The book everyone needs to read

It's the Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality. You can read pieces of it on the internet Here at google books.

For me, this book came at a time in my research, about 3 or 4 years in, where I was beginning to suspect that sexperts and sexual researchers were rarely to never using substantiated data on female sexual response to back up their theories, conclusions, and advice. I was also beginning to really doubt myself because no authors or scientists or experts were saying the things I was suspecting. Often I would read something that seemed to be on the track I was on and then suddenly would backtrack, or I would read hints that the author was on the same track, but nothing more concrete.

In general, the rule of thumb in every journal article, advice column or book I would read was that women have sexual organs and they play a part in sexual pleasure, but it's really just a crap shoot as to what works from one woman to the other. Of course, most would emphasize the clitoris as something that is pleasurable to most women, but there was always this allowance that anything could cause a woman to have an orgasm and that some woman are built to have orgasms in all these ways and others in none of these ways. Frankly it seemed like the scientific community should know more about this, and the fact that they don't either means they're not trying hard enough or women are simply magical beings outside of the realm of science - which seemed a little unlikely to me. I mean I certainly wasn't finding this wishy-washiness about how men orgasm.

Then I started reading The Hite Report, and I realized that someone (Shere Hite) was saying in the early 70's the things that I am suspecting and that no expert will say in the early 2000's.Women are not strange magical beings. There is research out there that explains female sexual response (Masters and Johnson). It is not mysterious, but our societal structure has made it seem like it is mysterious. It was so simple and so obvious, and I had to wonder how the teachings from the Hite Report weren't ingrained in our sexual culture. I later concluded that the emergence of the 1981 book The G-Spot and other Recent Discoveries about Human Sexuality had a lot - although not everything - to do with it. However, that's for another blog. For this blog, I want to point out that the things Shere Hite was telling us in the early 70's are as relevant and pretty much correct as they were then.

In this book 3,000 women age 14 to 78 speak for themselves in detail about their sexual experiences - both physical and emotional. Shere Hite shows how these women's physical experiences of masturbation and orgasm do not reveal a population of women with various physical capabilities for orgasm, but a population of women with one capability for orgasm who are too often confused, uninformed, ashamed, and afraid about that capability. Hite confirms that these women's physical descriptions of sexual response coincide with the detailed scientific accounts of human sexual response studied by Master's and Johnson. Then Hite describes how societal change can change the harmful misunderstandings and confusion women carry in regards to their orgasms. Even with 30 years of research and societal change between then and now, the Hite Report still stands firm as a useful, informative, and accurate look at how females experience sexual response, and how our society affects that.