Read The Hite Report on Shere Hite Online
Authors: Shere Hite
There was a lot of red tape, but finally the rights were bought in the US by a smaller but better publisher, Grove/Atlantic.
Though I knew I should be happy with this, I wasn't sure. Did I really want to see my work messed about by the US media one more time? Never mind the drop in my income if I lost the US market, was it worth the physical and emotional risk? The idea of dealing with all that media again ⦠I wasn't sure if I could take it! I was happy now, and I didn't want to go back. Part of me wanted to see my work published in the US, especially with the ferocious and draconian right-wing
legislators then in power, so intent on forcing âfamily values' down everybody's throats (meaning anti-feminism). Perhaps my book could bring some sanity to discussions of the family â¦
I am not surprised
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
was not published in the US until two years later than in Britain. America has a terrible problem with conformity, especially with people who are afraid not to âfit in'. T. S. Eliot complained of this, as did H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker and others like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Carson McCullers. This rush to conformity expresses fear. Publishers who were traditionally brave can act cowardly in the face of corporate pressures. Publishers imagine themselves as âgood people' who publish books that speak out against abuses such as the scapegoating of the Jews in Germany during World War II (achieving their glory at a safe distance of fifty years!). But now that scapegoating is happening in the US (not only of me, but also of other feminists), they cannot seem to âsee' it, and most don't do anything brave.
To say âmarket forces' rule today's hard-nosed corporate publishing world isn't true. My books are great successes in terms of sales: they have never gone out of print in many languages in twenty years, and always made a profit for their publishers â usually, quite a handsome profit, continuing long-term.
In fact, there are fewer and fewer publishers to compete against each other âin the market', because most of them belong to the same larger holding companies (Though the holding companies claim their âdaughter companies' remain independent, this seems suspect.) By
1985, most large US publishers had become consolidated, as the anti-trust laws were not enforced. In addition, the distributors of books had become consolidated; two chains owned 80 per cent of the bookstores in the US. These large publishing conglomerates (by 1999, most large US publishers were owned by Berteilsmann) have a mysterious department called âmarketing'. Marketing does not mean the sales department, it is the department which decides what the publisher's image should be, what the publisher should publish â never mind an author's previous sales. (In a way, it's better to be an unknown.) They should call this department âimage', not marketing'. Or âcontrol department'.
Inside myself, other interests were stirring. Around this time, one day I wrote in my diary:
Last night a small bird flew into my house. This was strange, because I live on a very high floor of a building, and birds rarely fly this high, or at least, not close to the building. I had only one window open, my bedroom window. When I walked into the room, suddenly I encountered a bird flying across the room towards me, beating its wings frantically.
Had it lost its way?
It flew around, then sat on a curtain next to the window. I regarded it. The pale grey softness on the underside of its very round belly seemed so vulnerable, in contrast with the bright precision of the colours and
design on the top part of its body: the feathers on top were immaculate, black and white with yellow markings â one yellow stripe down the middle of its head, and softer yellow flares where the wings met the body. The beak was very long and elegant, with a black shiny finish coming to quite a fine point at the end. The beak was almost as long as the entire head â which seemed to have no neck, but to emerge directly out of the body â which was nice, chubby.
The wings did not collapse flat into the sides, as with some birds, but remained always in a slight extension, making an elegant trapezoid shape of the entire body, seen from above.
This bird, though I kept the window open, never left until the next day. It didn't wake me up when I slept, either by making a noise or beating against the windows when it saw daylight, or jumping onto me in bed.
It had the smallest eyes imaginable. I could hardly see them, even when I got close, but I could see that they were open and bright black. It had very flexible feet, almost orange, with three âfingers' or talons, so it could grasp around the branches. It never chirped or sang. Once I whistled a bit, to see if it would respond, and it listened, but mysteriously, said nothing.
The night it arrived, I thought it would go out again, once it had had a chance to rest. But instead, after finding a perch it liked at the top of the curtains, it stayed there. I came in and out of the room a few times that evening, and it was still there. Then I began working and forgot about it, until I became very sleepy. I thought, maybe it has some dreadful disease, and I should push it back out. But that seemed cruel. So, I gently closed the curtain, talking to the bird to tell it what I was doing, and the bird hopped down.
