Margaret Talbot:

To appreciate Hite, it helps to think of her as a collector of first-person accounts and not as a scientist.

Her work represented a legitimate trade-off. As she reasonably argued, a truly random sample was close to impossible in sex research, because a random slice of the population would not agree to answer such probing questions. In exchange for hearing from a self-selected group of respondents, she got remarkably intimate, frank, and detailed accounts from thousands of people.

The solid, official-sounding “Report” in the title probably won attention for the book. It also encouraged expectations of scientific rigor that Hite was bound to disappoint.

Hite’s approach began with the survey she’d devised for her first study: some sixty pointed questions for women about how, when, and why they had sex. She printed them—at a gay anarchist print shop and commune in lower Manhattan—in rainbow ink on pastel paper, decorated with hearts and starbursts. As Campbell writes, they resembled a “teenage diary, not a clinical questionnaire,” a look that Hite hoped would invite unguarded replies, and probably did. Masters and Johnson, in their 1966 book, “Human Sexual Response,” defined orgasm as “those few seconds during which the vasoconcentration and myotonia developed from sexual stimuli are released.” Hite’s informants, precise in their own way, were more likely to offer a description like this: “a gradual tensing of my body which reaches a sharp peak then hits a thrilling plateau, a kind of screeching, sliding across a plane” that then “lets go in five to six fluttering convulsions.”

[T]horoughly Hite was formed by the women’s movement of the nineteen-seventies. Her books read less like sexology than like transcripts of the consciousness-raising sessions that were a hallmark of second-wave feminism—though the forensic specificity with which some of Hite’s respondents describe their orgasmic sensations and techniques remains pretty singular.

It was not an underground nudie job that finally pushed Hite out of modelling and into the women’s movement. It was a respectable, and flagrantly sexist, advertising campaign for Olivetti electric typewriters in which she was cast as a fetching secretary. As she recalled it, the tagline was to be something like “The typewriter that’s so smart that she doesn’t have to be.” When she learned that women were protesting such ads, she gathered her nerve and attended a meeting of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. At one point, she leaned over and told the woman beside her that she was the model in one of the offending advertisements. Her seatmate promptly announced this to the room. The reaction, Hite recalled, was “You see! Even the women in the ads don’t like them!”

For Hite, understanding how sex actually worked for people, or did not, offered a key to understanding gender relations more broadly. “A woman’s place in sex,” she wrote, “mirrors her place in the rest of society.”

The big eyeopener from “The Hite Report,” though, was that seventy per cent of women in her sample did not orgasm regularly from heterosexual intercourse, while many reliably did from various forms of clitoral stimulation, including masturbation. This testimony challenged a still dominant set of assumptions: that women’s orgasms were harder to achieve and inherently weaker than men’s, and that failure to climax from vaginal intercourse signalled a neurotic block, best treated through psychological intervention. That last notion came, in part, from Freud. In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” he had argued that a woman reached sexual maturity and normalcy when her infantile “erotogenic susceptibility” was transferred “from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice.” His American followers helped keep that turn-of-the-century doctrine respectable, and for many women shame-inducing, well into the nineteen-seventies.