Women Without Love
Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Process.
by Shere Hite.
Knopf. 922 pp. $24.95.
The noise over Shere Hite’s latest book, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution, has come and gone, and so has the book itself. This must be an embarrassment for all concerned. Hite’s first book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, reigned over the best-seller lists in 1976, while sales for Women and Love have been leisurely at best, despite the hype provided by a Time cover story.
Events surrounding the book’s publication did not help. Foremost among these was a series of attacks on Hite’s statistical methodology—the 100,000 essay questionnaires she sent to a not-very-random selection of women that yielded a mere 4,500 answers. There were hints that Hite had cooked some of the numbers so that her cross-section of respondents would better match the female population at large. Finally there was the revelation that Hite might have impersonated her own secretary in order to strong-arm reporters out of personal interviews with her and into stage-managed press conferences. By the end, even her publisher had stopped returning phone calls from the media.
The publication of the first Hite Report transformed the then-thirty-four-year-old Shere Hite from a quondam graduate student and ex-Playboy model into a millionaire. Her timing was right. The sexual revolution was still newish in 1976, and sex was being promoted as a form of all-around therapy for every physical and mental ill; middlebrow sexual gurus such as Alex Comfort flourished like fern bars.
Wrapped chastely in a medicinal white jacket and tricked out with impressive looking tables of statistics, the Hite Report propounded an arresting but surefire sales thesis—that women have better orgasms, well, alone—and it illustrated that thesis with lots and lots of how-to advice and extracts from confessional letters to the author by recipients of her questionnaire. All this cast a wide net, bringing in readers ranging from the clenchedfist sisterhood to phalanxes of curious men attracted by the extraordinarily salacious contents which described in unblushing detail every conceivable variety of passionate spasm and how to incite it.
To add spice to the pot, the Hite Report, like all subsequent Hite productions, claimed to have a feminist agenda—something about doing away with “male-dominant” sex. Strawberry-blonde and stern, a sort of Leni Riefenstahl of male-bashing, Hite toured the talk shows in elegant silk dresses and high heels, telling of her reeducation from sex object to sex sociologist at the hands of the National Organization for Women. There was something hilarious about the spectacle—the hurt and angry apostle of women’s liberation catapulted to fame and fortune by pure, prurient male chauvinism.
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Women and Love is a much tonier production than either the original Hite Report or its 1981 successor, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (which was intended to give women a similarly graphic overview of the male animal and, predictably, did not sell nearly so well). The new book is designed in every respect to convey the impression that Shere Hite is to be taken seriously. This, indeed, may be the source of one of her marketing problems. A lengthy bibliography shows she has duly done her homework at the increasingly heavy shelves of feminist scholarship. Quotations from Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Walker, and other doyennes of women’s liberation abound, as do endorsements from such luminaries as Barbara Ehrenreich of the Institute for Policy Studies. And the book is heavy, at 922 pages more than twice the length of the original 438-page Hite Report, which fit easily into a 1970’s beach bag.
Worst of all for sales, few of the spasms inside the new book are of the kind that rock the bed at midnight when all cats look gray. In bloated chapters with titles like “What is the Purpose of Being Married?” and “Finances and Housework,” the text of Women and Love—carefully culled excerpts from those 4,500 responses to those 100,000 questionnaires—consists almost entirely of complaints about men.
The world of Women and Love is actually the world of women without love. It is a world where husbands are brutal and demanding, marriages “suffocating,” and boyfriends cold and distant. It is a world where 95 percent of the women report emotional harassment by their men and 84 percent are generally dissatisfied. It is the world of the “relationship,” that affectless late-20th-century substitute for the old-fashioned love affair. In short, Hite’s new book is a chronicle of the collapse of the hopes for female fulfillment held out by the women’s movement.
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In this respect, Women and Love is a revealing document, fully living up to the premise of its subtitle that a “cultural revolution” has taken place in relations between the sexes; only, it is not the revolution Shere Hite and others had in mind.
Naturally, any assessment of the book’s contents must stipulate that 95 percent of the women who received one of Hite’s questionnaires threw it into the wastebasket. It is likely that happy women had better things to do than help Shere Hite churn out another long-winded tome, so we are left with the responses of the miserable and the embittered. And of course, not all 4,500 responses are reprinted in full. Everything was filtered through Hite’s jaundiced eye.
Still, the book amply confirms the theories advanced by such disparate thinkers as George Gilder and Lenore Weitzman that it is men who made out like bandits in the sexual and feminist revolutions of the last two decades. The sexual revolution made an entire pool of women—the “nice girls” whom men were supposed to protect, respect, and, later, marry—suddenly available for no-strings-attached sex, without thought of protection, respect, or marriage. As for the feminist revolution, it relieved men of their obligation to support and honor the women who became the mothers of their children, or, indeed, the children themselves. This led to an astonishing coarsening of relations between the sexes, who have become competitors and, thus, enemies. What once was regulated by the rules of chivalry is now regulated in the courtroom, as in those latter-day phenomena, the sexual-harassment suit and “date rape.”
The book’s two saddest chapters are about dating—if it can still be called that—and they chronicle the miseries of life for single women without excuses to say no. “Last Saturday night I wound up with a man after an unusually pleasant intellectual conversation,” writes one young woman, who adds that it is now Thursday and she has yet to hear from him. Another remarks with hurt surprise: “He had said he wasn’t into one-night stands.” But other chapters are equally depressing. It is horrifying to read account after account by long-divorced (and probably, for all intents and purposes, deserted) women in their fifties and sixties prattling of “relationships” and “therapy” as though they were thirtyish Manhattan singles.
Shere Hite, for one, still believes a revolution is in the offing that will eventually blunt sex differences—by which she appears to mean mostly the tendency of men to enjoy to the hilt whatever freedom is given them—and thus bring about the longed-for happiness of all. “In fact,” she writes in her best utopian mode, “gender may be the basic, original split that needs to be healed to alter society, to lessen aggression as a way of life.” But the women in her book know better. The “revolution” is already far along, and it has made relations between men and women not better but a lot worse, while doing nothing to blunt the sexual differences between them. No wonder most female book buyers have passed up this tome in favor of How to Marry the Man of Your Choice.
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