The Sexologist Who Taught Us How to Talk About Women’s Orgasms

It’s been 50 years since the publication of The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. The legacy of its author, Shere Hite, is everywhere.

Once you’ve seen a photo of Shere Hite, it’s hard to forget how beautiful this late twentieth-century self-trained feminist sexologist was. Tall, willowy, with tumbling curls, often photographed draped in gauzy blouses and shifts, Hite was born to be a celebrity. And given the controversy surrounding her blockbuster best-seller about women’s orgasms, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, it’s even harder to remember how smart and courageous she was.

Although not the first major sexology research directed and written by a woman (that honor belongs to paleobiologist Marie Stopes’s 1918 marriage manual), The Hite Report was the first popular sex manual to put women at the center of their erotic lives. Hite and her team of female research assistants drew from a survey completed by more than 3500 female respondents. They were not credentialed academics or physicians, a fact that was used to attack both their methods and findings. Hite had some training in the social sciences, but she centered her approach around radical feminist methodologies she observed in consciousness-raising groups.

In these settings, thousands of lay experts on women’s sexuality practitioners debunked long-held definitions of “good” or “mature” sex theorized by—and privileging—men. Hite’s findings were a collective portrait of the many non-penetrative routes, particularly masturbation and fantasy, that women took to orgasm. The premise of the book was simple: Women had plenty of orgasms—just not with men. Not surprisingly, many male readers found The Hite Report salacious and enraging (Playboy famously dubbed it “The Hate Report.”) But women, and undoubtedly some men, loved it. In the first year of its publication, MacMillen sold two and a half million copies.

The Hite Report’s instant and enduring popularity offers the intriguing possibility that there was never a unitary “sexual revolution,” but rather a complex transformation that unrolled over a decade or so, gradually pulling in different, overlapping demographics: men, queer people, and finally, with The Hite Report, women. More than 50 million copies have ended up in readers’ hands, making it among the 30 best-selling books of all time; it is still in print today. Yet, as we learn from historian Rosa Campbell’s engaging and deeply reported new volume, The Book That Taught the World To Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report, a book that brought women’s orgasms out of the consciousness-raising group and onto the page was nearly relegated to the rubbish bin of history. Hite’s publisher gave her an advance contract in the early seventies, when feminism was hot, but, by the fall of 1976, it had lost confidence in the project and cut the press run to 4500. “Female sexuality had been over-discussed,” Hite recalled bitterly, “and nobody needed any new books about it. Sorry kid.”

Hite was used to hearing “Sorry, kid.”

Born Shirley Diana Gregory in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 2, 1942, she was the illegitimate daughter of a teenager, also named Shirley, and an Army draftee who shipped out—permanently. Shirley deposited her firstborn with her Christian fundamentalist parents. They divorced in 1948, and in 1951, big Shirley, now married to Raymond Hite and toting a second infant, returned. A year later, “unable to cope,” she brought the child—now renamed Shere Hite, after her stepfather—to St. Joseph. (Shere is usually pronounced “share.”) Big Shirley returned for exactly one visit, largely remarkable for the fact that Hite nearly drowned in a public pool while her mother flirted with the men there. Then Shirley vanished from her daughter’s life; she was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, and cycled in and out of institutions thereafter. Hite appears to have seen her only once more, decades later.

Campbell and documentarian Nicole Newnham, who directed The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a 2023 documentary biography about the sexologist’s life and work, agree on more than the arguable assertion that Hite and her work have vanished. Both infer that her courage, independence, and sexual nonconformity were a consequence of childhood resilience in the face of persistent social shame and family chaos. At about 13, Hite became aware that she was beautiful. When she began to have sex, her grandmother could not tolerate it, warning her........

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