The Hite Report on Shere Hite (11 page)

I remember one day I saw Gloria Steinem. She looked extremely pretty and I was afraid of her, she was so famous. She too wasn't quite accepted by the core group at some conference or another where we were because she was so successful and had her own magazine, and I wasn't accepted because I was still a ‘nobody' and a blonde who sometimes wore make-up and besides, I was from out of town, ‘nowhere'. Gloria and I eyed each other at the edges of this circle of women who were casually hanging out, and gossiping, checking out clothing, sharing ideas and information. We both wanted desperately to be included (it seemed to me). She – being the brighter and braver of us that day – smiled at me and began to strike up a conversation. What did I do? Did I appreciate this gesture of hers, and respond? No! I snottily – but really, shyly – turned back
to the group who didn't accept me and weren't noticing me. Why on earth did I do a stupid thing like that? I've always regretted it. Fortunately, this was not my last chapter with Gloria, for she became a friend and colleague, a relationship that has lasted for years.

One group I felt very attracted to – strangely, since I was only about thirty – was the Older Women's Liberation organization,
OWL
. I felt very comfortable in their debates and workshops. First, I was interested in the issues, secondly, there was less rivalry there, I felt. I had never liked the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of ‘catty' cliquishness that had existed in parts of the college campus, modelling and now here. I thought it was shallow, and most of all, I hated it distracting me from trying to follow my own inner thread, by getting involved in personality or power struggles, which I felt I couldn't win anyway. Perhaps growing up mainly as an only child made me unequipped for the complexities of ‘sibling rivalry'. And maybe the complexity of my relationship with my grandmother and my mother made me determined never to involve myself in petty rivalries and relationships. I always wanted to focus my life on larger goals, and this was an intense period for formulating what those goals might be. I needed a clear head. That is also part of why I was celibate for about two years during this time.

I loved the women's movement. I had an incredibly great group of friends but still, somewhere, somehow, I was not sharing all of myself. I was trying to fit in, to be ‘acceptable'. I went for over a year not wearing make-up. Ideologically, I agree with not wearing it – still, I
liked make-up. Well, I had been a model for four years. I didn't wear make-up at all at university, I didn't even really know how to apply it before I started modelling.

While modelling, I could express one part of myself, the sensuous, sociable, pleasure-loving part of myself. At Columbia, I expressed my bookish side. Now, in the women's movement, I still could not be all of myself. It wasn't just the make-up; that was only symbolic of other things. One did not feel in those days, certainly, that one could flaunt a hetero boyfriend, certainly could not bring ‘him' to meetings. I didn't have one at that time, didn't want one, but I felt vaguely guilty and uneasy for having had them in the past. It felt like a potential betrayal. Of course, lots of women in the movement either had boyfriends, or were even married!

Gay women could come to meetings together, and this was considered great. I wished I could be gay and have an intimate relationship, but at the same time, I was unsure how I really felt. I had liked some of my boyfriends, yes, but not wanted to spend my life with any of them. I had never had a lesbian fantasy, at least that I was aware of. This too made me feel guilty. In short, there was a lot of political correctness on the scene to deal with, but this PC was positive; its discussions placed issues on the table which had been submerged, previously regarded as not discussable. I could see the ethics and political helpfulness of women loving women. I wondered if this was why I had not felt that carried away with any of my boyfriends.

Others, more heterosexual members of the group, wrote a pamphlet called
In
the
Belly
of
the
Beast,
asserting it was radical to be heterosexual. But the retort was more convincing. ‘No, this would mean putting energy into a man which could better be put into a woman.' During that period, I saw clearly that sexual orientation can be a matter of choice. What we call ‘biologically natural' heterosexual orientation is generally a matter of social pressure. Also, the women's movement has often said that unless we can give other women physical affection, we will not be able to move truly forward as a movement, because, lacking physical and sexual affection and love, women will not want to fully commit themselves, integrate themselves into the women's movement. For me, the movement was all mind, and not body – though for many of my friends, it was body too – maybe body first! I was envious of their sexual experimentation with each other, and their true love in some cases, but much too shy (except for a brief occasion) to try even in the slightest. And the idea of falling in love, real love, with a woman was far beyond me at the time, though I thought I was open-minded and liberated! Maybe I was, maybe it's just that I didn't fall in love with anyone.

While virtually every other issue was being debated in the women's movement in 1970, sexuality was not – though there were a few early queries. Barbara Seaman published a book called
Free
and
Female,
based on the sexual descriptions of the women in her women's group, as early as 1969. Masters and Johnson's second book was in our group's library, but it claimed that although clitoral stimulus was important for women's orgasms, this should happen automatically during intercourse (coitus). Mary Jane Sherfey in her book,
The
Nature
and
Evolution
of
Female
Sexuality,
and Anne Koedt, in her pamphlet
The
Myth
of
Female
Orgasm,
differed with them. Koedt stated that there was no such thing as a
vaginal orgasm; Albert Ellis, too, had questioned this even earlier

Who was right – this pamphlet by Koedt, or Masters and Johnson? No woman did have orgasm during coitus, or all women ‘should'? We wondered, but we were not debating this. Not us, we were devoted to issues like ‘equal pay for equal work', health issues related to the birth-control pill, sexist depictions of women in advertising and so on. But the pressure on women to have vaginal orgasm, or be deemed frigid ‘psychologically immature', or ‘fucked up', was
every
where.

