The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report

In 1948, when Shere was six, her grandparents divorced after thirty-five years of marriage, a huge scandal for the time, particularly among their strict Christian community where divorce was a sin. Shere did do something new: She brought in the feelings. But Shere thought that in the present, too, feminist struggle would change women, including at the molecular level of desire; they would see other people and themselves differently. Nobile argued that Shere ‘whipped herself up into an antipatriarchal frenzy’, and as a result the book was a ‘travesty of sex research’.