A second sexual revolution

Until Shere Hite’s Report, even the most daring sexologists refused to listen to what women desired and hated in sex

by Rosa Campbell  BIO

Illustration by Prashanti Aswani

is a historian of global feminism. She holds a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowship at King’s College London, UK. She is the author of The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared (2026).

In 1972, Shere Hite, a Playboy model turned feminist sex researcher, jumped on a motorbike and drove around Manhattan. With a cascade of strawberry blonde curls peeping out under the helmet, rosebud lips visible under the visor, and a vintage lace gown streaming behind her, she handed out surveys to any woman who would take one. It was all about sex. Across 58 questions, Hite asked: ‘Could you describe what an orgasm feels like to you?’; ‘Do you feel free to do all the things you would like [in sex], or do you think the other person(s) would be shocked?’; ‘Do you think sex is in any way political?’ The responses formed the basis of the feminist sexology bestseller The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (1976). It sold 50 million copies.

This was among the first books that asked women how they felt about sex, rather than telling them what to feel. Its great provocation was that most American women were sexually dissatisfied: 70 per cent of them could not orgasm from penetrative sex but required clitoral stimulation; a significant proportion of women faked orgasms. The Hite Report remains the 30th bestselling book of all time, and one of the most-read books of the 20th century. Yet today it and its author have largely vanished.

By the early 1970s, the number of young women in the US who reported having had premarital sex was around 62 per cent – up from 7.6 per cent of those born before 1900. The Pill was widely available – 10 million women were using it – decoupling sex from reproduction for the first time in history. And the introduction of no-fault divorce in California in 1969 (soon followed by other states) meant that women could more easily free themselves from loveless marriages. Into this confounding sexual revolution Shere published her Hite Report.

Hite found that the sexual revolution meant more sex for women, but not better sex. For many of the women she surveyed, sex still followed a similar and unsatisfactory pattern that one woman described as ‘a little kiss, a little feel, a finger for arousal, a touch of breast and he’s on top, wham it’s over.’ Invariably, male orgasm determined the end of sex. One woman, freed up by the sexual revolution to have many lovers, noted that ‘I’m beginning to think there must be something like a sexual “Robert’s Rules of Order” which every guy follows.’ Even Alex Comfort’s widely read book The Joy of Sex (1972) couldn’t get away from the sexual script that saw penis-in-vagina sex as the pièce de résistance. (A Black lesbian who filled out the Original Survey, on which The Hite Report was based, remarked that she ‘didn’t think much’ of Comfort’s contribution.) Women also felt that during the sexual revolution they had ‘lost their right to say “no”’. One woman told Hite: ‘Most men didn’t give a damn about whether I wanted to have sex with them or not; if I didn’t want to screw them, they would … try to lecture me into being “free”.’ Sexual inequality percolated through the revolution.

Hite’s path to feminism was unusual. While enrolled on a PhD at Columbia University in New York, she worked as a model, sometimes doing fashion jobs, sometimes porn (which paid better), and was hired by Olivetti typewriters to appear in an advertisement. But, as Hite later recalled, when the advertisement was published, she found her image appeared beneath a sexist caption: ‘The typewriter is so smart that she doesn’t have to be.’ That prompted the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to launch a protest. They marched through Manhattan with placards that proclaimed ‘Don’t Drown In The Olivetti Typing Pool’. Hite was overjoyed by the support. She contacted NOW and soon became involved in political campaigns and consciousness-raising groups (CR), the key tactic of women’s liberation.

The Women’s Strike for Equality organised by the National Organization for Women in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 19th amendment, New York City, 26 August 1970. Photo by Bob Parent/Getty Images

At CR, women met in small groups to talk about how a sexist society shaped them, often against their own interests. They would take turns answering questions like ‘How do you feel about housework?’ and ‘How do you feel about ageing?’ Women came to understand that their feelings – often bad – were political, the result of a deeply unequal world, not their individual failings. They often described this moment of consciousness raising as a ‘click’: there was a political cause to their personal misery. Feelings were a form of expertise. Women could follow them to paint a collective picture of what life was like as women, what needed to change, and how they might go about it. But Hite noticed something else at CR. Women talked of their feelings about every aspect of culture and society – except for sex. Even in these groups, sex was still considered a private matter – personal, even shameful.

A porn mag ran Hite’s questionnaire ‘in the interest of better communication [with] women’

There had been some feminist writing about sex. In The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1970), Anne Koedt argued forcefully that all orgasms were clitoral. Erica Jong, in her novel Fear of Flying (1973), celebrated the pleasures of the ‘zipless fuck’ (a sexual encounter without commitment or emotion). Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden (1973) detailed women’s most explicit fantasies. Both Friday’s and Jong’s works were blockbusters, and many women who filled out Hite’s Original Survey reported reading them. But how did these declarations,........

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