Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
NICOLE: I must be in the mirror.
Uh-huh. That's for Nicole.
Okay. Hm.
SHERE: Well, honestly, and I would love
if I had a chance to go and buy some clothes.
NICOLE: Um...
Cut.
CAMERAMAN: Just one second, Dave.
Cole, you have to lean back on the couch.
Lean straight back, Cole.
Okay.
Um, I really want you to take the lead in this.
I mean, I'm going to just ask this and that question,
but you take over as much as you like.
- Okay. - You say that your book,
in a sense, redefined sex.
The stereotype in our culture
has been that women should orgasm from intercourse itself.
That is from thrusting.
- [ Laughter ] - Billy, free to stop sniggering.
Cut, please.
At the start of your book, you write,
"Masturbation is, in a very real sense,
one of the most important subjects discussed in this book
and a cause for celebration."
Would you talk about that?
Well, masturbation is really a cause for celebration
because it represents female sexuality underground.
The majority of women, even since Kinsey's time,
know how to masturbate to orgasm easily,
regularly, with great pleasure.
So, this shows that women know how to have orgasms
when they want, contrary to the popular stereotype
that women have a "problem," in quotes,
with sex.
That's pretty radical stuff for 1976.
Yes, it was. I looked sort of nervous.
- Yeah. [ Laughs ] - Did you feel nervous?
I mean, you were talking about things people didn't talk about.
I suppose I was nervous, of course.
[ Fast violin music playing ]
GERALDO: During the course of this program,
we'll be talking about intercourse,
masturbation, orgasm,
and other topics covered by an extraordinary nationwide
survey of female sexuality called "The Hite Report."
ANCHOR: Shere, your book is made up of this questionnaire.
I'd like to know why you did it.
I was in graduate school and I was studying history
of the Enlightenment, of all things.
And it occurred to me that sex also is an institution,
especially the way we practice intercourse,
foreplay, and all of that.
PRESENTER 1: Who is Shere Hite?
Her childhood interrupted three times by divorce.
A sexologist, a social researcher,
and even a cultural historian.
Her research has made her a best-selling author.
MIKE: The Macmillan Publishing Company
couldn't churn the books out fast enough.
REGINA: "The Hite Report" gave voice
to people who never had a voice, to experiences people
never had an opportunity to even discuss before.
The feelings and knowledge and experience
of thousands of women in our time.
WOMAN: Shere Hite has sold more than
20 million books around the world.
MAN: 36 countries and 19 languages.
Some of the best-selling books of our time.
Shere, you've probably done more research
in-depth on male sexuality
than anybody else who ever lived.
MAN: There is some dispute about your methodology.
You were criticized by some of the reviewers.
What she says is always controversial.
Do you think that out of your work
will come another sexual revolution?
This is going to lead to real changes
in the definition of sex between men and women.
WOMAN: Is there any danger in that?
Equality doesn't seem dangerous to me.
[ Soulful music playing ]
After all, if it's possible once, it's possible again.
What I'm trying to work out is how.
The most mysterious of organs, the female vagina,
the vulva, the uterus, and especially the clitoris.
Names and information about these organs
were suppressed for long periods in Western history.
For centuries, it was said
that women have difficulty having orgasms.
Men's orgasms are so much stronger,
their sexual organs bigger, and none of this is true.
The most common means to orgasm has no name at all.
The fact that there's been no word for clitoral stimulation
for most of Western history shows how clearly the culture
has tried to stamp out knowledge of women's bodies
and to stamp out women's enjoyment and pleasure.
[ Soulful music playing ]
CAMERAMAN: Speeding.
- WOMAN: Okay. - Close in.
Slate coming in.
- Oh, my God, like the movies. - Uh-huh.
[ Laughs ]
[ Soft piano music playing ]
REGINA: I live on Central Park West,
and I had seen her in the neighborhood
because she lived right across the street.
This wonderful creature going along with this gorgeous hair.
This pinky strawberry blonde.
She had a sort of Lucille Ball thing going with curls up top.
Very graceful, always dramatically dressed.
And very striking, very beautiful.
She looked spectacular, walking down the street.
So, I'd seen her, but I didn't know who she was or anything.
I went to a feminist party.
Everybody there was talking about what she was doing.
Night after night, grinding out mimeograph questionnaires
on sex and sexuality.
I made contact with her, and I invited her to lunch,
a place I went a lot, and mostly men in this French restaurant.
And in she came, tall, willowy.
And after her entrance, which stunned everyone,
her voice sang out with "the clitoris" and "the vagina."
I was just like, "Oh, yes.
Oh, really? How interesting."
And everybody was just riveted by this.
So, of course, I got excited.
I took on the book.
Then I worked with her down in her apartment,
which is right across the street.
NARRATOR AS SHERE: This is where I was living
in the basement of the building.
Those were the windows and door outside my apartment.
But I made it real nice.
But inside, it was beautiful.
[ Car horns honking ]
My grandfather was sending me to college.
I have been going to state schools
but now at Columbia, the tuition was huge.
And I borrowed it from the government loan.
But I felt, how could I ever pay this back?
I was, in fact, one of the only women
in that graduate history program.
[ Typewriter clacking ]
They thought I would be a schoolteacher,
but I knew I was studying history
because I couldn't understand the present.
[ Crowd chanting "We want equality!" ]
Why were there so many inequalities?
Columbia has consistently refused to alter these policies.
AS SHERE: Why were people often so uncaring?
Why couldn't everybody have an equal chance?
JACQUES: Changes that we keep complaining about and groaning
about are surface changes.
They're merely irritants.
AS SHERE: The day I met Jacques Barzun,
I told him I had come to Columbia
because I admired his program,
History of Western Thought, 1789 to Present.
In a timid voice, I said,
"Did you have time to look at my master's thesis?"
"Well, I did read it.
But honestly, I don't believe you wrote it.
And besides, I'm absolutely sure
that you don't have most of these books
at the University of Florida library."
That was one of my first experiences in class prejudice,
in addition to gender prejudice, overtly expressed.
I had no money, none.
As a student, I had to earn money on the side.
I was advised by people around me in 1969
to use my looks to make a living.
MIKE: I first met Shere when I was a studio manager
at a photographer's studio on Central Park West.
Going through Shere's portfolio, she had a very unique style,
and I tried to show different aspects of her personality.
And she liked what I was doing.
After my day at work and after her pounding the pavement,
Shere would bring over her unique outfits.
I would have Rolling Stones on or the Beatles or Bob Dylan.
[ Tape rewinding ]
She would much prefer to have
her favorite Rachmaninoff concerto.
And I didn't mind that.
I listened to it.
Barely. Yeah.
It was fine.
It was Shere.
AS SHERE: Having to support myself,
what were my alternatives?
To become an out-and-out prostitute?
To be a secretary? To get married?
Of all forms of prostitution, any job within the system is,
I preferred this.
Modeling allowed me the most independence of all
with perhaps the least personal involvement.
PRODUCER: Was she the model for both women?
Yeah, that's Shere and this is Shere.
I had the Rolleiflex,
the finest camera you can own, black and white Rollei.
And it has an automatic shutter release on it.
And you set the time.
She would move from one side of me to the other,
and I'd just stand there with a gun.
She made my career, I think, virtually.
She did this work with illustrators
because she couldn't get enough work as a high fashion model.
Paperback book covers and illustration
was not held in any esteem at all.
They were frowned on. It was low-grade art.
[ Laughs ]
And that's what I was doing.
The two of us worked together on all those covers.
We were a team.
AS SHERE: I could earn a living.
The work was self-defined, and even sometimes artistic.
Every day I wondered how long it would be
until I could be of some real use in the world.
Even though you were with an agency,
you could never tell how much money
you would have coming in next month or next week.
And every day I had to search for jobs.
MIKE: Shere was always broke, couldn't pay the rent,
didn't have food.
She had this tiny little apartment.
ROBERT: And when we go in and she'd turn the lights on,
the roaches were scattering.
AS SHERE: Exhibit A. There were rats in the building.
The other tenants and I were in a struggle with...
MIKE: The owner of the building,
he would turn off the heat in the winter.
ROBERT: She was on a survival situation in that apartment.
It was really bad.
MIKE: It was very rough, but she made the most of it.
The nice thing about it,
it had access to its own little tiny backyard.
She had a little dog, Rusty,
and he would like to be outdoors.
I was crazy about her, and we dated a bit.
We were both young, Midwesterners, new to New York,
and we sort of liked being a little bit different.
We'd go to old films together, downtown, films from the '30s
and the '40s.
[ Woman speaks French ]
MIKE: We'd set up pictures like that.
Shere found this Greta Garbo hat.
Silly pictures. They weren't job related.
But her real interest was more intellectually advanced.
AS SHERE: In graduate school, I was a specialist
in the French Revolution,
classical music and Balkan farming.
Despite this, I had an inclination
to take the historical facts
as presented with a grain of salt.
KARLA: It was really hard to be in graduate school at that time.
It was perfectly acceptable to write
dissertation number 3,483 on Shakespeare's Hamlet,
but if you wanted to write about sex or sexology,
you would just make them totally crazy.
They told me to transfer to the Women's Studies Department.
There was no Women's Studies Department.
They were trying to get rid of us,
and Shere was facing the same thing.
I remember Shere as being a bit shy.
She told me that she was bisexual.
To make a statement like that, as she did,
was extremely unpopular at that time.
I met Shere at the Gay Academic Union.
We often met on the Upper West Side,
a group of graduate students, college professors,
and independent scholars whose work was being
dismissed, ridiculed, diminished.
People came with their research
about artists' colonies for lesbians in Paris,
for example, gay men who had encircled Virginia Woolf,
women who were painting women.
We couldn't believe it.
These things had been firmly suppressed for decades.
And we talked to each other
about our common experience in academia.
AS SHERE: Columbia was a major dose of failure.
Females don't belong. I took a leave of absence.
Also eating me up was the passivity required of females,
which made me very hostile.
What do I do?
I spend my days one by one as a fashion model.
Caught in such a horrible trap, it's just incredible.
False eyelashes were necessary for modeling.
