The Play's the Thing

A month ago, Shere Hite, 33, was a former fashion model all but unknown outside a few feminist circles in Manhattan. Today she is a sex guru. Harper's Bazaar and Playboy are planning interviews, and she seems sure to be the subject of magazine covers in the months ahead. She is appearing on TV talk shows, New York University has invited her to lecture on female psychology, and the New York Times Magazine has asked her to write an article on female sexuality. So many want to plumb Hite, in fact, that she has decided to turn down a host of suitors, including Penthouse and much of the British press. Says Hite's agent: "Now she wants to be very selective in the things she does."

The reason for this passionate pursuit is The Hite Report (Macmillan; $12.50), a book based on the 3,019 replies to 100,000 explicit sex questionnaires that Hite has distributed to Ameican women since 1972. Released Sept.20, the book is already in its third printing (total copies to date: 60,000); its prospects have Macmillan aglow. Report's stimulation and legitimacy come not from its statistics -- there are surprisingly few -- but from the confessional accounts by women of their own sex lives. Many female readers can closely identify with these intimate revelations, which have a frankness and directness not usually seen in print.

Hite presents a picture of vast dissatisfaction and sexual misfirings. What is more, she thinks she knows the reason. "It is very clear by now," she says, "that the pattern of sexual relations predominant in our culture exploits and oppresses women ... [It] has institutionalized out any expression of women's sexual feelings except for those that support male sexual needs."

Clitoral stimulation is central to women's sexuality, says Hite. So she framed one question for her survey that most professional sex researchers have not asked: Do you regularly achieve orgasm during intercourse without separate massaging of the clitoris? Only 26% said yes.

The Hite conclusion: it is biologically normal for women not to reach orgasm through intercourse alone, and only pressure by a male-dominated society keeps women from seeing this fact. "Intercourse," she writes, "was never meant to stimulate women to orgasm." She advises women to masturbate and to find a sexual partner who will give clitoral stimulation. "There is no great mystery about why a woman has an orgasm," says Hite. "It happens with the right stimulation, quickly, pleasurably and reliably."

On the basis of her findings, Hite criticizes Sex Researchers Masters and Johnson for insisting that intercourse is the normal way for women to reach orgasm. The famous team argues that the thrust of the penis pulls the labia against the clitoris and produces female orgasm. To Hite this is "a Rube Goldberg scheme" that works for very few women.

Hite also concludes that orgasms produced by clitoral massage are stronger and more ecstatic than those produced by intercourse--a finding that other sex researchers, including Masters and Johnson, support. But Hite goes still further, arguing that many female orgasms during intercourse are "emotional orgasms"--diffuse physical sensations produced mainly from feelings of love and intimacy. Hite considers it a desirable form of release "as long as women are not pressured into using emotional orgasm as a substitute for real orgasms." She also suggests that the presence of the penis in the vagina may reduce a woman's chances for intense orgasm by acting "as a pacifier"--dispersing sexual tension and diffusing the focus of orgasm. Still, she says, this soothing may bring women a feeling of fulfillment without orgasm.

Eighty-seven percent of Hite's women said they enjoy "vaginal penetration/intercourse" mostly because of the feelings of closeness and security they as sociate with the act. "Clearly," says Hite, "there was no automatic connection between not having orgasms during intercourse and not liking it. " Four-fifths of the women reported that they masturbated, and of these, 95% reached orgasm easily and regularly. Most admitted they liked cunnilingus, though Hite reports that they described it in "spare, tight, unenthusiastic and secretive" language. Says Hite: "Women do not feel proud about clitoral stimulation in any form."

Hite, who has never been married, is reluctant to talk about her own back ground. "People assume that when you do something like this, there's something wrong with you," she says. A native of St. Joseph, Mo., she worked her way through the University of Florida, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in the history of ideas. In the mid-'60s she moved to New York, enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, then dropped out and worked as a model in New York, Paris and Milan. She does not care to dwell on her modeling career "because when you say 'model,' people think you're frivolous."

Political Sex. Hite joined the feminist movement, and in 1972 she won permission from the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women to use the NOW letterhead for her freelance sex study. Many of her questions reflected an embattled view of sex arising out of the feminist movement. (Sample: "Do you feel that having sex is in any way political?"). Others proved so opaque ("Is having an orgasm somewhat of a concentrated effort?" "If you have ever experienced something you called 'love,' which emotions were involved?") that Hite revised the questionnaire three times and then ran into problems lumping together answers to three versions of the same question.

To find candidates for her survey, Hite advertised the availability of the questionnaire in feminist circles, church newsletters, the Village Voice and several magazines, including Oui, Brides and Mademoiselle. Though the respon dents are from 49 states, they tend to be liberal and Eastern.

However shaky her methodology, Hite is not about to abandon her sex research. She is once again circulating questionnaires, this time for a report on male sexuality. A possible hint of things to come: one portion of the current book is entitled "Do Men Need Intercourse?"Though Hite never answers her own question, she refers admiringly to the 19th century sexual practices of the famous Oneida Community in New York. The Oneida men usually indulged in intercourse but not orgasm.

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