Shere Hite

Shere Hite (/ʃɛər haɪt/;[2][3] November 2, 1942[4] – September 9, 2020)[5] was an American and later German[6] sex educator and feminist. Her sexological work focused primarily on female sexuality. Hite built upon biological studies of sex by Masters and Johnson and by Alfred Kinsey. She also referenced theoretical, political and psychological works associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, such as Anne Koedt’s essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. She renounced her United States citizenship in 1995 to become German.[1]

Hite was born Shirley Diana Gregory in Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Paul and Shirley Hurt Gregory.[3] Shortly after the end of World War II, when her parents divorced, she took the surname of her stepfather, Raymond Hite.[3][7] She graduated from Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Florida. After she received a masters degree in history from the University of Florida in 1967, she moved to New York City and enrolled at Columbia University to work toward her Ph.D. in social history.[3] Hite said that the reason for her not completing this degree was the conservative nature of Columbia at that time.[8]

In the 1970s, she did part of her research while at the National Organization for Women. She posed in the nude for Playboy while studying at Columbia University.[9][10]

Hite taught at Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan), Chongqing University in China, and Maimonides University, North Miami Beach, Florida, USA.[6]

Hite focused on understanding how individuals regard sexual experience and the meaning it holds for them. Hite believed that the ease at which women orgasm during masturbation contradicted traditional stereotypes about female sexuality. Hite’s work concluded that 70% of women do not have orgasms through in-out, thrusting intercourse but are able to achieve orgasm easily by masturbation or other direct clitoral stimulation.[11][12][13]

Hite, as well as Elisabeth Lloyd, have criticized Masters and Johnson for uncritically incorporating cultural attitudes on sexual behavior into their research; for example, the argument that enough clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm should be provided by thrusting during intercourse, and the inference that the failure of this is a sign of female “sexual dysfunction.”[13] While not denying that both Kinsey and Masters and Johnson have played a crucial role in sex research, Hite believed that society must understand the cultural and personal construction of sexual experience to make the research relevant to sexual behavior outside the laboratory. She offered that limiting test subjects to “normal” women who report orgasming during coitus was basing research on the faulty assumption that having an orgasm during coitus was typical, something that her own research strongly refuted.[11][page needed]