Standing in front of the small bathroom mirror every morning,
putting them on, thinking, "You're wasting your life.
You're wasting your life."
ROBERT: She once told me,
"Trying to maintain beauty the way I do..."
She says, "It's such a hard job, just to work constantly."
And she just seemed to be at that point of giving up.
AS SHERE: Modeling is bad because it reinforces
all the stereotyped roles
already so damaging in our society.
Wife, mother, sweetheart, sexpot, loud-mouthed bitch.
Formula-- take an organism with psyche
and drain it of all but those characteristics,
and you have left a packaged chicken.
Dehaired, ready to be bought after being felt
and squeezed to find the juiciest specimen.
We'll have order and submission, nothing alive to frighten us.
We only want a pleasure machine, a piece of wet raw meat
to wrap around our cocks and feel comforted by.
I can't stand it anymore.
I don't know what to do.
Now I'm crying again, and my eyes will burn again tomorrow.
[ Somber music playing ]
Around that time, I did some photos with my friend,
the photographer Michael Wilson.
And I consider this one a sort of self-portrait,
confronting myself.
It's just as simple as know yourself, not your role.
It's hellishly hard.
[ Typewriters clacking ]
MAN: Who is the Olivetti girl?
ANNOUNCER: The Olivetti girl is the best secretary
in the office.
WOMAN: Would you believe the men in this office
never noticed me until I became an Olivetti girl?
What does the Olivetti girl have that I don't have?
The right equipment. [ Snickers ]
[ Grunts ]
I did a commercial for a typewriter company.
[ Grunts ]
And they sat me down in front of the typewriter,
and I started typing and he says,
"No, look at the camera and flirt with the camera."
Now that I type sharper, I look sharper.
I said, "Well, yeah. But why?"
And they said, "Well, because the caption is going to say...
ANNOUNCER: The typewriter with a brain inside.
SHERE: "...the typewriter that's so smart
that she doesn't have to be."
Right?
I felt fairly odd about that.
Then I read in the newspaper how there was some women's group
or something picketing in front of the headquarters
of this corporation on Park Avenue.
[ Women chanting ]
SHERE: And I thought, "Oh, it sounds interesting.
Should I go? Or shouldn't I?
Finally, I went.
[ Women chanting ]
JOYCE: I was treasurer of
the National Organization for Women in New York.
The group that I was very active in was
the Image of Women Committee.
I was at a NOW meeting.
She just came in and sat next to me.
AS SHERE: I didn't tell anyone at first
that I was in one of the ads they were picketing,
listening to the animated discussion I gained confidence,
and finally whispered to Joyce, whom I had just met.
She burst out, "Listen, everybody,
you'll never guess who's here."
Everyone turned to stare.
They said, "You see, even the women in the ads
don't like them."
And off they rushed into new areas discussing this point.
I loved it.
SHERE: And I got very involved in that women's group.
And I made friends that I've still got today.
[ Women cheering ]
♪ When I'm walking down the street ♪
♪ And every guy I meet ♪
♪ Says, "Baby, ain't you sweet," I just could scream ♪
♪ Though I know the guys are sick ♪
♪ And think only of their prick ♪
♪ And I'm tired of fuckers fucking over me ♪
[ Women laughing ]
Okay. We're tired of fuckers fucking over us.
Right?
ALL: Yeah.
Let's do it for the time.
Don't forget that you've the time to fall, all right?
♪ Hail! Hail! The dykes are here! ♪
♪ What the hell do we care now? ♪
AS SHERE: It was new for me to find a place
where I fit in so well.
The movement's intellectual debates
made Columbia University's look pale and anemic.
Brilliant ideas were a daily occurrence.
KARLA: We wanted to take on male institutions
and see whether we could make a cultural change.
We chose the Natural History Museum.
We called it the Museum of Unnatural History.
In the displays, there were men hunting,
fishing, building homes.
Every woman in every continent of the world had a pot.
Every woman had a baby strapped to the front,
to the back, in a little basket like Moses.
Not just women, but how indigenous people
around the world were being portrayed.
[ Indistinct chanting ]
AS SHERE: I began to feel a space in which I could be me,
an atmosphere that would not harm me.
Like a light suddenly switched on in a dark room.
KARLA: We formed consciousness raising groups.
REGINA: The idea was to just listen to women's voices.
Cannot make these decisions about your own body.
This is one thing we obviously wanted, that women should have,
should be able to have abortions on demand.
They should be, if not free, they should be very low cost,
so that there's no discrimination
on economic grounds.
JANET: I was at the confluence of three movements.
One was the second stage of the women's movement.
The second one was the burgeoning
of the cognitive behavior therapy movement,
and the sex revolution.
So, I was really in the right place at the right time.
And very lucky to be there.
♪ This is the dawning of the age of asparagus ♪
♪ Age of asparagus ♪
Good girl.
I'm a clinical psychologist,
and my specialty is human sexuality
and working with couples.
I had a strong personal interest in sex.
In the early '60s, when I first moved to New York
and was making $75 a week as a research assistant...
...I discovered one evening when I was walking around
Fifth Avenue that men would keep approaching me.
Finally, it did occur to me when one of them actually spoke up
that he wanted to have sex.
So, I thought, "What the hell?"
So I started supplementing my income
by getting together with men and having sex with them.
And some of them I actually remained friendly with
for years.
It was an interesting group of people.
I also finished my undergraduate degree at Columbia.
So I had a personal and professional interest in sex.
And then right around that same time, I met Shere.
I think we were both very committed to helping women,
especially after my internship experience
where I was the only female on the ward
and couldn't have cases of my own.
And the chief psychiatrist would often comment
on my skirt length.
And my first sexual relationship with a man ended in disaster.
I got pregnant, and I didn't have another relationship
with a man for a long time.
And I also became terrified of sexuality.
You know, like, to know or to try to know
where I am, you know,
and to be aware of how I feel, not to just plunge.
I don't like anybody who just likes to plunge in
and decide what is, this a man, you know.
All right, here, here we go, rap, rap,
and it's over, because that's not it.
Sex is making love, actually, not just fucking.
JANET: At that point, I started doing assertiveness training
for women and sex education workshops.
How long women have to go along with their bodies
being this dark, mysterious, kind of painful thing
that they know nothing about?
JANET: We gave women the homework of going home
and looking in the mirror and examining their genitals,
which many of them had never done.
And even more of them had never seen the clitoris.
SHERE: The women's group I was involved
in got into a debate about Masters and Johnson.
In their first book, they had said
that women's orgasms needed clitoral stimulation.
But in the second book they said,
"Yes, but, even though that's true,
you should get indirect clitoral stimulation
through simple intercourse."
So, I thought, "Well, maybe we'll have a conference,
we can debate this topic."
But then all my friends said,
"Yeah, well, who's gonna be the first one to stand up and say,
'Yeah, how I orgasm is...'"
I mean, nobody was going to do this, right?
MIKE: Shere would go to these self-awareness meetings
and she started a conversation about masturbation.
She would ask everybody in the audience,
"Do you masturbate?" You know, "Raise your hands."
And most people are very shy and did not do that.
So she came up with this idea
of making an anonymous questionnaire.
SHERE: I made up a questionnaire.
I wanted women to send them back to me anonymously.
And since I had been in graduate school,
I sort of had an idea, you know, how to do that.
WOMAN: I started passing it out around town.
MIKE: I was one of the helpers.
I had the motorcycle.
Shere would have a big cardboard box of surveys,
and we'd strap it on with bungee cords
on the back of the motorcycle.
She'd put on her helmet and hop on.
Zoom across town to some place
that was going to distribute the surveys.
Not just uptown or downtown, all over the place.
Up in the Bronx, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Chinatown.
SHERE: Then I began distributing questionnaires
to women all over the country,
to women's groups, to church groups,
to all kinds of groups.
I sent out questionnaires in batches.
I advertised the questionnaires in magazines.
MARTIN: I was the editor of a magazine called Sexology.
It was a digest-size magazine
that was meant to bring sex education
to the general population.
And I received a letter one day,
and it just sort of attracted my attention.
Most letters that I would get would be typewritten,
but this one came with a kind of a red bold
handwriting, very, very fluid.
AS SHERE: "Dear Mr. Sage,
I've been distributing the enclosed questionnaire
to women all over the country.
Would very much enjoy contributing to your magazine.
Sincerely, Shere Hite."
The handwriting was alluring, and so I was curious.
[ Telephone rings ]
We arranged to have lunch, and this woman walks in
kind of mix matched clothing and an electric hairdo.
We talked, and she explained what she was doing.
There was a kind of warmth that was beginning
to build up between us.
You know, I didn't really know how to deal with it
since I was married at the time.
I had to call my office and explain
that I'd be back from lunch a little bit late.
And, all of a sudden, somebody crawled into the phone booth
next to me, and it was her.
She was gonna make a call after I did.
But normally people wait until you exit the phone booth.
It was kind of an intense meeting of bodies.
I went back to the office.
Shere had already called three times.
I said, "This is going to be a problem for you."
We struck up a relationship, and it went from there.
She was always working, and if she wasn't working,
she was sleeping, and if she wasn't sleeping, she was eating.
One night, I went with her to the printing press.
They printed anti-war leaflets
and all sorts of stuff during the day,
and at night, they would allow her to use the printing press.
AS SHERE: I learned to run a printing press myself.
I had to pay for ink and electricity and bring paper.
MIKE: They taught her how to type up a mimeograph sheet
that she'd put on the roller and get it all going.
Thousands of copies by hand, herself.
MARTIN: She would choose the inks and mix them,
the same color of her nail polish at the time.
Her hands would be stained with ink.
SHERE: I put designs, I used colored ink.
I wanted people to feel this was something very personal,
that they were writing their diary,
or just talking to themselves in their most private moment.
This is free.
You can say whatever you want.
[ Horn honks ]
It's not a multiple choice questionnaire either,
because we felt that, who would know the categories of answers?
So, we're asking open ended questions.
Would you like me to read some of them?
Okay, well, it starts out mildly.
Is one orgasm sexually satisfying?
If not, how many?