I closed the window, then the bird hopped back up on the curtain and watched me.
I got in bed and covered my head, so the bird would not fly into my hair during the night, or whatever it had been trying to do when it first flew towards me, that is, towards my head (did my head look like a good perching point?).
I wondered if the bird would wake me in the morning when it became daylight: would it fly around the room or beat against the windows, or fly or jump over me? But I was too tired to worry, and fell asleep.
In the morning, I woke up and the bird was still there, cheerfully hopping around the room, without disturbing anything. It was a beautiful day, the air was clear and the sky sunny, just the right temperature. I again opened the windows â this time all of them, so the bird could easily find its way out. But instead of going it perched itself on top of my small Venetian dressing table mirror, which Friedrich had given me, and enjoyed the view. At one point, it hopped onto my bed. I motioned it to leave, so it flew across the room to perch on the open windowsill. Sometimes it pecked the carpet, maybe thinking it would find something to eat. I got it some millet, and put it on the floor, but it didn't show any interest. It never occurred to me to give it water.
I left the door open into the other rooms of the apartment, but it didn't come into the other rooms. Every time I went back to the bedroom, the bird was there, sitting somewhere else, or walking around. I talked to it a bit. It seemed to listen. Twice it flew towards me, but at such a speed that I was frightened and I ran out of the room! It was nice that the bird somehow wanted to communicate or make contact.
I examined it as best I could to see if
it was wounded or
disoriented, a wing broken or anything, but it seemed in perfect condition. In fact I wondered if it could have been somebody's pet bird that escaped, it was so perfect, so unusual, so chubby and well fed. Or if it was a bird that was migrating south, and got caught up in some unusual air currents near our high building.
When I came back into the room, around late afternoon or early evening, the bird was gone.
We had had an interesting encounter, one that not many people or birds have. If it was migrating south for the winter, how had it got separated from the rest of the flock? This was a very adventurous bird, that found her or his way into a human's apartment, and stayed there for fifteen hours to investigate it. If I had given it water, maybe it would have stayed for the winter.
Why did the bird make such an impression on me? Maybe the bird seemed like freedom, like my spirit trying to fly. Did this bird remind me of the bird that visited Christine de Pisan in the fourteenth century when she was banished in a similar tower?
When
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
was published in the US I suffered no repeat of 1987.
Ms
magazine featured the book on its cover and offered it as a bonus to new subscribers, so I achieved a high credibility rating and the best audience I could have had.
Still, I stayed away from the US doing little to promote the book there. In other countries I was happier. Anyway, I didn't go to the US to publicize it. It had already been published as a ânormal story' in country
after country. There were solid newspaper debates all over Europe and elsewhere about my ideas.
In fact, I was happy. I was entering one of the happiest periods of my life. Though Friedrich and I lived in separate apartments and saw each other only on weekends and holidays, on the other hand, professionally, I blossomed, branched out into working directly with newspapers and magazines, wrote editorials all over the world about the new topics of sexual politics that seemed to multiply daily. This was true especially after one famous newspaper sent me to Beijing to cover the United Nations Conference framing the Declaration of Women's Rights.
Travelling extensively, I was invited as a guest lecturer by universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, professional psychological societies, and women's organizations. Whenever one of my books was published in another country, I would travel there, or speak to journalists and interesting people from that country. I tried to learn from all these experiences, and enjoy this contact with the world. Thanks to my university education (and my grandfather's foresight), I had learned several languages, and this gave me access to more cultures than simply speaking English (lucky as I am to have that as my mother tongue). In short, I was making new friends and a new life.
Gradually,
a
great
transformation
was
taking
place
in
me
–
in
my
soul.
The
semi-sleep
which
I
had
been
in,
the
part
of
me
that
had
lain
sleeping
and
awoke
most
completely
when
I
was
alone,
was
fearless,
stronger,
ready
to
fly
into
the
world,
live
more
completely,
awake,
to
trust
itself
more
deeply
with
others.