I suggested we have a weekend conference open to women from all over the city to try to discuss this. My friends in the group looked at me in horror: ‘Well, who's going to speak out? Not me! You think I'm going to stand up and tell everybody about how I have orgasms?! You've got to be kidding!' So I decided an anonymous questionnaire was the only way to go forward. I would distribute it, then read some of the answers at the conference.

I went home and wrote my questions. When I brought them to the next meeting to ask for suggestions, looks of shock and even outrage filled some faces after just the first few questions. One woman later wrote me a condescendingly patient letter explaining that, ‘It would be better to ask ‘
If
you masturbate, how do you do it?' rather than
‘How
do you masturbate?' since, she said,
she
did not masturbate! I was amazed that she needed to tell me this! However I merely wrote back that it was better to imply that it was normal and acceptable for people to do this, rather than the reverse,
i.e., reinforcing the assumption that ‘nice girls don't', would make it doubly difficult for women to answer or describe how they did it. This information was crucial, in light of stereotypes that women had ‘problems' having orgasm; women's ability to masturbate to orgasm contradicted this stereotype.

I began this project riding around on the back of my friend Mike Wilson's motorcycle, distributing questionnaires all over New York City. This soon expanded into distribution by mail all over the United States.

I distributed my questionnaires (supported in name by the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women – and supported financially by myself) from 1972–6. During this time, sexuality discussion groups of all kinds began to be formed within the movement and Betty Dodson began her famous masturbation seminars; the New York Radical Feminists, another group, held an evening to debate ‘What Is Good Sex?' Two women who worked in publishing had advised me to publish the material I was receiving as a book, so it could be seen by as many women as possible everywhere, so soon, armed with a minimalist $20,000 advance, I stopped modelling, distributed thousands of questionnaires for four years, borowed money from friends, and analysed and wrote my conclusions about the answers. My editor came up with the name
The
Hite
Report,
and the book was published in 1976.

During these four – really five – years, I took what little money I had, and went into overdrive, working seven days a week. Every day I would work twelve or more hours. What was I doing? Reading questionnaire
replies, sorting them, and making huge charts (this was before personal computers), placing all the 3,000 essay answers to one of the questions (there were over one hundred questions) on first one, chart, then another, and so on.

I was totally committed. I didn't even have time for meetings of the women's movement now, since I hardly had money to pay the rent, never mind the astronomic cost of postage to mail all those heavy, five-page questionnaires. The paper cost a fortune and I used to buy it at end-of-stock warehouses that sold it ridiculously cheap, in interesting colours. In order to get the thousands of responses I wanted, with this kind of unsolicited distribution, I had to print hundreds of thousands of questionnaires. This involved a major outlay of cash in terms of paper, ink and printing press.

To save money, I learned to run a printing press myself. Fortunately, there was a radical collective in New York at the time, which grew out of a Quaker organization, making it possible for people to print posters for their ‘alternative' events. I'm glad they believed in what I was doing and let me work there. I had to pay for ink and electricity, and bring food and paper. (This was a hippie commune, with no door on the bathroom, because that would represent unnecessary privacy and be elitist!)

My editor's doorman loaned me money to continue, when things got difficult. My editor lived in a big building across the street. The doorman, Virgilio del Toro, used to say hello to me during the night when, after working, I would take my dog Rusty out for a short
break. This was in the middle of the night, or sometimes in the day. He was a gentle person, originally from Puerto Rico, full of a poetic love of the calm night. He said he was surprised he always saw my light at all times of the day and night, that I never went out. (It was his job to stand in front of the building across the way, so he knew what everyone did.) And why didn't I go out more? What was I doing? Little by little, I got to know him, and told him about my project, and how I had to rush because soon I would run out of money, and so on. He had three daughters, he told me. One day, he said, ‘Say, look, I've saved up some money, and I could loan it to you.' I didn't pay any attention until he kept saying it over a few weeks. I felt that I shouldn't borrow it, but it saved the project.

I continued to distribute questionnaires for years, first in New York, then all over the US. I mailed batches to organizations and student centres, also church and health groups, with a letter explaining their purpose, asking the president or whoever received the letter to put the questionnaires out for members to take, if they wanted one. Then, the respondent would mail them back to me (these were long, often handwritten responces to essay questions) without signing them, so she could have absolute confidence that she could say anything she wanted, without fear. This made utter and absolute honesty possible. From 1972–6, I hardly went out. My best friends were my editor, Regina Ryan, Veronica di Napoli, who was helping me stamp envelopes and open mail – and Rusty!