How do your thoughts and emotions
affect your desire for orgasms?
If I read them all, it will take all the time.
- Well, there's... - And then it, just a minute,
and then it asks a lot of questions about masturbation.
What do you think is the importance?
Do you enjoy it? And how do you do it?
And that's really important,
because that's when women have most orgasms.
So, how that's done, you know, should be something
that begins to be incorporated into a lot of love making.
And it's fascinating. We have 2,000 answers back now.
That's what all these things are here.
It's really wonderful every day to get the mail.
You know, you open it up, you get these fantastic things.
[ Soulful music playing ]
WOMAN 1: I am 21 years old,
of Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry.
I have been married for two years.
We're lower-middle class.
My husband, a college student, and I, an unemployed secretary.
WOMAN 2: I'm 23, Jewish, raised mostly in New York.
WOMAN 3: 39 years old, Black, physical education teacher.
WOMAN 4: Age 47, brought up strict Methodist.
WOMAN 5: 32, college dropout.
WOMAN 6: I was 75 this September,
living alone, and I don't miss anything.
WOMAN 7: I can always tell if my partner
really wants me for me or me for my body.
WOMAN 8: For years I never told my real needs to a man.
To a woman, I can say how I want to feel.
WOMAN 9: I never even told my mother
when I started menstruating.
And I went on birth control on my own
through Planned Parenthood.
I'd like to thank them right here.
WOMAN 10: I don't fall in love.
I find it hard to trust, to be open with men.
WOMAN 11: I would like to act freely
and happily on my impulses and desires.
WOMAN 12: For many years,
I thought I was different to other women.
It has caused me a great deal of worry.
WOMAN 13: I am now, at this moment,
on a freighter in the North Sea
where I have been a cook for 10 weeks.
It is a drizzly night.
We're stuck on a sandbar in rough water and fog.
I have never written about sex before.
And, as I enjoy writing and I enjoy sex,
it could be an intriguing exercise.
Previously, I thought little of the women's lib and its issues.
But I have not yet in my life experienced a heavier,
more concentrated dose of male chauvinism
than provided by being the only woman
on a freighter among young men who I am unwilling to fuck.
I'm a little provoked with men at sea.
SHERE: I didn't know their names,
but I knew where they were from.
I knew their age.
I never had heard in detail how women felt about
all kinds of things having to do with our private lives.
And I thought they were very important.
REGINA: I thought, "Every woman's gonna want to read this,
you know, and men should, too."
Masters and Johnson had just come out with a study,
and there was the Kinsey report.
My husband said, "Well, there's only one title this could be.
"The Hite Report."
I have a geographical distribution, at this point.
It turned out to cover the whole country very well.
And I'm doing the statistics now.
DYLAN: She would give me these oversized sheets of graph paper
that had columns-- orgasm, masturbation, intercourse,
clitoral stimulation, other, and notes.
I grew up in a family where sex was treated very clinically.
It's like something you pick up with a tweezers
and put over here.
It was just not something that would ever be fun.
I was 18, and a sophomore at Barnard College.
I went by myself to this NOW conference
just out of sheer curiosity.
And I saw this stunning woman behind a table
that was laden high with these very interesting,
daring, kind of forbidden questionnaires.
And I said, "Can I work for you? I'll work for you for nothing."
And she said, "I have to pay you.
I just can't pay you very much."
And it was that fast.
You know, we just clicked.
I would sit out in the hallway outside her apartment,
and smoke like a fiend, with a stack of questionnaires.
SHERE: Do you have orgasms?
- Yes. - Yes.
Several times a week.
WOMAN 14: No, because it would take lots of encouragement
and not being uptight about the whole thing.
WOMAN 15: Yes, but in my rather long life, too few.
WOMAN 16: I'm not really sure that what I think
may have been an orgasm really was one.
I don't know what would contribute to having them.
I don't think I feel free to have them.
AS SHERE: Please describe what an orgasm feels like to you.
How does your body feel?
WOMAN 17: Fluttery sort of feeling.
Almost as if my body wasn't there.
WOMAN 18: Like you can't move and, I mean, just like caught.
WOMAN 19: That's when it's really getting good.
Some women will say one thing, others say another.
WOMAN: Often, I touch my face with my left hand.
Sometimes I kiss this hand.
When I'm close to coming,
I have to hold on really tight to something.
WOMAN 20: Waves flushing through my body,
beginning at my clitoris and spreading forever outward.
Like any feeling, you can't say.
What does cold feel like, you know?
What does anything feel like?
DYLAN: You have to translate from prose
these little mini stories that women were writing
into something like, always, usually.
Do your orgasms usually occur during cunnilingus,
manual clitoral stimulation, intercourse,
or other activities?
Sometimes. Rarely. Never.
WOMAN 21: I've never reached orgasm through intercourse.
WOMAN 22: I always have them during masturbation.
WOMAN 23: I've only made love once with a woman.
I was too nervous to achieve orgasm.
WOMAN 24: I've also had orgasms with no sexual stimulation.
Just running down a street, in dreams,
and at other odd moments.
And then we would count them up.
Always numeral I-A, followed by a T in a circle,
always apart.
WOMAN 25: My legs usually collapse in a diamond shape.
And that is how I fall asleep.
Open, closed, apart, apart, apart.
SHERE: We tried to put together a composite picture
of what everybody said.
WOMAN 26: I love vaginal penetration
if accompanied by clitoral foreplay.
DYLAN: Circle with X in it means manual stimulation,
plus, intercourse equals orgasm.
Purple, prefer with penetration.
It was kind of like embroidery, like little stitches,
then they all had to come together
and mean something and form a larger pattern.
SHERE: The statistics that we're getting,
if you want to use that term, and faking orgasm is like 95%.
Because even women who, you know,
they know better and they understand,
they've been in consciousness raising and all of this,
they still do it sometimes
because the men haven't been in consciousness raising.
And, you know, like, a lot of women don't like intercourse
that much, and they've got somebody on top of them,
they can't breathe, they're lying there,
they can't move, right?
[ Both laughing ]
She's laughing. So...
[ Both laughing ]
Anyway, the phrase is,
"Anything to get them off," you know?
And that's really terrible
when it gets to that state, you know?
We've been adapting our bodies to male sexuality for centuries.
And so I think that now what we have to do
is we have to take ourselves out of that situation,
see ourselves just for ourselves,
and then take that knowledge
and relate to other people of whatever sex,
but to be doing things that are right for us.
[ Classical music playing ]
This really became my life for five years,
and it was more fulfilling than, in many ways,
many of the relationships that you could have
because so many women telling me so many things really,
I felt that I had 3,000 very close friends, really.
REGINA: We went to celebrate the book coming out,
and we had lunch in the Tavern on the Green.
And it was so beautiful, and there was rain coming down
on top of a skylight.
It was just a wonderful day.
We were so happy, both glowing.
"We did it." [ Laughs ]
It was before all the terrible criticism,
I think, had come her way.
[ Music continues ]
Some years later,
I learned that the sales manager had ordered the sales force
not to get more than 4,000 advance orders,
which would determine the printing,
which would determine the book's fate.
They hated the book.
They really tried to sabotage it,
keep it down, keep it down.
SHERE: They were only gonna print 4,000 copies
and do no publicity.
And after five years' work, I really didn't think it was
right to let it just go down the drain like that.
MARTIN: We were talking about how the book can be presented.
And she said, "This is a news story."
I said, "Well, then why not have a news conference?"
This was like a lightning bolt splitting
and hitting two heads simultaneous.
And within really just a few short days,
we put this together.
SHERE: I'm Shere Hite, the author of "The Hite Report,"
which is a study of 3,000 women.
Can you hear me?
Can everyone hear? Okay.
MARTIN: We thought it would be best
that she have a panel so that not only could she
present the book from her point of view,
but others could be in support.
SHERE: This is Kay Whitlock from NOW,
the National NOW Sexuality Taskforce
on Lesbianism and Sexuality.
KAY: I was thrilled that Shere would actually reach out
to this lesbian NOW Taskforce.
There were several people speaking, all esteemed
sexuality educators and researchers,
and I was kind of the young punk on the block.
As women, we will not be free
until we come to terms with our own definitions of sexuality,
and take charge of our own sexual lives.
When I got a copy of Shere's book,
I just thought, "Holy shit, this is amazing."
Lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, celibate,
"The Hite Report" doesn't fall prey
into dividing people as society does.
SHERE: Some people's reaction was that it sounded
very radical.
[ Chuckles ] To me, it doesn't sound radical at all.
The most important finding in my study
is that a majority of women don't orgasm from intercourse.
That's what we're here to talk about today.
This is Janet Wolfe.
JANET: Suppose men were programmed with the idea
that their sex organ was their testicles,
women would diddle around every once in a while,
on the penis.
But men were expected to have orgasm
simply by stimulating their balls.
What would that have been like?
I mean, it's inconceivable for people to think,
but that's exactly what happened to women.
SHERE: In short, our whole idea of sex must be re-evaluated.
We need to make a new kind of physical relations
to go with a new, more humane society,
and that's my statement.
[ Applause ]
GERALDO: Hello. I'm Geraldo Rivera.
Good evening, and welcome to a special edition
of "Good Night America."
AS SHERE: The words "clitoris" and "orgasm"
were not permitted in many newspapers,
as if that part of women's anatomy was dirty
and had to be hidden.
GERALDO: Masturbation, orgasm, don't get hung up,
don't get turned on, and don't get turned off
by the use of those words.
They're just words.
AS SHERE: So even to use the words was heroic
on the part of journalists.
Please join me in welcoming our special guest
this evening, Miss Shere Hite.
[ Applause ]
- Hi. - Hi.
Your book has really caused a tremendous stir.
And I just wonder, Masters and Johnson went to
great lengths to describe exactly how women achieved
orgasm through intercourse.
Your study contradicts that.
I want you to talk a little bit more about that, Shere.
Masters and Johnson made a tremendous step forward
in that they studied and showed clinically, for the first time,
that all orgasms are caused by clitoral stimulation.
And we really have them to thank for that.
