The Hite Report
Words and handkerchief by Susan Babchick
In my late teens, growing up in America, my best friend gave me a copy of the book The Hite Report – A Nationwide Study Of Female Sexuality. Like many of my friends, I was feeling palpable attraction within our world of sexy teenagers and was experiencing true arousal. But because there was no reference – in culture, in family and school sex education, in teenage girl talk, not even in films – to the female orgasm, like most youngsters I was oblivious to this physical phenomenon, this pleasurable possibility and natural human birthright. I remember first looking at the book cover and thinking, why would I want to read about sex? But then, very soon after opening the book, the magic spilled out of the pages and into my imminent future. My memories of that summer are filled with bright colours; colours that sprang from the aqua-blue lettering of the book’s cover, slipped into the dark, streetlight-lit, balmy summer nights, on into the dawn, then dived into the vivid sunshine as I swam nude in the cool, outdoor swimming pools of my hometown of Houston.
It was my first summer of true awakened physicality and excitement for experimentation. The Hite Report was published in 1976. Shere Hite, who was working towards her PhD in Social History at Columbia University, had left her studies and conducted written interviews with 3,500 women, each of whom wrote honest, detailed accounts of how they experienced sexuality, what it meant to them and how they each were best able to achieve an orgasm. The results of the report conveyed that traditional psychological and anatomical theories on sex were incomplete and misleading. The conclusion was that 70 per cent of the women interviewed did not have orgasms through the unquestioned convention of ‘in-out’ thrusting intercourse alone. Hite shifted the focus towards the female experience and the recognition and importance of the stimulation of a woman’s clitoris in order for her to achieve orgasm.
This was news to me as well. I was grateful for Hite’s approach and embraced this instructive information, which gave me the courage to experiment. After my university years in Austin, I moved to London on a British/American university work-abroad program. I was working at The Groucho Club in Soho. One evening I was standing in the reception area, helping to take people’s jackets. A tall, pale woman with angelic white hair gently handed me her overcoat and I asked her for her name to go with the coat. She said, ‘Shere Hite’. I quietly gulped, feeling very weak on my legs and faint to my core. I smiled and handed her the tag. I didn’t utter a word of recognition or gratitude to her. I hope she could sense it anyway.
This artwork is part of The Wall of Sexual Heroes, a collaborative textile art piece featured in our previous exhibition at the Horse Hospital (2022) and Bow Arts Lab (2023). All embroidered, printed and appliquėd handkerchiefs celebrate unsung heroes of sexual emancipation, activism and innovation.
The Wall is an organic work. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch with The Keeper.
More tales of Sexual Heroes>
