The Hite Report on Shere Hite (28 page)

‘No. I'm married to a German citizen and I would like to change nationalities.'

‘Well, it is not necessary to change nationalities to be married and live here happily for as many years as you like, being a US citizen.'

‘That is probably true, but I would not feel that I was fully involved in life here, I would not feel quite right somehow.'

This conversation continued for twenty or thirty minutes. At the end, the young blond man told me to go back out to the waiting room, and I would be contacted. I went back out and waited. After a brief time, my name was called. Friedrich and I thought that now I would get the formal statement that I would sign, and that it would be sent to Washington.

I approached the window behind which the blond man now stood. ‘Here, sign this', he shoved a form under the bars at me. I looked at it and I signed it. ‘Now this,' he shoved another. I read it and looked at him, then signed it, asking, ‘Now will this be sent to
Washington? How long will it take to hear hack? What is the next step I should do now?'

The blond man, without smiling, said, ‘I have no idea. You are no longer a US citizen. You are now stateless. Good luck.' And he slammed his window blind shut.

I was stunned. ‘But … I thought …'

What a surprise!

The good news, at least, was that now I didn't have to wait the two months, so this was progress. But I had made no plan with the German government as to how or when to get my papers, so suddenly I could not travel outside of Germany. I had no citizenship, no status, no identification.

We got on the train and headed back to Cologne. It was late afternoon, all state offices were closed by the time we got back, and we were exhausted. What about dinner? We didn't feel like eating, or we did, but … ‘Let's go to McDonald's?' ‘Great idea.' ‘Do you want to eat it there, or take it home?' ‘Let's take it home and sit in bed and watch a movie on the television and eat it.' ‘Super.'

We went to McDonald's, that icon of Americana, and bought two giant bags of everything they had, including ten burgers of assorted types. At home, we dumped it all in the middle of the bed and looked at it. We made a bet with each other, to see who could eat the most. Though Friedrich is over six feet tall, much taller than I am, I won. (I knew I would.) I ate the most. Then we fell into an exhausted deep sleep.

The next day we had a piece of luck. The office we
needed to see was open only one day a week, and this was the day. A visit there, and we were informed that we had to put together various papers and documents, ‘Then come back, and we'll see.' This involved getting a ‘family book' to prove that we were married (the ‘family book' is a special German document, and since we were married in the US, we didn't have it), and other documentation. Happily, Friedrich knew many people in Cologne including the mayor, and he began a telephone campaign to organize everything. Just as when we got married, it was Friedrich who, now once again, showed his capable, practical side.

Soon, I was standing in the official office, the delighted recipient of documents welcoming me into new German citizenship. I was moved. I will always remember that moment, the woman handing me the documents and Friedrich's arm around my shoulders.

Too, I'll never forget Friedrich turning to me and saying, just after I got my papers, ‘Welcome! Now you too can be asked at all the world's cocktail parties why you killed the Jews!'

Being in Europe had done me a world of good. A new emotional climate with new colleagues, new intellectual stimulation, and new friends – plus Friedrich – restored me so much that I published three books in four years.

I published my novel,
The
Divine
Comedy
of
Ariadne
and
Jupiter,
and a volume of theoretical essays
Women
as
Revolutionary
Agents
of
Change: Selected
Essays
in
Psychology
and
Gender
1972–93
. I have to admit, to see the theory behind all the books brought together for the first time was highly satisfying – emotionally, not financially. This is prestige we're talking about here! Who asks for money?!

Surprisingly, one of the publishers of
Revolutionary
Agents
was in the United States! This was a university press. I had specifically wanted to reach an audience I knew understood my work, without the media circus. This wonderful publisher the University of Wisconsin Press is probably my all time favourite.

Another thing that made me happy, seven years after the US attack on my book,
Women
and
Love,
was going over Knopf's royalty statements. I was elated to see that
Women
and
Love
had gone on to sell millions of copies worldwide, including one million in the US, was constantly being reprinted in many languages, and had sold almost a million copies in Germany alone. (These are mass market editions, however, so don't imagine that masses of money are rolling my way!) I'm glad to know so many people are reading this book.

Working on research for the fourth Hite Report was sheer pleasure, what I liked to do. It completely absorbed me intellectually, studying how ‘human nature' is socially constructed in childhood. This built on, and was a culmination of all my years of research. It also turned out to be politically timely, since when it was published in 1994, the world was engulfed in a struggle with a fundamentalist, medieval mind-set calling for a ‘return to traditional values', or ‘back to basics'. Yet, there was very little serious study of ‘family values'. And here was my new study.

The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
demonstrates the advances people are making in democratizing their family lives, building on the ethics of justice and equality between family members, not just following a formula of the ‘perfect family', a reproductive unit with dad-at-the-top. This, of course, is a counterblast to the rigid attitudes of fundamentalism, which insist on a reproductive family structure in which a man is dominant – the current climate of ‘back to basics' and Vatican Encyclical II. The 1990s have been a time of increasing fundamentalism, not only in the Middle East but in the West, (for example, hatred against ‘single mothers' has run high in Britain and the US, where women were threatened with having their children taken away from them and put into orphanages).
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
was published in the face of a harsh political climate advocating return to ‘family values', meaning, the traditional family, with father ‘on top', children ‘in line', and mother in the kitchen (and bedroom) doing her job. Today, statistically, according to many governments, most people are not living in the traditional nuclear family; rather, 50 per cent of people are ‘single'.
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
makes the case that as much as politicians would like to make it seem simple, changes in private life are not the cause of the West's problems, or the collapse of civilisation. In fact, what is happening is the democratization of private life, which will give fresh energy to political democracy.