However, when they described how it's done,
the thrusting of the penis causes the vaginal lips to move,
which causes the skin
that's connected to the clitoris to move,
which causes the glans to move over the clitoris,
which supposedly gives you orgasm.
But that doesn't work for most women,
and I called it, unkindly, a Rube Goldberg model.
There's just too many variables involved.
It's funny, when you describe it that way, it kind of sounds
like the knee bone connected to the shinbone.
That's right. [ Laughs ]
That's right.
[ Laughter ]
What percentage of...
KAY: Shere was breaking a functional silence.
It was brave in a way that took my breath away.
I wonder what the notoriety
that has attached already to "The Hite Report,"
and certainly that will grow, what effect has it had on you?
The main problem I've been up against is to try
and make sure that things that are written reflect
accurately what it is that the book is saying,
and keep the emphasis on the fact
that women are speaking out,
and that it's a communal discussion
and not anything having to do with me.
Have you been successful in hearing...
I think pretty much most of the things
that have been written have been very good and very serious.
I'm very pleased.
PRESENTER: National Public Radio...
MAN: Author Shere Hite.
WOMAN: The Hite Report, phenomenal success.
WOMAN 2: News Weekly, biggest sex study
since Masters and Johnson.
MARTIN: The book got such good coverage and such good press
from the get-go, primarily from women.
There's very short amount of time between the release
of the book and kind of the book becoming a phenomenon.
It was so short that I think she was swept up in it,
and she could only have been surprised
for a very short amount of time before the reality hit her,
"This is a success."
MAN: But we have new book on it today.
MAN 2: Is there a new book on sex?
"The Hite Report."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a woman's point of view.
Ugh!
You know, only been 200 million years we've been doing this.
All of a sudden, they got to give you diagrams how to do it.
- That's right. - You don't think that the women
should have any point of view?
[ Laughs ] No, no.
I say what they're doing is making a book
out of a woman's point of view.
In the bookstores these days,
there's one section that's getting almost as big
as the cooking book section, and that's female sexuality.
Is there room for yet another book?
There is, apparently, "The Hite Report."
AS SHERE: Consequences of publishing a successful book
were a real culture shock to me.
It seems odd to me that penetration
wouldn't satisfy a woman,
and I wonder if we're made wrong.
Or if there's some terrific joke.
AS SHERE: I found the newspaper and TV situation confusing.
NICOLE: What does your study tell us
about how women really do define sex?
Well, women see sex as something that values very much
the intimacy, the closeness, touching,
the expression of feelings.
WOMAN: That's not new.
That we know. We've known that women...
Well, you see, I can't do it by...
You see, I'm already finding myself when I said that,
saying something that doesn't...
You see, I have to couch the language
in a way that reflects how my study went.
I can't-- you said I was-- I'm undefining sex.
I can't tell you what the new sex will be.
AS SHERE: I didn't know how to react.
Articles often seemed not to reflect the ideas
I meant to communicate.
MAN: Was it a political ploy
you were using to suggest that women didn't need men?
But why would I want to do that?
Well, that came through to me...
Can I quote you from page 169, I'll quote you directly...
GERALDO: If there has been a backlash to your report
amongst men it is because of a fear that masturbation
will then become the ultimate sex act
and men will become in some way irrelevant.
WOMAN: That's terrible.
All you need is one super stud around to service each nation.
What about the men in your life?
Are they intimidated by the fact
that you are now such an expert in this field?
No, I don't think so.
I think everybody that I know is
very involved in the spirit of the whole thing and very...
Everybody is so excited about the changes
that are possible and involved in their own change
that I haven't found that at all.
REGINA: She moved to the Hotel Alden down the block,
quite different from the basement apartment.
MARTIN: As the book became successful,
Shere threw a party to celebrate
all of the respondents to the questionnaire.
And she'd gotten enough money back to reimburse
all of the people who had loaned her money
over the course of the writing of the book.
DYLAN: I remember the cake,
and I remember all the names going around the cake.
And that was very important to her.
She's a very generous person who shares the credit.
She did ask me to give her money, and I gave her money.
MARTIN: Shere had gotten a meager advance,
but the book was years in creation.
She would borrow money from anybody
who seemed to be coming along.
MIKE: A lot of people fell in love with the project
and in love with Shere.
MARTIN: At one point, she turned to me,
and she said, "You know, I'm kind of short of money,
and you've never offered to loan me any money," you know?
Sure, the answer is sure.
I had to go to a bank and get a cash advance
on my credit card.
AS SHERE: Men have all the money.
They also have a lot easier time getting loans than women do.
WOMAN: Women couldn't get a credit card.
You had to have a man vouch for you.
I mean, the laws were horrific.
She actually borrowed money from someone
who worked in my building.
The porter. He became a good friend of hers.
He helped support her while she was writing this.
MARTIN: Maybe that was the happiest I've ever seen her.
She had a smile on her face that just was endless.
SHERE: This is for you.
Yeah. I can't read that.
I can't read most of them.
Did you get any interesting letters yet?
SHERE: I've been doing a questionnaire for men
for two years, and in a couple more years,
I'll be done with it.
WOMAN: TIME Magazine suggests your next book
will be called "Do Men Need Intercourse?"
SHERE: No, it's not going to be called that.
It's going to be about how men feel about sex.
AS SHERE: I had a few boyfriends over those years.
One, I liked a lot.
A struggling young artist.
ED: I moved to New York January of 1977.
I had a raw loft in Chelsea.
I was living out of a suitcase.
I didn't even have a dresser to put my clothes in.
I got on to a painting crew at the Alden Hotel,
painting all the corridors.
One day, a door opened and a woman
with bright orange hair came out.
She said, "Hello.
Would you be interested in painting my windows?"
I didn't know who she was.
I noticed boxes and boxes of books with the title
"The Hite Report."
And they were in all different languages,
Hebrew even.
We hit it off right away.
She gave me a copy.
And I guess I had what you would call a baptism of fire.
I learned a lot about her ideas, being more aware of my feelings
and also how my behavior affected her and other women.
She was so interesting and so charming.
I was kind of mesmerized, I guess.
AS SHERE: He was beautiful, in both body and spirit.
I don't remember much about how we made love.
Though I remember that together,
we concocted magnificent shades of pale yellow, ivory, and rose
in different finishes for the walls and moldings.
When the sunlight hit these colors,
the walls appeared luminescent.
ED: She was just working all the time.
It was a small one-bedroom, and she used the front room
as the office, couple of doors on file cabinets for desks,
and she had a lot of people working for her.
MARTIN: While she was working on the men's book,
she was also conceiving a follow-up survey
for women about their emotional lives.
Even though she had a completely different background
from so many of the women that were writing
and filling out the questionnaires,
she was experiencing what they were experiencing,
what does it mean to be in a relationship.
So she was one of them.
AS SHERE: The purpose of this questionnaire
is to hear women's point of view on questions
that were left unanswered in the original Hite Report.
How women feel about love, relationships, marriage,
and monogamy were not covered due to lack of funds.
I think these should be taped.
You need somebody to hire and efficiently send...
Now, here's...
MARTIN: In some cases, women would record cassettes
of their replies to the questionnaire.
SHERE: Looks like I have to switch to a tape recorder
because this is ridiculous.
It's taking me much too long to type.
WOMAN: The women's movement, I think, is interesting.
I'm a Black woman, and I'm doing some research
now on the Black woman's feminist movement.
I think we've always been torn.
We don't want to put our men down.
And we're not exactly what a white woman
is in terms of what her goals are.
It's a very tricky situation.
SHERE: I'm embarrassed to admit that I skimmed "The Hite Report"
for my own answers.
I answered that questionnaire when I was 20 years old.
One time, as a sneaky experiment,
I showed the book to a boyfriend, a new boyfriend,
pretending to just randomly open a page,
but actually opening it to a quote by me about sex.
He read the page and then he said, "This is gross.
Did you read this one?"
Pointing to what I had written.
WOMAN: What is your own description of yourself?
I'm a female, very proud of being a woman.
I like being a woman.
I think I'm very strong.
I can do anything that I set my mind to doing.
And I like that.
I like the strength of the female.
MARTIN: She would listen to them and remark
upon how lovely these people sounded,
and their tone of voice and how gracious and caring they were,
and aspirational they were.
Wouldn't it be? Couldn't it be?
That was who she was.
She was drawing strength from them
in a way that helped propel her further in her work.
My name is Mariko Tse. I am a spokesperson
for the Asian/Pacific American Women's Caucus.
National Indian Women's and Alaskan Natives Caucus.
I'm Sandra Serrano Sewell, president of
Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional.
MAN: In Houston, there's a huge National Women's Conference.
MAN 2: The largest gathering of women in American history.
They will approve a national plan
to improve the status of women.
There were strong differences of opinion on how to do that.
And Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan
appealed for reason and compromise.
And when the debate becomes heated,
I hope you will remember Lyndon Johnson's invocation
of Isaiah's invocation,
"Come now, let us reason together."
[ Cheers and applause ]
MAN 3: Across town there was an even bigger gathering.
Many are Fundamentalist Christian.
They're against the Equal Rights Amendment.
They're against abortion on demand.
They're against laws favoring homosexuals.
Their numbers indicate that a lot of people
in this country fear the changes
that the women's movement is trying to make.
KAY: Shere knew sexuality was one of the things
that could be most easily weaponized by the right,
with the deadliest possible consequences.
♪ Yes, Jesus loves me ♪
KAY: In 1977, Anita Bryant surfaces in
Dade County, Florida.
MAN 4: With a religious fervor that has made her America's
most controversial woman overnight,
her group is crusading to repeal a new Dade County Law
which protects homosexuals in jobs and housing.
For the first time, I know the Christian community
have never been involved in any political controversial issue,
and they're not only involved,
but they're committed.
KAY: There starts to be a solidification
of a right-wing movement toward real political power.
Billy Graham, Pat Robertson,
Jim Dobson's Focus on the Family,
Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority.
Almost always you're going to find an argument
about the corruption of innocent children
at the heart of any kind of culture war.
I like all those badges you got there.
Homosexuals cannot reproduce biologically,
but they have to reproduce by recruiting our children.
