The Hite Report

"The crucial thing The Hite Report does—and it’s a message that still hasn’t filtered through—is that it makes a very, very strong statement about the clitoris being vital to female sexuality. Up to that point, the word ‘sex’ meant intercourse—as it still often does, even in sex books written by informed people. When people say ‘we had sex’, they mean ‘We had intercourse.’ One of the main arguments of the book—the groundbreaking part that got Shere Hite so much attention—is that most women do not orgasm through intercourse alone. We need clitoral stimulation. And that’s the basis on which almost all sex books for women have been written since. It’s also a big part of accepted sex therapy. Sadly, it’s a piece of information that many women still don’t have and many men still don’t have. But before The Hite Report , everybody thought a woman should climax through intercourse. It was a core belief that went unchallenged. Freud wrote that a woman who has an orgasm by stimulation of the clitoris is infantile and is having an infantile orgasm. He’s one of the culprits. As were all the other male sex therapists who followed, saying, ‘If we climax through penetration, that’s obviously the way it has to be done.’ It’s a myth that still lingers: to this day I get people writing to me in my role as an advice columnist saying, ‘I can’t climax easily through intercourse, what’s wrong with me?’ Shere Hite was the first to challenge that view and back it up with research. Yes, questions were raised: Did she get paid for it? Did she actually do all of the research? We’re still suspicious, but The Hite Report was a turning point. It’s not really important whether its methodology was squeaky clean, because all the subsequent research has shown that the clitoris is important. So whereas when The Hite Report came out (and in the years following), people were going, ‘Her work is suspect so it probably isn’t true’, now we have the bigger picture. “Most women do not orgasm through intercourse alone. We need clitoral stimulation” She radically changed the way we view sex. The next time we got as important a message about the clitoris was in 1998 when an Australian neurologist pointed out that clitoral tissue—including the clitoral tissue inside the woman’s pelvis—has as many nerve endings as penile tissue. That piece of research again changed everything. But no one would have thought of doing it, if it hadn’t been for The Hite Report."