift to all women, Shere Hite—a woman who loved women more than they loved themselves. She planted her toes on a new shore and opened an old door with new information to give women the right to self-pleasure without guilt or shame. In 1976, Hite had the courage to open her vocal folds with The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality and to say out loud to the whole world what women have known since the first woman: “Women don’t need men to be able to have an orgasm. They do not need vaginal penetration. They can climax through stimulation of the clitoris alone.”
Shere Hite spoke from and about her center of pleasure. She gives me courage to do the same.
In 1976, Americans were not ready to embrace Hite’s truth. We threw her off her soap box the way the British did to suffragists in the late nineteenth century. We knocked her flat on the street of shame, tore apart and tried to soil the clothes of her social research into women’s sexuality—some of us even threatened her with death. We hounded her out of America across the Atlantic to Europe because American men, but more importantly, some American women couldn’t let in her truth. How many women still may not have heard of her or of The Hite Report? They may self-pleasure, but still live in its former shame and shadows.
In a tribute article to Hite in The Guardian (September 10, 2020 ), Matthew Weaver quotes Hite from a 2011 interview in the same publication: “I was saying that penetration didn’t do anything for women and that got some people terribly upset…I was the only sex researcher at that time who was feminist. I tried to extend the idea of sexual activity to female orgasm and masturbation.”
The public and media pilloried her. A recent article (Sept. 11, 2020) in The New York Times “Shere Hite, Who Challenged Myths of Female Sexuality, Dies at 77” by Katharine Q. Seelye states, “The tidal wave of anger and resentment against her inspired 12 prominent feminists, including Gloria Steinem and Barbara Ehrenreich, to denounce the media assaults on her as a conservative backlash directed not so much against one woman as ‘against the rights of women everywhere.’”
To respond to her critics and to place her life and work in a more honest and accurate context, in 2000 Hite published The Hite Report on Hite: A Sexual and Political Autobiography. From this same article in the Times, “The Guardian lamented that a woman [Hite] who had set out to defy sexism had been condemned as vain and narcissistic. ‘Strip away the sneers,’ the newspaper wrote, ‘and what really scares people about Hite is the fact that she is a beautiful, clever, sexy, self-made woman.’”
Matthew Weaver (Sept. 10, 2020) adds, “The writer Julie Bindel, who interviewed Hite in 2011 and stayed in touch afterwards, told The Guardian she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Bindel said: ‘Her work was groundbreaking—in many ways she began the real sexual revolution for women in the 1970s after the abject failure of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. In the 60s, women didn’t ever feel that they had the right to sexual pleasure. Shere Hite put women’s sexual pleasure first and foremost for the first time ever. She centered women’s experiences as opposed to seeing men as the default position and women as secondary. That really spoke to a lot of women about their own bodies, their own sexual liberation and sexual pleasure.’”
As a whole, most American women today still are not standing up for what Shere Hite stood for. Many women do not freely discuss self-pleasure in conversations with other women or with their sexual partners. I didn’t show my husband how I wanted to be touched until I was in my seventies. Are young women today doing better? Writing on the current adult hookup culture suggests women do not expect their orgasm to be part of the interaction. Nor do the men they sleep with encourage them to do so. What about teenage girls and college women? In Peggy Orenstein’s 2016 landmark book, Girls and Sex, some coeds recount stories of getting drunk before they go to frat parties so that when they enter the room and men hit on them for sex, they can comply and later claim they did so because they were wasted. These women see this strategy as a win-win: they can remain popular and sought after by guys and yet not be considered sluts. Alas, the double-standard is still alive and well in America. Sadly, Shere Hite—who worked so hard to erase it—is not.
No one is saying women don’t need men.
I haven’t read all Hite has written; yet, I don’t believe (as some of her critics have said) that she felt women didn’t need men in their lives. She was married twice, so she clearly wanted a man in hers. I have certainly wanted and loved having a man in mine.
Lovemaking between a man and a woman—or any two consenting partners—is a deep renewal of intimacy on many levels, not just through orgasm. It is men, not Hite, who want to believe that their primary importance to women is giving them an orgasm vaginally with their penis. Hite wanted women to know they didn’t need men for the orgasm part of sexual satisfaction and that giving oneself pleasure through clitoral stimulation was an important part of a woman’s sexual needs.
Yet, there are no mass protests on the streets with women shouting, “We have a right to self-pleasure!” Why? Because it is common knowledge and now accepted by both women and men? I think not. I didn’t know about The Hite Report until at least two decades after it was published. Knowing about the validity of clitoral orgasm would have made a huge difference in the sexual life of my marriage and the ambivalence I felt about self-pleasure. Yesterday, I spoke to a very knowledgeable and highly intelligent woman who had never heard of Hite or of her report. So many mainstream religions still denounce self-pleasure as sinful. Until women can stand up and shout from their vocal folds and their vulvas, “Our self-pleasure matters!” it will remain our secret shame, and we are fooling ourselves to believe we have reached full equality with men.
“If a woman wanted a vote, I agreed they had a right to vote, for I regarded the franchise in our Republic more as a right than a privilege... [but] what I secretly felt…was that, so long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will remain indirect.” –Ellen Glasgow from The Woman Within, p. 187