KAY: Shere paid for Mary Calderone and me
to go to Dade County and spend time
working in the campaign to defeat Anita Bryant.
MAN 5: The campaign has been vicious,
with television commercials, the Save Our Children Group
is appealing to parental anxieties.
MAN 6: When they take to the streets,
it's a parade of homosexuals, men hugging other men,
cavorting with little boys.
The country is really, at this moment,
looking to Dade County to save us
from a wave of reaction and viciousness and bigotry.
MAN 7: One gay spokesman had his car fire bombed
after doing a television interview.
In Florida's Dade County referendum,
those advocating job and housing rights for homosexuals
lost badly, by more than two to one.
The campaign led by Anita Bryant was the winner.
The war goes on to save our children,
because the seed of sexual sickness
that germinated in Dade County has already been transplanted
by misguided liberals in the U.S. Congress.
KAY: Shere was just right there.
There was no question of her understanding
of the politics of anti-gay movements
and how this was building and what this constituted.
If we're going to undefine, not redefine, but undefine,
how we relate to each other, so that each individual can
decide how to share their body with another person,
then I think we have to imagine people
will love people of the same sex, also.
KAY: She cared passionately about a better world
for everyone, without labels, without repression.
It's hard to express just how revolutionary
I think that was at the time.
MAN 8: There are consciousness-raising groups
all over the country exploring how women feel about themselves,
their sexuality, their role in society.
But so far we've heard very little from men
on these subjects.
GRIFFIN: Here at last is the long-awaited companion volume
to Shere Hite's blockbuster bestseller on female sexuality.
Welcome, Shere Hite.
[ Applause ]
"The Hite Report on Male Sexuality" continues to carry on
in the author's controversial tradition.
Here is Shere Hite.
Why are people so fascinated with all this?
Well, you know, there are many books on sex
that don't sell at all.
So the idea that people are fascinated with sex,
per se, may not be correct.
My area was a little different.
I'm really trying to draw a picture,
a larger picture of the society
and how people are feeling within that society.
The women's movement,
how has it affected the male's sexual response?
Um, I think that the women's movement can only help men,
because men complained over and over in my study,
and that's certainly not the first time they complained,
that they felt a lot of pressures on them to perform.
They had to get an erection.
You have to have intercourse long enough
for the woman to have an orgasm.
My study showed, in the first book,
that most women can orgasm easily from clitoral stimulation
and not from intercourse so much.
I know a lot of women, though, that, that...
Well, never mind, go ahead.
DOUGLAS: No, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead. I don't mean to interrupt.
David, please finish the statement.
You don't want to leave the audience hanging.
"I know a lot of women that..."
We'll pick it up there.
That don't...
God, how do you talk about this stuff?
- Don't have orgasms. - That don't-- that don't--
- The usual way. - Yeah.
- Right. - Yeah.
That have orga-- That if you're going to...
[ Laughs ]
They-- They are embarrassed by clitoral stimulation, also.
You know what I'm saying?
MARTIN: Shere didn't smoke when we were together.
She was a bad girl when she wanted to be a bad girl.
[ Laughs ] I'm Bette Davis.
I'm Marlene Dietrich.
She, essentially, smoked in Mike Douglas' face.
[ Douglas coughs, laughs ]
- Sorry. - That's a bad habit.
- Yeah, I guess you're right. - Yeah.
♪ When you're laying so close to me ♪
BOB: The adjective I would apply to Shere is "flamboyant."
That's what she wanted to be.
And that's what she came across as being.
♪ I love to love you, baby ♪
Not scary, not even nervous making,
but it kept you with your wits about you.
MAN 9: Sex expert Shere Hite
on her new surprising report on male sexuality.
BOB: I knew, of course, that there would be a great deal
of interest in this book, because the first Hite Report
was such a sensational success.
HELEN: Shere, in your report on female sexuality,
men were staggered to learn that clitoral stimulation
was much more important than penetration.
The world was agog.
Now what did you find out in male sexuality
that was equally astonishing?
What will women who read this book find out about men
that they did not know before?
1,100 pages, 7,000 interviews altogether.
MARTIN: I think Shere decided to do the male book
because we would understand more about men's issues,
their inability to communicate.
AS SHERE: Men's book, why so angry?
Too many demands, men don't feel free to be themselves.
What are the values men are taught?
Why do men want sex?
How do men feel about women, us, and themselves?
For me, a crucial thing in my experience
of working on that book was when I asked to read
a whole lot of the filled out questionnaires.
Somewhere between 60 and 100 questionnaires that I read full.
MAN 10: Age 50, occupation, college professor.
MAN 11: Black, born and upbrought,
until 11, in a small town.
MAN 12: I work in a mill for a mining company.
MAN 13: Age 62. English. Youngest of three children.
MAN 14: I'm 57. I love my wife and children.
BOB: These guys, not about their sex lives
or their fantasies or their frustrations.
But when they started answering the questions
about their emotional life,
I haven't had many sadder experiences
as an editor in my life.
AS SHERE: What did your father tell you about how to be a man?
MAN 15: 25. I've always been emotional.
I cried very easy as a child, not from being hurt physically,
but mentally.
My father would sometimes tell me to shut up,
and I tried, but it was hard.
MAN 16: I never was close to my father.
We just discussed matters of minor importance to us
like soccer results and acts of the government.
He was the hard parent.
And I respected him and had fear of his anger.
MAN 17: No, I have never cried myself to sleep.
But I've really felt unloved and discarded.
MAN 18: I have felt rejected at times,
but assuming that I've been misjudged,
I try not to take the rejection to heart.
After all, I can't be more alone than I am now.
Over and over again, they said the same thing.
We have no one to talk to.
We can't share things with people, even our wives.
MAN 19: I have no warmth nor closeness in my life.
The only feeling of warmth that I get
is when I'm through with work and am free to do what I want.
BOB: We're isolated.
MARTIN: We assumed that, yeah, our lives were difficult,
we had to work, but we were men,
we had women in our beds, they were happy.
And then, all of a sudden, a book comes out and says to us,
we're not happy.
MICHAEL: Welcome to "Leave It To the Women."
Today's panelists are actor/male stripper John Gibson,
actor Gil Gerard, actor/writer Ron Masak,
and myself, Michael Conrad.
Here's our host, Stephanie Edwards.
Shere Hite has joined us, and we welcome you, Shere.
The author or the compiler of the information in
"The Hite Report on Male Sexuality."
- Welcome. - Thank you.
The book did well, but not, I think,
as I thought it might do.
Did you recognize yourself in this book at all?
I didn't, no, as a matter of fact,
I would like to get to that.
I didn't recognize myself into this book,
- or anybody that I know. - No kidding?
No, but I don't know the 7,239 men.
- [ Laughter ] - Did you see yourself at all,
the fellows who say
they feel as though they must perform?
No, I have to say the majority of the material
that I went over in the book that I'm not familiar with.
- STEPHANIE: Really? - No, I don't agree with a lot
of what she has to say.
BOB: Men weren't ready. You can see it.
Not only don't they understand intimacy,
they don't want to know about it.
We'd like to ask you before the men pounce
on what they've already heard, what you found it meant
to be a man in our society,
from those who answered your questionnaire?
I think it's difficult for men to criticize
the idea of masculinity because if a man criticizes
the idea of masculinity, whether it's a sexual connotation,
or just what kind of a job you have,
then he runs the risk of having other men look down on him
and think that, "Well, he can't make it as a man."
So it's very hard for men to speak out about that.
GIL: I don't agree with that at all.
STEPHANIE: What don't you agree with?
I don't agree with that at all, that a man
can't speak out about the role of what makes a man masculine
without other men coming down on him about it.
I don't agree with that at all.
No, I meant, I meant he can't criticize...
- GIL: Sure, he can. - ...what he's supposed to be.
That's never been my experience with anyone I've ever known.
MICHAEL: I happen to agree with Miss Hite in this respect.
When I was a boy, nobody cried.
I remember very clearly running away from a man,
and I was caught, I was the slowest.
And I was caught, and he beat me up.
And I was crying. And I walked up to the guys,
and they just looked at me like I was dirt.
I didn't cry for 25 years after that.
Now, what I'm concerned with is what type of person
is going to stay home and answer 170 questions, essay format?
I mean, does that give us a good...
- STEPHANIE: Representation. - ...representation of what
the male sexuality is all about?
I don't believe it does.
JANET: People criticized her methodology
because they didn't understand what it was,
and so they could discount her findings.
72% of the men who were married said they had had
extramarital affairs within the first two years of marriage.
Gil has been married, how many years?
Two years now. Two years on October 20th.
[ Audience laughing ]
And your wife is about to give birth, even as we speak.
As we speak, yes. Any second it can happen, yes.
STEPHANIE: Did you recognize yourself in here, Gil?
No, I didn't.
I didn't recognize myself nor most of the people that I know.
I think that there must be people out there
with these kinds of thoughts.
MICHAEL: But have you read the book?
I read some of it.
I skipped some. I didn't have time to read, I guess.
ED: They really weren't paying attention
to reading the material.
They didn't really understand the sophistication
of her methodology.
It was referred to continuously that the 72% of these men...
- GIL: Of married men. - Well, of married men.
That's not right. 72% of the 7,239 men,
which is only 6% of the 190,000 things she sent out.
If I were doing a typical sampling of muffins
in market research
on an essay-type distribution the way I did it,
you would get about 2% or 3% answering,
and that's considered valid market research.
So out of maybe 400,000 questionnaires you sent out
to both female and male,
you're saying only 8% of all of those people responded
from which you have two books
that are being considered almost like
Kinsey's report and Masters and Johnson,
an authority.
Masters and Johnson had a total of 700 people.
Kinsey had a total of 11,000.
But all we can do is try
and match it to the population demographics.
MARTIN: She received a tremendous amount of criticism
because they said this is not a scientific study.
In the press, it's often said that my work is,
quote, "unscientific," unquote, which drives me crazy
because what they mean is, is it representative?
"Scientific" can mean many things.
