Shere Hite
Shere Hite (born November 2 1942, Saint Joseph, Missouri American-born German sex educator and feminist. Her sexological work has focused primarily on female sexuality. Hite builds upon biological studies of sex by Masters and Johnson and by Alfred Kinsey. She also references theoretical, political and psychological works associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, such as Anne Koedt's The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. After attacks on herself and her work, she renounced her United States citizenship in 1995 to become German.
Education
Hite graduated from Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Florida. She received a master's degree in history from the University of Florida in 1967. She then moved to New York City and enrolled at Columbia University to work toward her Ph.D. in social history. Hite attributes the non-completion of this degree to the conservative nature of Columbia at that time. She later completed a Ph.D. at Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and another Ph.D. in clinical sexology at Maimonides University, North Miami Beach, Florida.
Research focus
Shere Hite has focused on understanding how individuals regard sexual experience and the meaning it holds for them. Hite has criticized Masters and Johnson's work for uncritically incorporating cultural attitudes on sexual behavior into their research. For example, Hite's work showed that 70% of women who do not have orgasms through intercourse are able to achieve orgasm easily by masturbation. She has criticised Masters and Johnson's argument that enough clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm should be provided by thrusting during intercourse, and the inference that the failure of this is a sign of female "sexual dysfunction." Whilst not denying that both Kinsey and Masters and Johnson have been a crucial step in sex research, she believes that we must understand the cultural and personal construction of sexual experience to make the research relevant to sexual behavior outside the laboratory.
Methodology
Hite uses an individualistic research method. Responses from anonymous questionnaires are used as a framework to develop a discourse on human responses to gender and sexuality. Her conclusions derived from these questionnaire data have met with methodological criticism. The fact that her data are not probability samples raises concerns about whether the sample data can be generalised to relevant populations. As is common with surveys concerning sensitive subjects, such as sexual behavior, the proportion of nonresponse is typically large. Thus the conclusions derived from the data may not represent the views of the population under study because of bias due to nonresponse. [1]
However, regardless of methodological drawbacks, Hite has been praised for her theoretical fruitfulness in sociological research. [2] The suggestion of bias in some of Hite's studies is frequently used as a talking point in university courses where sampling methods are discussed, along with the Literary Digest poll of 1936.
Notable works
- Sexual Honesty, by Women, For Women (1974)
- The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976,2004)
- The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality (1981)
- Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress (The Hite Report on Love, Passion, and Emotional Violence) (1987)
- Fliegen mit Jupiter (1993)
- The Shere Hite Reader: New and Selected Writings on Sex, Globalization and Private Life (2006)
Notes
The New Statesman, November 17, 2003 [3] USA Today, May 15, 2006 [4]
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