The Hite Report on Shere Hite (16 page)

Rusty left as mysteriously as he came. He died suddenly and without warning just near publication of the third Hite Report. He had helped me with all three. (I wrote an entire book about him, a satire in which he is the leading character,
The
Divine
Comedy
of
Ariadne
and
Jupiter
,
published in 1993.) Owners of dogs whom they love will understand this. Others will think I am sentimental, and it can’t all be true. I don’t care. Rusty was a big part of my life, and I want to say so here. He should get credit for helping me so much with my work, and with understanding life.

I always think of this time as sunny days, the sun on the sidewalk by the Alden and in the park with Rusty, walking there together. I felt I had everything. I was very happy. This was my childhood, my teenage years, my young adulthood – no matter what my chronological age at the time. Rusty helped me have a new childhood, a new way of growing up, a re-education, if you will, together with him (forever, forever I am together with him).

Another close friend for ten years was Julian. A lovely Hungarian man, very thin with long white hair, in his sixties. He looked like an old-style European maestro. Sometimes people on the street would address him as ‘Maestro,’ and he beamed with pleasure. He had a beautiful, basso voice, and spoke softly with an elegant pronunciation.

His real name was Eric Gyula. Julian told me affectionate stories that made me happy, like, ‘Do you know that today when I took Rusty for a walk while you were away, he would leap up at the side of all the taxi cabs that stopped in front of this building to see if it was you coming back? He really missed you!’

I was surprised when friends of mine didn’t warm to Julian. Some were, in fact, snobbish towards him, and treated him as if he didn’t exist. He wasn’t a status
symbol to them, he was poor and old. To me, he was a symbol of quality. I loved him and found him wildly interesting. Very gentle, his every gesture, every idea suggested a non-aggressive spirit. This to me was the most status one could attain.

Julian had the same gorgeous accent as Bela Lugosi – for his homeland – Ploesti, Romania (the Hungarian part of Romania at that time) was the same. Yes! part of Transylvania, the home of Count Dracula and Bela Lugosi! Julian had that same exotic speech, with a basso pitch. He told me how as a boy, he had seen dancing bears on the corners with street musicians, with his mother. His mother was a teacher. He said his father was too violent. Then Julian moved to Budapest, an aspiring writer and poet. By the mid-1930s, he had become a major journalist for the most important Hungarian newspaper,
Magyar
Hirlip.
He lived with a woman doctor in the Jewish district, near the Yiddish theatre and the synagogue. It must have been fun to live there, before they made the neighbourhood a ghetto, killing so many people during World War II. He eventually learned English well enough to write about all of this in an autobiographical novel, which I found after he died and still have.

After the war, Julian – the famous newspaper writer and poet who had spoken against the Nazi brutality – ran for the new Hungarian Parliament. He was elected, but before his term of office had even begun, he and other friends in his party were shot at in the parliament building itself, by the new ‘liberal’ communists. Julian fled. Miraculously, he made it to the US by way
of Austria (with a fake Swedish passport), then Australia, and finally New York. And now here he was, leaning on my desk this bright Sunday morning in spring, beaming at me, declaring proudly, ‘Well, I
made
it!’

I looked at him inquisitively, ‘Made what?’ I was at my desk, working.

‘Made it! Today – I’m seventy. I
survived
!’ And he beamed to tell me how happy he was.

One day, I bought some Hungarian records, and was playing them when he came in. He stopped at the door, and said, ‘Oh! It’s a very long time since I’ve heard that …’ and he was listening. Then he started to repeat the words along with the song. ‘Dambovar, Sambovar …’ It is a river and the person is remembering it, longing to see it again.

‘Do you like the song?’ I asked.

‘Well, I prefer Brahms.’ Julian loved Brahms’ quartets, and Dvořák. Not this schmaltz, or gypsy csárdás, they were for peasants! And tourists like me. But for some reason, I loved those crazy Hungarian melodies, and old Viennese songs, more than he did, I think. Though we both liked Jussi Björling.