There has never been a perfect sample in sex research,
and there won't be for some time
because if you were going to do a random sample,
most people wouldn't answer
because they wouldn't be anonymous
and their names would be known.
So of course, they wouldn't answer.
I don't know anything about methodology.
She got what she could get out of it.
And it was effective. And I think useful.
SHERE: I just had to get back, excuse me,
to this word "measure,"
because that's, pardon me, a very male word.
And it's not a word I would ever use.
And I don't wish to measure men.
What I'm trying to do is provide a forum
in which men can see how many other men feel.
"Measure" is a very male word?
SHERE: Perhaps not all men,
but it's a forum in which men can talk.
And they can talk to each other,
and they can talk to other women.
But I'm not trying to say that you should be this way
or you should be that way,
and, if you're not, there's something wrong with you.
That's the very antithesis of what I'm doing.
MARTIN: They just were vehement, and they wrote incredibly
nasty letters to Shere, and she got phone calls.
She didn't understand why this book
was the object of scorn and hatred.
AS SHERE: I felt naked, scrutinized.
So many inaccurate things and strange things
were being said about me in the press.
As a model, I had always made it a point of honor
to use my own full name.
It was discovered that I had been featured in the nude
in Playboy several years earlier.
Photographed for Playboy meant immediate disrespect
and disregard for my work.
I couldn't be a good researcher
because I was "just a bimbo who had posed nude."
SHERE: Did you have another comment?
REPORTER: Oh, no. I just had one other question.
I remember some years ago there was a profile done on you.
And I think it was Playboy magazine.
- And they had some... - A profile?
Well...
[ Laughter ]
Hate to hear about this whole thing.
[ Applause ]
It was some-- there were some semi-nude photographs.
- Ah. - And I was just wondering...
MARTIN: It's not that she didn't expect it.
I think she didn't expect it to persist the way it did.
I think she thought eventually this will just blow over
and they'll move on to the next target.
But she stayed a target for a long time.
REPORTER: I was just wondering what were those frilly
green things that you were wearing?
[ Men laughing ]
The frilly green things?
I guess you had to be there just to know, you know?
- I guess so. - I guess so.
Well, did you have another question about that?
REPORTER: No, that's it.
AS SHERE: Plan for not being a stereotyped creation
of your society.
Number one, spend three days alone.
[ Choir music plays ]
Number two, take yourself seriously.
[ Opera music playing ]
Number three, whenever caught in a situation
where you are made to feel girlish and helpless,
bitchy and aggressive,
or any other stereotype, leave immediately
and do any action which you enjoy and is yours.
[ Opera music continues ]
Number four, rely on your own
financial resources at all times.
KAY: Shere had to sue Macmillan to get her full earnings.
They had put a limit on the amount of income
she could get per year.
AS SHERE: It's a tax-free, interest-free, eternal loan.
Here I am, me, propping up this stupid company.
MARTIN: There was a settlement, and she was given a payout.
MIKE: All of a sudden, she had $250,000,
so she wanted to buy a place.
And she was so excited.
[ Soulful music playing ]
AS SHERE: I bought an apartment.
GENE: I was the first tenant,
what used to be the Heart Fund building on Fifth Avenue
and 64th Street.
As I was passing through the lobby and her door was open,
I don't remember if I said, "Shere Hite,"
or if she said, "Gene."
What do you do? I stick my tongue out.
What do you do? I'm writing a book.
She invited me in to say, "Hey, come on in.
Let me show you where I live."
Shere wound up taking the first unit on the first floor facing
Fifth Avenue.
It could have been a small palazzo in Europe
with beautiful vases and art pieces all over the place.
Very ornate.
JANET: Both of us had a love of the decorative arts,
surrounding ourselves with beautiful things.
It gave us relief from the heavy workloads
that we both had.
AS SHERE: I needed beauty around me
to forget painful images seen in the press.
Number five, enjoy yourself a lot.
I had lots of parties.
[ Upbeat music playing ]
So, you couldn't come to my Valentine's party?
No, I would've loved to...
JANET: She just invited a whole range of people.
I remember women from Coyote,
which was a prostitutes' rights organization.
MARTIN: Flo Kennedy. Swifty Lazar.
I was there, with my new wife, Sybil.
ED: Julien, the night doorman.
JANET: There were people of all different walks of life.
[ Woman singing in French ]
GENE: Sometimes I'd come in late from the studio or on tour,
and the door would be open.
We palled around.
Donna Summer is downstairs.
"Oh, Donna, what are you doing here?"
"I just moved in here."
"Oh, really? I'm up on top. "Hey, come on over."
She was curious about this rock star thing
and the sexuality there.
"What you do? And why do you do it?"
Shere was inquisitive.
Most people when they ask you questions,
don't follow it up with, why?
And it makes you sort of...
"Yeah, why?"
KAY: She chose that part of New York,
the creative side and the movement side.
[ Woman singing in French ]
♪ Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me ♪
MAN: And so on her birthday, heavily attended by New York's
radical chic crowd...
Did you see what Shere gave me?
Isn't it fabulous? I can't get over it.
It's so beautiful.
MAN: ...Flo trots out her defense of prostitutes
with a little ditty.
♪ Everybody needs a hooker once in a while ♪
GENE: Shere was forward thinking.
It helps, I believe, to come from a small town
and then see a difference.
New York, you've got room to breathe
and you can weave and dodge,
and there's a lot of other people in the way.
You have a better chance of developing your own soul
and becoming whoever you want.
JAMES: I was working at the Village Voice.
We met 'cause I photographed her.
I loved her style. I loved the way she dressed.
I could also tell that she loved working.
And so, I think I was kind of standing back.
I was showing the way she worked more than
I was showing her personality.
It was as if I couldn't quite get near her.
And then I saw a picture of her as a child, and I said,
"Can I take a picture of this picture?"
She looks like she's about 6 or 7,
but she looks extremely self-possessed.
And I thought, this child looked very lonely.
And as I got to know her,
I found out that the child was lonely.
I grew up in a very small town
and was very much of a churchgoer.
I grew up with my grandparents, so it was
an even older generation than normally would have been.
There was no discussion of sex or menstruation
or anything like that.
Just a discussion that you had to get married
and men married nice girls,
and you should always do what you should.
She was reluctant to talk about it,
and I had to ask her about it,
and she was still reluctant to talk about it.
AS SHERE: Mother and father.
I was a mistake.
He left after a year or so.
She was just out of high school.
I was a hindrance and made her too old,
a nuisance and in the way.
Worthless.
A piece of garbage.
Then she left.
How would you define love?
Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time?
Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone,
right from the beginning, for no known reason?
Does the relationship fill your deepest
needs for closeness with another person?
Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
JAMES: She could come off as being a bit cold.
One reason I liked photographing her
was that I was sort of breaking the image.
Obviously, image was very important to her.
I was hoping to make her feel comfortable in her skin.
But she carried the weight of the criticism all the time.
I wanted her to be happier than she was.
MIKE: Shere had clearly invented Shere Hite.
BOB: A lot of people simply couldn't take her seriously
because of the way she presented herself,
but presenting herself that way was who she was.
That was really important to her to be the Playboy girl
while working for a PhD.
She needed to see herself that way.
We all need to see ourselves in certain ways.
But partly because of her flamboyance, people noticed.
She wanted to be seen.
[ Mid-tempo piano music playing ]
PRESENTER: New York, summer 1988,
Horicke and Hite in their apartment on Fifth Avenue.
Three years ago, the German-born concert pianist
and the best-selling writer were married.
Shere Hite's books have sold five million copies.
They've been translated into 14 languages
and banned in eight countries.
PRESENTER 2: Hite's latest book,
"Women and Love," caused a flurry of news stories
weeks before the book even hits the stores.
REPORTER: You may have read about it,
and perhaps even argued about it.
And even though today is its official publication date,
it has already been widely endorsed and widely criticized.
NICHOLAS: The press conference was on the day
that the book went on sale.
It was a packed house.
I thought, "Wow, this is really terrific.
All these people want to hear Shere."
And then I heard some of the people say,
"Well, they want to see what she's gonna do.
She's difficult, and she's just weird."
[ Applause ]
Good morning. Thank you for coming.
Doing this study, I realized that when women talk about love,
it's much more than talking about love.
You know, love has been trivialized for so long
and how women feel about love has been trivialized.
It isn't trivial.
WOMAN: Number 19. How would you define love?
WOMAN 2: Oh, gracious, Shere. [ Laughs ]
WOMAN 3: It was an excellent feeling,
and then again, it was a very anxious feeling,
a vulnerable feeling.
My heart could be broken at any time.
WOMAN 4: I don't even know if I'm capable of it at this point.
I've just had so many bad relationships.
I don't think they've had anything to do with love.
WOMAN 5: I'm in love with my children.
I don't think I'm in love with my husband.
WOMAN 6: I could never really communicate with him.
I could never really share with him.
WOMAN 7: My lover hit me because I pulled the covers
off of him at night.
If I didn't fill up the ice cube trays all the way up,
he would scream at me.
WOMAN 8: I have had an extramarital affair.
I was looking for re-affirmation of myself as a woman.
WOMAN 9: I had sex outside of my marriage,
wanting to test my real capacity for love.
SHERE: The great majority of women are saying
that they're frustrated and dissatisfied
with their relationships with men emotionally.
They want things to be different.
And they've been trying and trying to get that to happen,
but aren't having a whole lot of success with it.
WOMAN 10: The most startling statistic,
Hite says 70% of women married more than five years
say they are having extramarital affairs.
KARLA: When "Women and Love" came out,
I remember being called into my boss's office.
He knew that I knew Shere.
He said, "Have you seen this book?"
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Have you read it?" I said, "Yes."
He said, "This book is preposterous."
I said, "Well, Shere wrote a book about men,
and men were unfaithful to their wives
in the first five years,
and no one was shocked by that statistic.
Who do you think they were sleeping with?"
His jaw fell because her implications
made him have to think about his marriage now.
MAN: The wedding day, promises of a long and faithful life
together from the happy couple.
But according to a book about to be published in America,
it's a dream that rarely comes true.
A new survey of American woman
has come up with some troubling results.