Despite
being
a
researcher
into
private
life
and
sexuality
dealing
with
facts,
and
expressing
myself
‘courageously’
through
my
outspoken
theories
on
controversial
topics,
my
inner
dreams,
remained
only
partially
realized.
I
felt
a
burning
desire
to
speak
more
directly
(or
to
sing,
perhaps),
to
contact
others
more
deeply,
more
than
I
had
been
able
to
do
in
the
first
half
of
my
life.
Friedrich’s
love
gave
me
a
stability
I
needed,
then. I
began
to
break
out
of
my
cocoon
in
1992,
through
a
short
novel I
wrote,
The Divine Comedy of Ariadne and Jupiter.
Then
soon
after,
with
a
series
of
pictures
taken
by
the
photographer
Iris
Brosch,
who
became
my
close
friend
and
collaborator, I
took
another
step.
Reintegrating
Sexual
and
Spiritual
Identity ·
International
Politics
,
Fundamentalism
and
My
Work:
the
Western
Chador,
and
My
Predictions
of
Things
to
Come
In 1994, early autumn, the photographer Iris Brosch was asked to do a photographic portrait of me for the colour magazine of the prestigious German paper,
Frankfurter
Allgemeinge.
Brosch and I had already worked together on a photo shoot for the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
FAZ
magazine is well known for its feature called ‘Portrait’; in which the person interviewed is asked to present the essence of him or herself and their work, in words and photographs. Brosch took photos of me in a beautiful Parisian fountain in summer, enjoying myself in the water. I also had a small notepad with me and I was writing at the same time! (As Iris said, ‘Why always show a writer at a desk? When most of the work comes from the soul and mind?’ Good point.)
This photo, however – publishing it in context with my political and theoretical writings – put me in an inner turmoil. I was unsure whether people would understand the re-unification of the sexual and intellectual (body and mind) we were trying to portray. As women, we were both dealing in our lives with issues of sexuality, and society’s view (descended from ‘religious teaching’) of our supposed ‘good, correct behaviour.’
I wrote in my diary of that time:
Today, I September 1994, is the publication date of
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family
in Germany. There is a great front-of-section article in
Die
Zeit
by me about how the culture makes boys too tough, and so does violence to them and to the society. I’m so proud! (And it doesn’t have any side bars, like
Die
Woche
, also saying things like ‘married to a twenty-years-younger man’, etc.) There are now quite a few good pieces:
Washington
Post,
Guardian,
New
Statesman
,
Frankfurter
Allgemeine
editorial,
Tageszeitung,
and so on.
But tomorrow, 2 September, the weekend magazine in the
Frankfurter
Allgemeine
is coming out, they say with a cover photo of me completely wet, in a gorgeous fountain in Paris, the Fontaine de l’Observatoire. And with three more ‘fountain’ photos inside. This is a profile done to go with an interview.
The
FAZ
wet photos, and the serious article about boys at puberty – won’t they seem opposite of each other to most people? How can a woman who adores the body and female sexuality, and shows her own body! (and is therefore ‘vain and self-involved’ and I don’t know what!) also be an intellectual, a theorist (a ‘really serious person’!) who spends weeks of eighteen-hour days at her desk,
slogging through research, writing and delving into intellectual conundrums over the family, love, sex, gender, and their place in Western history?
No, it is not possible for both to be the same person. One must be a fake. The FAZ photos of me in the water don’t go with a serious social science researcher who writes for
Die
Zeit
and opinion editorials in
Frankfurter
Allge
meine.
If I publish these sexual photos, not photos behind a desk, can I still be seen as a scientist and researcher (like Margaret Mead, for example)? If I allow these kinds of photos to be published? But how can I be honest about my identity if I don’t? I don’t want to have to appear as only intellect, in order to be taken seriously or considered accurate, serious or scientific. This contradicts what my work says.
I love being sexual. I want to be both sides of myself, all of myself, not hide. Live my life completely.