I do not think people are in general making a mistake
by changing family structure, if since, as individuals, they find other forms of family or private life more valid. Why should only one form of the family be right? Politicians should feel less sure of themselves when alluding to the obvious glories of ‘traditional family values'. Many people, trying to make sense of their lives in the midst of such fundamentalist ‘back to basics' pressure – being told that their lives are not ‘correct' if not lived in a ‘traditional family' – found the analysis of social changes in
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
illuminating.
The
Family
has played a part in the political debate over ‘family values', and helped block some negative-to-women (and men) policies proposed by politicians in various countries, offering a new and completely different analysis of the ‘crisis in values' going on now.

To understand the family (both the classic family and the changing family landscape we have today), it was important to newly document and re-interpret the stages of childhood – especially childhood sexual development, made such a focus in our society's definitions of ‘childhood', and made so important in Freud's theories. Thus over half of
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
discusses and describes in a new way children growing up. As documentation, for my research, I used the voices of people in only young age groups, so that my picture of ‘the family' as children experience it growing up would not be out of date.

The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
presents a ‘new psychology of childhood', a completely different landscape
of childhood than that which was mapped out by Freud and others. In it, boys and girls, women and men, aged between eight and thirty-eight, describe their childhood feelings and experiences. (90 per cent of the answers were kept within this age range, so that almost all respondents have grown up during the last twenty-five years of gender debate, changes in family structure; this way, benefits and difficiencies of ‘new families' can be determined.

The theory regarding childhood which has dominated twentieth century thought is the Freudian view. It proposed such incorrect concepts as ‘penis envy' (to ‘describe' women's dissatisfaction with their suppression and inequality), the belief that girls should transfer their feelings at puberty from the clitoris to the vagina to have ‘mature orgasm'; the ‘explanation' that if boys love their mothers, they have an ‘Oedipus complex' (a remarkably negative way to view boys' love for their mothers); as well as the false ‘explanation' that men are ‘naturally' aggressive and desire to dominate because of ‘biological, hormonal changes at puberty'.

The Hite Report
on
the
Family
challenges such Freudian, post-Freudian or ‘modernist' views, demonstrating that these ideas merely reflect the social system (the psycho-sexual identity that our social system wants to impose on children) – ‘human nature'. Much more interesting than arguing (yet again) about Freudian ‘stages', are listening to the real, individual emotional and sexual feelings children and young adults express, as they describe their feelings about their parents, their bodies, themselves and their friends.

Examining this data (many pages of which are presented in the book), new stages of childhood emerge, inner psychological turning points not described before. Much too much was made of puberty by Freud, following the reproductive categories of patriarchy and calling them psychologically central. Is puberty a valid category? According to my research, puberty is not the time of sexual awakening for girls, as it is for boys. While most boys first masturbate to orgasm with ejaculation between the ages of ten and twelve, girls usually masturbate to orgasm much earlier, almost half starting between the ages of five and seven. Puberty is not a time of sexual awakening for girls, but simply a time of change in reproductive status. Freud was simplistic in blurring reproductive and sexual.

Freud incorrectly modelled his ideas of puberty in girls on his notions about boys. Even his ideas about boys are incorrect: the change in identity demanded of boys (‘stop staying home and hanging around your mother, go out with the boys and be tough, play sport') is brought about by social pressures, not by hormonal changes, according to my extensive documentation.

I was struck by the intensity of the pain many boys describe feeling as they undergo this ‘making themselves tough' process, to achieve their new ‘adult' identity. (Some in England have started to protest that there is too much bullying of young boys by older boys at school.) At the same time that boys are pressured to stop identifying with their mothers and sisters, become aloof, they are given the ‘information' that women,
though of lower status, are the required objects of sexual desire and emotional comfort for men.

Growing up to learn that such are the only acceptable identities for men, many people, all their lives, live out a play-enacted version of themselves, a shadow-self tailored for public consumption. They display appropriate social behaviour in public life, while underneath, in private, confused feelings of joy, fear, eroticism and pain exist, all jumbled together. The expression of this dense world of the emotions is inhibited by fear of not conforming to ‘masculine norms' learned at ‘puberty'. These are ‘norms' we can productively change.

In short, puberty is notable because it is a time of ideological ‘shoulds' which children now have to obey because they are of reproductive status; it is the time of transference of loyalty from the mothers to fathers. These are not biological but socially induced psychological events.

The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
found no evidence for a sexual puberty in girls. Just as women can orgasm perfectly well after menopause (or the end of reproductive ability), just so girls can masturbate and orgasm frequently before supposed puberty (or the onset of reproductive ability). Thus, puberty in girls could only be termed reproductive puberty, not sexual puberty. Even the existence of strong, physical ‘hymens' may be, statistically, a myth.

Boys' sexuality emerges at puberty, in the sense of full orgasmic capacity, but is sadly negativized, in the sense
that they are taught simultaneously that women are objects of desire, yet objects of contempt. Boys are ridiculed for associating themselves with girls and women, taunted by other boys to demonstrate they are ‘tough', and pressured to disassociate from all things ‘female', in order to ‘become men'. This creates a lifelong psychosexual combination in many men of associating eroticism and pain, in both their physical and romantic relationships with women.