MAN: Shere Hite says that only 13% of women
married more than two years are in love with their husbands.
To find out that this was a two-way street
was just too much for many of them to handle.
I call "The Hite Report" the Hate Report
because it really is filled with a lot of hate toward men.
It's some interesting gossipy stuff about people's lives,
but a study it ain't.
I believe her questionnaire is as biased
as any questionnaire can be.
When you have pages and pages and pages of statistics,
no matter what you say in the body of it,
it acts as if it's science and it's not science.
It is a scientific sample and a scientific study.
KARLA: Where she stuck her neck out is to say that
her research is scientific.
For Shere, this mattered.
MAN: The reporter, David Streitfeld,
interviewed quite a lot of people
about Shere Hite and her book.
One professor put it this way.
"Hite does not report how many people answered
each of her questions.
So, I can't tell whether she means 70% of 1,000 women
or 70% of 10 women, so the statistic is meaningless."
The ABC News/Washington Post poll decided to conduct
a scientific telephone survey of 1,500 men and women
over age 18 in a nationwide random sample.
The idea was to determine if the trends
Hite found could be confirmed.
They were not.
We presented Shere Hite
with our findings during an interview.
After looking over the statistics,
she had this reaction to the numbers on infidelity.
You call me on the phone, you think I'm gonna tell you?
You've got to be joking. [ Laughs ]
I always thought she fought too hard with her adversaries.
She may have been better off just saying to them,
"The work speaks for itself."
This is a creative project, which develops as it goes.
She was very sensitive to criticism,
and that was maybe her Achilles heel.
OPRAH: Today, the author of this much publicized book
has agreed to face an audience filled entirely with men,
except for me.
Hi, everybody.
JANET: When she learned that she was going to be dealing
with an all-male audience, Shere asked me to come with her
to provide her some moral support.
I wasn't allowed to be in the audience, but I was backstage.
What your study does is say that all the problems,
everything that's wrong with relationships, is men's fault.
You guys are the guilty ones.
And I'm saying we're all guilty.
It's society as a whole.
This whole idea that somehow
it's an equal problem, it's not quite so simple.
Look at our body language, it's very different.
You live in a world in which power gives you the right
to sit with your legs apart, and you go like this.
And you're going like this.
Now look at me, I'm sitting here like this,
because I think there's a big difference
between men and women.
- MAN: No way. - Come on.
OPRAH: Yes, sir.
MAN: Yes, you know, this is the first time
I've ever heard that being able to sit
with your legs split is a privilege.
SHERE: Well, you've now heard it.
You've now heard it.
MAN: Shere's report is flawed extensively.
Only 5% of the people that she sent a report to
would even respond to her.
And she only asked women.
Why didn't she ask any men...
- Where's Janet? - ...what they thought?
I was able to go in in between breaks.
I would just keep reinforcing the fact that
although it would have been preferable
if they had read the book
and given her positive feedback on it, they didn't.
OPRAH: Did you see the report she did on men?
I've only been aware of this report,
and everything I've heard about her has been negative.
- Okay-- - She's only looking at one side,
the side that she chooses to look at.
I think, first of all, that a lot of people
who criticize the book haven't even read the book.
And I would like to stop, for whatever reason,
discussing how flawed the statistics are,
how many people responded, because the truth of the matter
is whether 4,000 or 50,000 responded,
nobody can deny that there's a problem.
That's what we want to talk about,
is the fact that there's a problem.
When I've been in relationships, the women, instead of
communicating and saying there's something wrong, what they do is
they pout and they don't want to tell you what the problem is.
And I think that we just need to communicate more.
SHERE: Well, you have a whole book of women telling what's
the problem, and men are reacting like they'd been shot,
or they're reacting with total terror or total outrage.
What I'm complaining about is the general approach
to this whole program, which started back with women's lib.
And since then, men have been murdered
and gotten away with it.
We have had our children taken away from us,
we've had our homes taken away from us,
and we've had our jobs taken away from us.
Let women have 47% of the labor force,
but I don't want to hear you
complaining about it, you started the program.
[ Applause ]
You all who are applauding, you sound angry. You're angry...
JANET: We went to Oprah's favorite thrift shop afterward
to sort of cleanse ourselves of
the nasty words that had been thrown around.
[ Saxophone playing ]
ED: I think the years and years and years of her
working on these projects, the amount of effort it took,
and then to get this kind of treatment from so many people,
it just was like someone stabbed me in the back again
and again and again and again until she reached the end of it.
Yes, you're very pretty.
You're the prettiest little thing I ever saw.
NICHOLAS: Sally Jessy Raphael had a show
that was very popular at the time.
It was a really big deal to actually book her show.
The morning that she was supposed to be doing it,
the limo driver was there to pick her up,
and she wasn't quite ready yet.
FRANK: I went to pick up Miss Hite yesterday morning
to take her back to New Haven for her taping.
MAN: Frank says he waited and waited.
NICHOLAS: She kept him waiting for so long
that they said, "Okay, well, we no longer can do a live show.
We're now going to have to do a taped."
And then it got so late that they said,
"Okay, just forget it."
So, I walked across the street and to tell her that,
"I'm sorry, dear.
I can't take you back with me, I'm gonna leave alone."
Those were your words, "I'm sorry, dear?"
-"I'm sorry, dear." - Right.
And when I said "dear," she freaked out.
She went violent on me, grabbed me by the throat,
and tried to dig her nails into my windpipe.
The next day she was scheduled to be interviewed
by Maury Povich on his show,
and it was going to be a live interview.
SHERE: Will I be able to see it before we start?
MAN: I don't think so.
We're just kind of running out of time.
If you want to push that little piece into your--
I heard you.
How's that? Does it look okay?
Is my hair crooked?
MAN: Five seconds.
Seriously.
Shere Hite knows what men think about women
and what women think about men, in bed and out.
It's been quite a week for you, I know, steeped in controversy,
particularly about another ABC/Washington Post poll
that says basically that much of your findings
are quite different from theirs.
How do you think this could happen?
The Washington Post/ABC people called women on the telephone.
I mean, imagine the scenario.
You receive a phone call, you're standing in the kitchen,
and right next to you is your husband stirring the lasagna,
and they say to you,
"Are you having extramarital sex?"
Well, of course not.
So your findings you feel because of the way you--
- That's one reason. - Right.
What happened yesterday in New York with the limo driver?
Did you accost him?
- No. - You didn't?
No.
I felt like it, but I didn't.
MAURY: You didn't.
We just happen to have the limousine driver with us.
Frank Nicoletti.
SHERE: Well, if that's the reason that you've given,
you know, to come and interview me,
then you've done so under a false reason,
because I asked what the interview would be about,
and it seems to me that by doing this,
you're doing what I'm saying and what women are saying
in my book that men generally do.
They don't want to listen to what the issues are.
But you want to bring up something else.
And so, therefore, you have now lied to get this interview.
And so, therefore,
I can't continue the interview unfortunately.
I would have liked to talked to women in the audience
about what this book is about.
But if you don't want to listen,
then you're very similar to many men
- that women describe in my book. - Oh, I'm similar?
Well, let's find out what happened yesterday
from the limo driver.
Frank Nicoletti is with us in New York.
And let's give him a chance to talk.
Alright, Frank?
Shere, I don't know why you say you didn't accost me.
I certainly didn't accost you.
You tried to disfigure me.
SHERE: Stop it, you.
FRANK: Just like-- same way you did there, dear.
That's exactly what you did.
SHERE: Following me across the room.
You don't have the right to do that.
I have the right to get up and walk off camera.
MAURY: You sure-- you can do that,
but we'd like to hear the story of what happened yesterday,
and Mr. Nicoletti is here.
FRANK: I don't know why she's lying.
SHERE: This is why I asked you to check on that.
Well...
SHERE: Don't touch me.
No, I don't want to tell any of them anything.
- WOMAN: Listen, Shere. - SHERE: No, I'm sorry.
I don't care.
I'm going. I don't care.
You're not going to keep me physically here.
I'm leaving.
MAN: What was that?
What happened?
MAN 2: Yeah, did you follow her?
MAN 3: Yeah, I tried until she grabbed me.
MAN 2: She grabbed you?
MAN 3: Yeah, she grabbed the whole camera.
MAN 2: Trying to help women.
[ Men laughing ]
By the next day, it was-- the whole campaign
was starting to unravel.
MAN: On "A Current Affair," this happened.
Stop it, you.
No more nice guy.
Things were played and played and played
and played and played.
PRESENTER: Here's what happened on New York television.
SHERE: What are you, following me across the room?
Shere Hite, the best-selling author,
has made millions dishing out criticism of men,
but when it comes to accepting any criticism herself,
as we'll see, that's quite a different story.
Fort Worth, Texas. Hello.
MAN: Hello, Miss Hite. I've read all of your books.
And my biggest criticism that I have of you is the fact
that you seem to have the attitude that just because
women disapprove of something that a man does...
KAY: I watched the Larry King interview with her,
and I was just shocked.
Her eyes looked kind of dead to me.
Even if she was angry about something,
there was always a spark of real life.
It felt like the Shere I knew,
the life was draining out of her.
I thought, "Oh, my God,
I really have no idea the toll this has taken."
Why is Shere Hite so sensitive about criticism?
You know you're doing exactly what, you're doing exactly...
- May I finish my question? - No.
And, in fact, I think that you're gonna keep on like this
during the entire thing.
And you know what you're doing?
Excuse me?
I don't care to have this part filmed.
You know what you're doing?
Exactly what the men in the book do.
Then you're gonna say you've been accused of man bashing.
- What you got to... - You've been accused...
Turn that [bleep] thing off.
You've been accused of man bashing.
Yeah, and it's gonna happen right here.
So, do you want to do a decent interview,
or do you want to leave?
I will do the interview that I want to do.
SHERE: Well then, go home and go back...
PRESENTER: And that's how we parted company with Shere Hite.
You know, all publicity is good publicity.
That's my job.
Um, in this case, you know,
I think that was the exception to the rule.
Maybe this wasn't such great publicity.
And it certainly stopped pretty much anyone
at Knopf working on the book any longer.