In a strange way, what the papers have said all these years – that I am extremely interested in sex – is true. Hearing from so many people, especially women, over the years, has answered a lot of my questions – but far from all. I want to develop my own personal sexuality more – as much as I have developed my intellectual capacity. I want to integrate my sexuality, body and mind. I want to present a visual whole, and in so doing maybe even pioneer a new identity form for other women. Writing about this will require the experience of another book, and I hope to do this soon.
I
will
publish these photos.
If these two sides of a person – the sensuous and the intellectual, serious – don’t go together, they should. This is the heart of a lot of my work: ending the conflict in the identities of women.
This photo, which I wrote so much about in my diary, perhaps expresses me better than any other ever taken.
This series of photos, and especially the picture
FAZ
chose for their cover, expresses my heart, all my emotions, my soul, the sense of longing I feel – an ache to touch, reach out, a quality of longing to have contact with the world. It is even a yearning, a kind of emotion behind everything I do, which makes me go forward trying to reach others, express myself. It is a feeling in my chest like an ache, as if my soul wants to rise up out of my chest, my heart wants to clasp the world. All my spiritual yearning is contained in that photo, in my body posture and expression. I am particularly proud of it because it shows I am not afraid to express myself with my body – something it took me years to learn. Miraculously, the photo captures both a spiritual yearning and a very physical, whole body expression. Perhaps a portrait should contain not only the face but also the body, as Frieda Kahlo would have agreed. But, how often does the body express deep emotion in a photo?
I have looked for images in art to see a combination of sexual and emotional feelings depicted, but rarely found them.
Women
and
Love’
s original edition (Knopf US) displays a famous painting from the Louvre on its cover: a woman, Diana the Huntress, going with her dog into a forest. This is symbolic, I felt, of the cultural revolution women are creating, involving issues of the female body and soul. The painting is of Diane de Poitiers. I am drawn to this symbol of a woman who is smiling, proud
of her body (she is not clothed), in motion with casual self-assurance. She is smiling softly, seeming to take pleasure in walking happily through a forest with her dog as her companion. I chose this image to represent something of myself, as well as women’s search for independence and beauty, in connection with nature.
Classical or neo-classical statues of women often strike me as cold and formal, the legs tightly snapped together, though the faces can be noble and show great dignity. The culture’s mind/body split, reinforced especially for women by the double standard, has meant that character and identity (it is believed) reside only in the face; the body is ‘animal’ (it is believed) with little individual consciousness, though it has a unique physical shape. But it is not usually depicted as the expressive part of a person.
While Iris and I were taking these portrait photos, the question emerged, why is the viewing of the nude female body ‘bad’? Is this not ‘identity’ and ‘personality’? Especially, why is viewing sexual parts of the body ‘pornographic’, forbidden? Why should ‘good’ women never be seen in the nude (this makes you ‘less respectable’)? Or in Islamic cultures, why is wearing the chador or the veil a sign of being ‘good’? (the equivalent of ‘respectable’ clothing for women in the West). Most photos of women nude in such magazines as
Play
boy,
in sex videos, or trendy ‘fashion body art’ (such as Jeff Koons’ images of Cicciolina) are not an answer to the need to develop a visual image of women’s bodies
seen in a new way without the distortion of the double standard.
Such new images would mean women reclaiming themselves, their bodies, from the culture. The ‘bad girls’ art movement took steps in this direction, but fell short: it seemed to say that, if women in the past had to be docile, now they would have to be ‘tough’ and ‘like guys’. Reclaiming identity by being a ‘bad girl’, sexy, ironically affirmed the Christian idea that sexual women are not ‘good’. How to get out of this conundrum?
Iris and I developed a truly close friendship through the process of discussing this, and trying various photographs of the body, working together to develop ideas and images about female sexual-body identity.
Iris’ series of pictures of me, taken over more than two years, helped me integrate more fully my sexuality into my life. I was looking at my body language, as I presented ‘myself’ through various layers of assorted shoulds, shouldn’ts and cliché points of view. Helping me sort through my image of myself was a great gift Iris gave me, as I often told her. It was a dialogue between us, she developing her own aesthetic in her professional work, at the same time offering a gift to me, while I shared my ideas and theories of the body and female identity with her.