Another time, when I was going to Europe, I had got a visa for Hungary (which would be near where I was going), as I had always wanted to visit. Julian suddenly expressed a desire to go. I had never heard him say he wanted to go before. I showed him the tourist travel folder I had got at the Consulate. He looked at it and exclaimed, dumbfounded, ‘But – this has nothing to do with me’. It was a brochure with pictures of young people,
mostly in bathing suits, trying to look trendy. Was it for the benefit of potential US tourists that the Hungarian Tourist Board had produced such an abomination?

I am glad I knew Julian. I learned so much from him about what a person could be like, how the world could be. In addition, he was patient and tender, giving me endless shoulder massages while I worked, over many hours, on my books. I wonder if he ever knew how I would miss him. I’m sure he knew how much I loved him. I hope so. Though when he died, I was not there, one of the tragic, stupid mistakes of life. We were quarrelling. I was frustrated because of all the media stress, and had no one to talk to about it, who understood. People said platitudes, and when even he did this one day – only trying to be helpful and console me – I burst out at him and shoved him away from me. He was hurt and upset.

Julian died at seventy-two, in the midst of the chaos of publication of
The
Hite
Report
on
Male
Sexuality.
He died alone, in the emergency room at Belleview Hospital in New York City. The same emergency room where Andy Warhol died.

Working on male sexuality was not easy! In the final years of research on women’s sexuality, I had begun research on men (1974). Every day I received long replies to my questionnaires. This turned out to be interesting work. There was a huge amount of data to go through, most of it investigating topics never covered by anyone before (or since!) about men’s
psychosexuality. Asking men questions was like feeling in the dark, groping for a key to unlock the complexities underneath the surface. To compensate for this, I asked 7,000 men questions, twice the number of women in my previous report.

Here are some of the questions from the questionnaire – perhaps still provocative, twenty years later.

• What is your earliest memory of feeling sexual?
  
• When were you most deeply in love? What happened?
  
• How do you feel if you are with a woman who does not orgasm in any way?
  
• Do you think your penis is beautiful? Ugly? How does it look?
  
• What would you most like to change about your sexual life?
  

I hired seven students from Columbia, or ex-fellow students, to work for me, helping me take the data off questionnaires and put it onto charts. This was in the late seventies, before computers were in use, of course.

Eventually, the manuscript was ready to edit. Bob Gottlieb, my editor at Knopf, put a lot of work into shaping it. He thought it was a little much when I arrived at his office with the first version – a huge stack over three feet tall! So he had Martha, his colleague, take a photo of us with the MS.

In this report, men describe what love means to them, what sex means to them. They agree and disagree with each other, with clichés of ‘masculinity’ and with
my thoughts, spread out over 800 pages of text. In
The
Hite
Report
on
Female
Sexuality,
women had often said men were sexually oppressive. Part of what I wanted to know was, were men satisfied with sex? Were they ‘built that way’, or was the insistence on penetration, pressuring women, promising love to get sex, various seduction scenarios – was this culturally created behaviour?

If
men were socialized to behave in this way (and in this study they complained often about social pressure to be ‘male’ by having erections and performing) what, then, might their innate sexuality be underneath all this? Would their answers define a new critique of the social pressures needed to make a human being sexually male? For example, did the male code of conduct make men feel happy, or alienated from themselves? And what about love, why did so many men seem ambivalent about love? Yearn for ‘freedom’? These were some of the questions I asked, and quote men debating, in
The
Hite
Report
on
Male
Sexuality.

My conclusions? Although it seems obvious, do we know what male sexuality really is? After all, it is impossible for us to know exactly how much of what we see men do is ‘natural’ male sexuality and how much is learned behaviour. The current definition of male sexuality (as a driving desire for penetration) is clearly culturally exaggerated. Male sexuality comprises a much larger, more varied group of physical feelings – as men describe them in this Hite Report on men. We can hardly know what male sexuality is, when it has been so narrowly defined by the culture.