I lived then in a tiny basement apartment for which
I paid about $450 a month (very cheap). It had two rooms and a small backyard, in which I planted ivy and paved the concrete yard with beautiful rusty old red bricks I found on a walk with Virgilio, passing by a building that was being torn down. He helped me carry them home, carefully laying the beautiful old red bricks over the existing grey concrete.

It was there that Rusty, my lovely dog, came to live with me. Brown with white spots, he was one of the loveliest dogs ever to grace the planet. He seemed a magical, charmed creature to me, and so graceful. His name was already Rusty, as Calla Fricke told me when she gave him to me. Her animal shelter was named ‘I Love Animals'. When I brought him home in a taxi for the first time, he shivered and shook pitifully, but as soon as we got out, he leaped around happily on the street corner, then when we went inside, settled down contentedly on the carpet. It was the beginning of a great sixteen year relationship.

To do a nationwide study of female sexuality for almost five years – how much money does this take? Answer: a lot! But I didn't have a lot. I was living on very little money – plus paying for the questionnaires, mailings, paper, postage, telephone – everything with a budget of about $1,000 a month.

With the total advance payment I received for
The
Hite
Report
($20,000 in instalments) and another $35,000 I borrowed bit by bit from banks and friends, I lived and worked for five years, paid quite a few assistants (slave wages), and printed and mailed over 100,000 questionnaires all over the United States. And
as I've mentioned the printing was done inexpensively with the help of a collective, Come! Unity Press in New York City, which asked only for donations, as long as the item printed was not to be sold, and you learned to run the printing press yourself.

$55,000 is a very small amount of money to live on for over four or five years, plus produce an elaborate piece of research. The government often pays for similar research, with a cost in the six or seven figure range. But it was a wonderfully happy period of my life, because I felt I was doing something worthwhile, and women working on it with me seemed to feel the same way. Nothing like it had ever been done before: recording women's voices on these personal topics, on sexuality – an area previously always defined by men – this was new and important. Discussing what female sexuality was really all about, underneath the clichés and pressures. I loved receiving the answers to my questions from women, and knowing that together we would redefine some part of ourselves – for ever.

The last year I was working on the research and living in that basement, someone bought the building, and he proceeded to try to force all the tenants to move out. We formed a tenants' union, and started withholding rent, plus going to court regularly. When he found that the court cases (handled free by our district assemblyman, Richard Gottfriend) were dragging on he decided to hurry matters along and we all started finding rats in the building.

I, and most of the others, had lived there for several years (one elderly Russian couple Boris and Ellen had
lived there for twenty years), and there had
never
been rats in the building before. Now suddenly, there were rats everywhere: in the halls, in our apartments, everywhere. It became a regular occurrence to have to call the exterminator who would come and leave poison bombs in your apartment. It took several hours for the fumes to spread everywhere, during which of course you had to vacate your home. Sometimes we went to each others' apartments, but it was usually at night, so it was very cold and we often spent the night in the corner coffee shop.

During the entire six years I lived there, it was the custom of the owners to turn off the heat at 1 a.m., assuming everyone had gone to bed then; it wouldn't come on again until 7 a.m., no matter how cold. Of course, this is illegal, but there was almost no way to prove this to city inspectors, since the landlord had the key to the basement and could reset the dials before the inspector was let in. In any case, we had the inspector in many times, but somehow he never found any violations. It was also a very old boiler, and needed regulating often lest heavy fumes would come pouring out of it, filling the building. One year, when the landlord was not resident, we learned how to unlock the door to the basement, and started running the boiler ourselves – that was the most pleasant year, heatwise. It was pretty cosy. We also organized the tenants' association.

Finally, the court case, which had been dragging on, was decided; we were all told to move within six months, but until then we could live rent-free. This was how I finished the book. This was to be a life-saver for
me, because I didn't know from day to day how I would eat, and already owed over $20,000. No one had any idea that the book would wind up selling as well as it did. The publisher had said there were ‘too many books already out on sex' and ‘feminism was dead'. So it was great to have an inexpensive place to live despite the things the landlord did to make life unpleasant.

My six months were up in July, before the book came out at the end of August. I had no money at all, so moving was a great expense. My future seemed so uncertain. All the while I was still working day and night, seven days a week, feverishly, intensely discussing or fighting passionately with three editors (all women) about the book. We talked endlessly about whether it was too radical, about the title it would have, about finishing the introduction – working, working, working – and not sure what the outcome would be. I knew it was an herstoric document, and a monument – and that gave me energy and strength. But I had no idea how it would be received by anyone other than fellow feminists or other academics, or even if it would be noticed.

During the editing process, no picnic, I would go wearily home and seek the advice and support of my friends, to plan the strategies for the next day's editorial battles primarily to keep intact the most important parts of the book. I had no idea that what one wrote was not always what was published. These weeks were gruelling, exhausting and draining beyond belief.