Shere Hite is a frightening woman. The first thing that strikes you is her incredible beauty, considering her age (Hite is 67). Next is her calm, eerie and slow tone of voice, which sends shivers down your spine.
Yet it is only when she unabashedly asks her audience, “Do you masturbate?” at the beginning of her speech, prompting nervous laughter from gathered students, that you realise her intimidating levels of self-confidence.
Since the 1970s, Hite has written twelve books on women and their inferior status in sexual life. She claims, “Sex is too focused on male-oriented intercourse…it is quite hard to orgasm during intercourse for a woman as it does not compare to our masturbation.”
To produce her “Hite Reports”, Shere has interviewed many women, concluding that 70% do not reach orgasm during the penetrative sex, because it lacks clitoral stimulation, an aspect of sex from which most women derive pleasure.
For Hite, this problem of male-oriented sex stems from our traditions and social notions. “Is it true that our shape defines our roles? There is the assumption that psychology grows out of our nature. I do not agree.” She adds, “Why is it that calling boy a ‘girl’ is still an insult? We need to upgrade the status of a girl. If men were bleeding, we would have called the days a national holiday.”
Hite is deeply troubled by sexual inequality. She is convinced that to gain gender equality we need to start on a sexual level. One of the problems she identifies is language. How can you communicate with your partner if you would like some “clitoral stimulation”? Hite pleads, “Can you suggest a better word? This has too many syllables.”
She also points out that female genitalia are often referred to in derogatory terms. “Cunt is another word that has become a form of insult. You dirty rotten cunt.”
Hite is critical of societal sexual attitudes. She says, “There is a view that sex is separate from the rest of your life, you shouldn’t masturbate. I don’t agree…we need to change the direction of culture to improve sexual freedom.”
Hite has also criticised family as the source of oppression for many females in her third report. As a result of her research, she concluded that 98% of married women are dissatisfied. However, her methodology has come under heavy criticism as only 4% of women to whom the survey was sent replied – it has been suggested that those who replied might have been more inclined to answer negatively. In a similar survey led by The Washington Post which used the technique of random sampling, as many as 93% of women were satisfied with their marriages.
As a result of the hostility she has encountered to her work she renounced her American citizenship, becoming a German citizen, as her husband at the time was. But Hite won’t tell me about how her research has affected her personal life. She seems heavily guarding her own sexual privacy, despite her willingness to disregard others’.
When I ask her what advice she would give to a fresher in this University, she switches topic suddenly saying, “But Marta, I came here to ask you personal questions, how do you reach orgasm?” Maybe it’s because down to all the psychological oppression, maybe it’s a result of cultural relativism, but I answer the question only half-heartedly and slightly intimidated, leave as soon as I can.
THE HITE FILE
Personal: Born in 1942, in Missouri. Hite married in 1985 a German citizen 19 years her junior. The marriage lasted 15 years.
Education: BA & MA at University of Florida; Started Ph.D studies in Columbia where she modelled part-time. Claims she received a Ph.D. from Nihon University, Japan
First Book: The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976) where she argued that orgasm is right for women given the right stimulation.
Plans for the future: Create a new, televised Hite report, for which she filmed several Oxford students.
From the ashes of the capitalist crisis
In many ways, as countries around the world hold their breath and hope that they emerge from recession, the most interesting question is whether this crisis has been a mere stalling of the capitalist system, or whether it reveals fundamental flaws in the economic orthodoxies by which we lived until a few years ago.
There seems to be little hope for the latter possibility in any immediate way. What was striking at a political level throughout this global crisis was the failure of the Left to deliver the intellectual coup de grace to the status quo. The best that could be said for them is that Keynesianism, a credo declared dead (at least by Anglo-American policymakers) for the last thirty years was reanimated in groups like the G20 with consensus that fiscal stimuli were a pragmatic response to recession. But this was not a vibrant new idea, it was a desperate rehashing of an old cure that only crudely suited a new problem. What was absent was a rival ideology to step up and lead the bewildered, mass-unemployed citizens of the free-market world out of the desert.
“For many people this is the new anti-capitalist ethic, targeting the profligate consumption that dominates mature capitalist economies”
Perhaps it is the suspicion that many feel towards anything ‘ideological’. In Britain we have had 12 years of a government that strove to be anything but, for fear that it would startle the comfortable middle-classes and drive away the money-makers in the City. So, instead, it might be interesting to look at what ‘ideas’ have emerged, however tentatively, and consider whether they could grow into ideologies of their own to rival, or at least contest, the capitalist behemoth that even as I write appears to be reviving across the globe (except, that is, in Britain).
Add financial crisis to environmental crisis and you get many vociferous calls for ‘sustainability’. For many people this is the new anti-capitalist ethic, targeting the profligate consumption that dominates mature capitalist economies in America and Europe, calling for a radical overhaul of our way of life, championing a return to the ‘good life’ of simple and ecologically sound consumption. Is this an ideology? I think a plausible case can be made; a set of ideas can be extrapolated from the basic impulse of sustainability that has the potential to form the basis for a political, social, and economic system.
There is a swathe of the electorate articulate enough and organised enough to campaign for such an ideology – a new moralism could form the rump of this movement, claiming that consuming less is a duty we have to the planet and to each other. It may even subsume parts of old ideologies that have been effectively homeless in the last few decades: social justice, equality, and an idea of freedom that is not based upon our role as consumers.
“Those who argue for sustainable-living too often do so from the privileged position of material comfort”
I do not believe that this will emerge as a popular political force in the years ahead, politics and people do not work like that. It sounds wonderful in practice, the realisation of a “steady-state” economy unshackled from the need to produce more to maintain its own viability. But no one has presented a realistic vision (much less an economically-sound blueprint) for how this would work; some have tried, including Thomas Malthus’s fear-mongering about population growth and J.K. Galbraith’s model in ‘The Affluent Society’. But essential to sustainabilism (if we can call it that) is a limiting principle, one that puts ceilings on earnings, on profit, and some would argue on innovation.
Mass-consumption capitalism may be epitomised by tanker-loads of plastic toys shipped from China to Pound Land, but it has also been the driving force behind the iPod, the laptop computer, the mobile phone, and myriad products which have revolutionised our lives from communication to culture. Those who argue for sustainable-living too often do so from the privileged position of material comfort; it is a curiously upper-middle class aspiration, to conspicuously consume less, and it is easy to doubt how enthusiastic even these people would be when it came to the hard choices of what to give up (the flight to Mauritius, the MacBook Air, the espresso maker?).
Capitalism has indeed shown itself to be in need of rebalancing over the last few years, away from arcane finance and oil, towards social justice and addressing the needs of the many not the wants of the few. But in truth, there is little hope for the world if the innovative force of capitalist production cannot turn its profit-seeking impetus towards making greener cars, planes and power sources. The poor, in developed and developing countries alike, will not and should not be willing to forgo the trappings of progress just because those with abundance think that it is vulgar to go on consuming as we do now; unless we harness the innovation, we are faced with more than a Tom-and-Barbara style back to basics, we face increasing poverty and a handicap in the fight against disastrous climate change.