When looked at closely, the definition of sexuality
put forth by society’s ideology is actually quite negative to men. Men are allowed much less sensuality than women; most women think in terms of a much broader concept of sexuality than the reproductive model we have come to believe is ‘natural’. The basic male behaviour code, however, refers to sexuality as a ‘body function’, an instinct, an ‘animal feeling’ of pleasure. It is the opposite of spiritual (or even emotional) feeling. Within this value system, ‘animal feeling’ is somehow not respectable, something without soul (animals in early Christian tradition did not have souls).

The idea of sexuality as completely cut off from feeling – sex as something ‘subhuman’ that animals (who have no feelings?) do and therefore not part of our humanity, part of a whole person – is a rather strange definition of sexuality, and probably not the most erotic one we could espouse. No wonder men complain of the difficulties of ‘performing’.

A part of the double standard not frequently cited is an alienating pressure on men to have frequent sex, to think and see the world in compartmentalized sexual terms. In fact, the ‘male’ ideology (and the lifestyle it creates) can rob men of the chance to enjoy love, by warning them against closeness, saying ‘you can’t trust women’, ‘don’t let your sex drive confuse you’, and so on. This ideology states that a ‘real man’ should be independent, remain free and unmarried for as long as possible. He should watch out, try not to be tied down. ‘Real men’ should go after and want to have sex with as many women as possible, as often as possible. ‘Real men’ don’t fall head over heels in love. The result of all
this training of men to control their feelings is that many men lose their ability to feel, and become alienated from their deeper selves.

Many men in my study said they felt, on a gut level, that somehow they were missing out. No matter how much sex they had, they were left feeling unsatisfied on some level. And yet our culture’s lessons to men have been so strong that few men have been able to go past them, create their own personal sexuality or transcend the double standard. But a new sexuality and identity is certainly possible.

This is by no means to downgrade men’s traditional ‘lust’, but to redefine it. ‘For men – to be penetrated not only physically but also emotionally –’, as the Hite Report on men explained:

Thus, the report concluded, male sexuality is not only a ‘drive for penetration or reproduction’, but also a longing to be entered: to take and be taken. However, most men can’t let themselves feel more than the aggressive side of their sexuality and emotionality, because this runs contrary to the definition of ‘masculinity’ in our society.

This research on men also raised a new question: ‘Why don’t most men marry the women they most passionately love?’ Half of the book was not about sexuality
per
se
, but about men’s emotional and psychological take on love and relationsips. The most basic finding – one I hadn’t expected – was that most men don’t marry the women they most passionately love. Furthermore, they are proud of this, and feel they ‘made the right decision’. This discussion of men’s psychological structure, men’s experiences with love – and what they perceive as its conflict with duty and masculinity – took up half of the book’s 800 pages. (The questions this research left unanswered, I brought up again and answered more fully in
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family,
in the section ‘Growing Up Male’, published in 1994.)

Again there were roars of fury when this book was published – especially from one reporter, who wrote an early story and thus influenced all the rest of the media
into following his ‘lead’ … If portions of the media hadn’t known what to make of my research on female sexuality in 1976, they knew even less what to make of this study of male emotional-sexual identity in 1981. A look at male sexual psychology in comparison with social ‘do’s and don’ts’ for men; in truth, there had never been a study like it. Women were used to being told that ‘how they thought’ was the result of ‘brainwashing’ that the society had done to them; men could not believe this could sometimes happen to them too! No, there was no such thing as ‘male psychology’; male sexual behavior was ‘normal’ or ‘hormonally inevitable’ or some such thing, according to many male reviewers! There had never been a study asking men to look at their own ‘masculinity’, including its sexual components, with an eye to changing it … re-designing themselves. But this was no different than the way I had approached my research results for women in my earlier book. My editor, a man, liked it …