MARTIN: Watching Shere's reputation in the States decline
was really painful.
Over the course of getting to know her friends in L.A.
or here, and my story with her would become known.
And people would have changing responses.
Initially, people would think, "Wow, you knew her?"
And then as she lost that kind of luster,
people would look at me as if, "What was with you?"
I came back to New York on a visit,
and I was walking with my wife,
and we were walking by her apartment on Fifth Avenue,
and I said, "We have to stop by."
We went to the doorman, and I said,
"Could you please buzz Shere's apartment?"
He said, "She doesn't live here anymore."
He said, "Over the course of a couple of nights,
she just disappeared, and she was gone."
REPORTER: Good morning.
The public ordeals of Clarence Thomas are over.
He survived his final Senate test by the closest
winning margin in the history of Supreme Court nominees.
Literally and judicially, he's now set for life.
WOMAN: Leaders of the women's movement in this country
had big questions about Clarence Thomas
almost from the day he was nominated.
Was he too conservative?
Would he vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?
Then came the charges of sexual harassment.
He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films
involving such matters as women having sex with animals,
and films showing group sex or rape scenes.
WOMAN: According to all the polls,
American women weren't listening.
They supported Thomas.
Is feminism dead?
WOMAN: I think that there is a certain backlash
in the culture at large that's internalized
by some of our students.
They don't like to use the F-word.
I kind of have a negative idea of feminism.
It's too radical.
I don't think it's really done much.
I think it's sort of faded away with time.
SUSAN: In the last decade, we've seen a powerful
and often unrecognized backlash
that's taken many different forms.
He said that if I ever told anyone of his behavior
that it would ruin his career.
What we saw and what I saw as an African-American woman
was, if you come forward, you will be called a liar,
an erotomaniac and mentally disturbed.
What do you get? You get humiliated.
You get your character assassinated.
Big winner is obviously Clarence Thomas.
Losers, perhaps, the Women's Movement?
Perhaps. And, in fact, in this half hour,
we're going to talk about the White House strategy,
what George Bush may do...
[ Crowd cheering ]
This, my friends, this is radical feminism.
The agenda that Clinton and Clinton would impose on America.
It's not the kind of change we can abide in a nation
we still call God's country.
[ Audience cheering ]
[ Soulful piano music playing ]
JOANNA: I met her at the launch for Women and Love in London.
I went along as a journalist and interviewed her.
So, we started talking.
She'd had such bad experiences in the States
that she was always nervous.
She just kept herself really very private.
REPORTER: You live in Europe now.
Where's your home?
Well, it's hard to say that I have a fixed address.
- You move around a lot? - Yes, I do.
What are the cities you live in?
Well, London is my publishing base,
and I spend a lot of time in Germany,
because of my husband, of course, is German.
And we spend a lot of time in Paris, too.
A lot of people say you've kind of become a self-imposed exile,
that you've left the United States in protest.
My books are very well received in many countries
besides the United States.
And there was so much hysteria over my last report
in the United States that,
I don't know, I just didn't feel a need to come back.
JOANNA: She started living some of the time in my flat
in London, because before that, she'd go between the Hilton
and this, actually, it was a squat.
It was a squat in a council flat.
Literally on a futon on the floor in a tiny room.
AS SHERE: "Dear Sonny,
I'm having a terrible cash flow problem.
There were no bids for the paperback rights
to 'Women and Love.'
No offers of interest
in publishing any future books of mine.
I had to sell my apartment to pay off the research debts."
JOANNA: I got a sense that the press interest was dwindling.
And, you know, she wanted to get her message across.
She wanted press, but she wanted to control it,
which is the old conundrum.
It's what everyone wants and is almost impossible to achieve.
- Okay, ready? - SHERE: Yeah, let's go.
REPORTER: Okay.
So, you gave a speech here at this bookstore?
SHERE: Yes, I did.
It was about fundamentalism and how it affects women.
- And how long ago was that? - About a year ago.
You have your whole book display in here now?
SHERE: I guess so.
REPORTER: You have three new books out right now.
SHERE: Yes.
REPORTER: Now the novel is all about you, is it not?
Well, the main character is a dog,
and the second main character is somebody who's sort of
like me, who asks a lot of questions, about a woman
who asked too many questions,
and all the trouble that gets her into.
REPORTER: Now this book, the book on the family,
the nuclear family, it's not available in the U.S. right now.
- SHERE: No. - Why not?
I wish I knew the answer to that.
You're gonna have to ask the publisher that.
I'm starting to stutter.
Are you concerned ever that it seems to be your personality,
your appearance, your lifestyle that gets
in the way of the messages in your book?
Yes, maybe I should write anonymously.
INTERVIEWER: Hold on half a second.
How do you feel about the fact that I'm telling you that
Shere Hite doesn't have a publisher for her latest report?
Doesn't make any sense.
Shere Hite's books have sold like hotcakes
over and over, book after book.
She's made a great deal of money for her publishers,
and she's very well known.
How can you shut somebody like this up?
It's outrageous.
I can really understand why she would choose
not to live here even.
She told me the last time I talked to her
she can't make a living in this country.
And if she can't publish in this country
and she's a writer, then she can't make a living here.
And so she's being censored.
Not only just criticized and censured,
she's being censored, too, silenced.
Are you saying things people don't want to hear or just
things that people don't agree with?
I think one reason my work is controversial
because I usually connect it to politics.
This kind of atmosphere of violence against what was known
as feminism gave the feeling of right
to those who would have bombed abortion clinics,
also to those who were leaving messages on my machines,
standing outside of my house,
showing my address on television.
I mean, it even makes me nervous to talk to you.
I mean, and I'm not sitting in the United States right now,
but it still makes me nervous to talk to you.
IRIS: I was a young photographer coming to Paris,
and I was called from a German magazine to do her portrait.
I thought she was just stunning and beautiful.
But I could see that she was kind of checking me out.
This is the first session I did with her.
And when you look at it, you can see in her eyes,
she doesn't know if she can trust me.
When she saw the first pictures,
and she liked herself,
I think that's when she started to trust me.
[ Soulful music playing ]
She was swimming in the fountain,
which is normally not allowed.
But she just followed her feeling, and I followed her.
We started to do more and more pictures.
AS SHERE: Iris and I developed a truly close friendship.
Just like a fan, some, more movement like this.
AS SHERE: It was a dialogue between us.
IRIS: She liked how I saw her.
There was an understanding from my soul to your soul,
two women working together and trusting each other,
helping each other also to be not afraid.
We did things normally you're not allowed to do,
but we just did it, and nobody stopped us.
[ Soulful music playing ]
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
AS SHERE: I am on a journey.
As I was traveling, suddenly the landscapes I saw
seemed to coincide with some interior landscape
I had been seeking.
I have a strong memory of my bedroom
at my grandmother's house.
So simple as to be austere, but it had a special atmosphere.
I would lie in bed listening to the sounds of the trains
passing by in the distance or the last bird singing.
One of those evenings, a strange desire began
to creep over me, a deep craving.
I learned that the sensations could be increased
by moving my legs around with my body pressed against the bed.
One day, doing this, I felt a wonderful explosion
deep inside my body.
The pleasure was like an electric shock.
I wanted to do it over and over, and I did, again and again.
But soon I worried, had I broken something inside my body?
No one had ever told me anything about their having
such an experience.
Maybe it was unnatural.
So that's where we were thinking about ecstasy, joy,
pleasure for women.
[ Speaking French ] How can you show a female body
with power, spiritualism, beauty, and eroticism?
[ Speaking English ] In the visual representation
of the woman, we were thinking that it is missing something.
You never see an intelligent portrait of a woman,
an intelligent face, and at the same time a vulva.
An icon of woman complete means with sexuality.
[ Soulful music playing ]
AS SHERE: Taking photos and having sexual discussions
with Iris was a further way of getting permission
to have a sexual body, this time from the female world.
Women reclaiming themselves from the culture.
[ Speaking French ] I am the founder of a magazine
called Gaze, which is a magazine that explores the female gaze.
[ Speaking French ] Early in my career as a journalist,
I discovered Shere Hite
a very unknown icon in Europe and France.
I quickly understood that the history of female sexuality
was very much a story that repeated itself.
Since the first anatomical diagrams of the clitoris,
which date from the 17th century to today,
it's a story of the successive erasure of knowledge.
[ Speaking English ] PHYLLIS: When I mentioned that
I'm doing this interview about Shere to a group of
young radical feminists, they said,
"Well, who is she?"
I said, "You've got to be kidding me."
She was in the media all the time,
and, you know, you couldn't help but know about her work,
but who's talking about it now?
We're gonna have to bleep the word "vagina."
[ Laughter ]
But not penis?
Please, please, let's stay clinical.
Let's use hoo-ha.
[ Laughter ]
You know, I thought you would be a first
on television with a man talking about the clitoris.
I can't do that.
[ Laughter ]
- Come on, yes, you can. - COLBERT: I can't do that. No.
REGINA: There's a disappearance of feminist knowledge,
systematically, century after century,
decade after decade.
WOMAN: Newsweek says "The Hite Report"
is the 30th-best-selling book of all time.
Really? How wonderful.
It's the 30th-best-selling book of all time?
I can't believe it.
That's quite extraordinary.
But I would be surprised if many young women knew of it.
I don't hear people talking about it anymore.
SHERE: This is a drawing made by a woman
of a woman's anatomy seen from the side.
At that time, no drawings other than of the reproductive system,
the uterus and so on, were available.
Male ownership of women's sexuality
is what makes patriarchy possible.
As women, we deserve the right to own our own bodies.
I just find it troublesome
that perhaps younger women coming along
will have to fight the same battles over again.
JANET: But I see that just since I've been answering
these questions, that the most important thing to me now
is freedom.
WOMAN: Feminine, how do I define it?
I define it as I can be anything from Cleopatra to Bette Davis.
Feminine is being anything I want to be.
WOMAN 2: That's the end.
It's been enlightening for me to answer the questions
and tell you all my secrets.
Now I have to go and feed my daughter.
Good luck.
GIRL: Mommy.