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 best-seller. 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.”
Douglas asked Hite how the women’s movement had affected “the male’s sexual response.” She responded, matter-of-factly, that it could only help. Men, in her most recent survey, had told her 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.” Her feminist-inspired research—soliciting detailed, anonymous accounts of how people felt about the sex they were having—showed that “most women can orgasm easily from clitoral stimulation and not from intercourse so much.” In a way, Hite said, this finding “opens things up so that everybody can enjoy intercourse . . . but not worry so much about the woman’s orgasm then,” as long as clitoral stimulation was somewhere on the program. Many men had the unfortunate impression that a “real man” should be able to make a woman orgasm through intercourse alone, and that, “if he didn’t, there was something wrong with her, or him.”
