DOING IT RIGHT

What Shere Hite found out about sex was more than some could handle.

- BY MARGARET TALBOT

In the nineteen-eighties, the sexologist Shere Hite was on TV a lot, uttering words seldom heard there before: “orgasm,” “masturbation,” “clitoris.” They tended to make her fellow talk-show guests rutch around in their seats. Take an interview Hite did in 1982 on “The Mike Douglas Show,” in which she was wedged between the genial daytime host and the actor David Hasselhoff. In 1976, her book “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality” had become a huge bestseller. Its main takeaway was the then startling revelation that most women achieved orgasm not by means of vaginal intercourse alone—or what Hite, to the sniggering discomfiture of many audiences, often referred to as penile “thrusting”—but through manual or oral stimulation of the clitoris. This was before Sally showed Harry how easy it was for a woman to fake a beguiling orgasm; before Seinfeld couldn’t remember the name of a date (Dolores) whose name sort of rhymed with a part of the female anatomy; and before sex toys for women became a multibillion-dollar industry. Reported sightings of the clitoris were rare enough that the New York Times, in an article on Hite’s research, felt the need to locate it for those still searching around with a headlamp: “a pea-sized hooded organ above the vagina that sexologists regard as the female sex organ equivalent to the penis of the male.”