Hite Report

position of asking for something 'special,' some 'extra' stimulation, or they somehow try to subliminally send messages to a partner who often is not even aware that he should be listening... So all too often women just do without--or fake it.

The culmination of Hite's thesis is that a woman should not have to rely on a man to "give" her orgasms. Rather, she should be able to "take charge" of getting them for herself during sex just as men do--either by asking for the type of stimulation she prefers or by masturbating. Orgasm becomes a verb, something that one does rather than something given or had. This concluding recommendation is, however, problematic. If the women originally felt embarrassed or ill at ease expressing their wants, it seems somehow unrealistic for Hite simply to counsel "taking charge" when precisely that sort of affirmative action has proven to be so difficult. Hite does not present a realistic solution to this dilemma. She merely insists that women need not feel inhibited.

The Hite Report stands as a polemic and a pep talk. See, she's telling all her readers, most women are absolutely normal when they fall short of the avidity that Playboy and Penthouse magazines try to fob off on them. Women can overcome their sexual dependencies--the last stronghold of a male-dominated society--only if they make demands, and both men and women will be better off when that happens.

Hite's counsel stands to reason. Women have been socialized into grids of passivity, and they will not act as whole, autonomous individuals until they have shed those patterns. But the means of translating this awareness into effective action remains unresolved. Hite would have us believe that sheer insight will stimulate women to effect a complete change, to revitalize all their relationships and become more assertive. She tends to limit her commentary to recapitulations of the sufficiently eloquent statements her respondents offer, where she could use their explication of pervasive sexual problems as a springboard to solutions. Such annoying pretension toward analysis hardly justifies Hite's designation as the author of this study. Ultimately, it is not Hite but the collected quotes which make this book remarkable, worthwhile and--at least from a female perspective--authentic reading.

Anyone with two cents worth of intelligence is going to wonder about Hite's methodology, an issue she has minimized in innumerable interviews. Most of the questionnaires were distributed through NOW, Oui, Mademoiselle, Ms. and The Village Voice--which obviously slants the sampling toward certain income levels, races and frames of mind. (I would bet no female Ford Motor Co. factory worker ever saw the questionnaires.) This is undeniably a flaw, but not of the magnitude that some reviews have made out.

Okay, so it's not a perfectly representative study, but it would be impossible and dishonest to ignore the fact that almost every single response reflected the same discontents, fears, guilts. Two to three thousand women must communicate similar impressions about their sex lives and sexuality for very real reasons as opposed to a flukey coincidence. From the point of view of academic sociology. Hite's research and methods probably aren't tidy enough. But the problem of statistical skewing does not invalidate the gist of the verbal responses they elicited.

Shere Hite is more vulnerable to attack for the dearth of information she presents about her own biases. She never specifies what motivated her to initiate the study. The theories and quotations Hite presents fit together so smoothly, one cannot avoid suspecting her of manipulating information. I suppose I would have felt this less if some distinctly anti-male sentiments didn't frequently creep into the book, affording an almost universally negative impression of men. In many ways, Hite seems overly anxious for the reader to accept that men are continually boorish, selfish, uninspired and non-emotional.

The short shrift given dissent reinforces one's suspicion that data was matched to a preconceived analysis. This "study" of female sexuality devotes only about a dozen pages to women who are able to orgasm during intercourse and who do enjoy satisfactory heterosexual relationships. Even though Hite was not primarily interested in examining contentment, this imbalance unfortunately abets those aiming to detract from the report's overall accuracy.