It began to dawn on me that the female body is supposed to be invisible, and why. I began to explore my own body in a new way, noticing how I would hide it from the camera (or present it in a clichéd way), much the same as I had in shyness, hidden it from Friedrich, sometimes fearing the clothes he gave me.
My spiritual self began to emerge more fully as our pictures explored the female body’s sexuality. Why? It started to become clear to me, that to create a true spiritual identity, one not hidden, it is necessary to come to terms with and fully accept the sexual part of oneself, to heal the double standard split in these parts of oneself. Many issues started coming together then in a practical way – the clothes Friedrich had given me, my feelings, the United Nations resolutions on female sexual rights, my theoretical work over twenty years. A transformation I hadn’t expected began taking place. I began to behave and perceive all kinds of things differently. My relationship with my body changed. I began to accept it much more, be more active and relate it to more directly.
Simultaneously, I found I ‘awoke’, began to stop living my life in the abstract, waiting for the future. Suddenly, I felt my life was
now.
I felt, I have a right to use and enjoy my limbs, my body, my self fully – for my own pleasure! To have a life, not just work and try to change the world, but also to enjoy the world that is, my world, the special people and things I love. My heart shifted, its axis changed.
I began to see new reasons (that I hope to write about) why the female body (soul and self) has been declared ‘bad’ – to see not only that it is unjust that we be called ‘bad’, but where this fear and negative fetishization of the female body came from.
There is a missing chapter in Western history: where did classical Greek patriarchy come from? What system did it grow out of? How did it overcome the system it
replaced? Was the previous system mysogynist? Not according to the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (explained in her book
Goddesses
and
Gods
of
Old
Europe
), or Merlin Stone (in
When
God
Was
a
Woman
). It is outrageous that women (and men) have had so much of their history stolen from them according to these two writers, especially Gimbutas in her four books. These are the best explanations I know. But there is surely more to say, and I think I now have a large part of the missing pieces of the puzzle.
I believe that the definition of sex that we have been handed doesn’t suit most women (maybe not men either) very well. The sexual identities given to most of us by the world we live in are relatively banal, often inaccurate or unworkable. These sexual personas cut off feeling, rather than opening us to each other.
Friedrich taught me, by combining sexual and spiritual love for me, appreciating and desiring my body and sexuality, that two parts of me could be one. He would also tell me frequently he admired my work and my politics, plus tell me he is glad I am his wife and that we are married (‘but I like to think of you as my sex object,’ he would say.)
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. I began to write about why mothers refuse this to their daughters (by refusing to talk intimately about their own, the mother’s, sexuality) in an article growing out of
The
Hite
Report
on
the
Family.
Through taking these photos and thinking about them, I found my personal life opening up on a deeper level.
Can you believe that it took me over forty years to become, or begin to become, comfortable with my own sexuality? This is either a comment on me, or the society, or both.
After twenty years of work in the area, it seems clear to me that the sexual scripts we have been given are so off base, that they make it difficult for us to integrate our sexuality into our lives – both emotionally and physically. To give a simple example, one thing many people particularly enjoy is lying close, head to toe, pressing front to front against someone they love and want, but there is no word for this. This is supposed to be just part of ‘sex’, to lead up to ‘the act’, part of ‘foreplay’. One is not supposed to lie pressed together like this for ‘too long’ with a non-sexual partner (with a friend, not a lover) although, in reality, this close body contact could be beneficial and ‘harmless’. Why can’t we, for example, cuddle up and press together with a close friend while watching TV?
The double standard of judging women (as ‘good wives and mothers’ or ‘the other kind of woman’) is partly responsible for the problems in psycho-sexual identity almost everyone, men included, experiences. In a way, we are all sexually retarded. Crudely, women are expected to be two people; a ‘good’ one (a mother) and a ‘bad’ or sexual one. But even when the ‘bad girl’ sexual side is allowed to women, the scripts are clichéd, boringly pre-defined and rigid, predictable. Often they
don’t feel real, even to those who are in the middle of enacting them. They quickly, even when ‘kinky’ became tedious.