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Shere Hite (1942-2020)
Photo: Photoshot / picture alliance
The feminist sexologist Shere Hite is dead. The British "Guardian" and the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" report.
Accordingly, she died on Wednesday at the age of 77 in London.
Shere Hite became famous in the 1970s for her "Hite Reports", sex science works that addressed - and found - a wide audience.
The first "Hite Report" in particular became a bestseller - in Germany it was one of the best-selling non-fiction books of 1977 with the subtitle "The Sexual Experience of Women".
The native American had financed her studies at Columbia University in New York by working as a model, and she also made recordings for "Playboy".
She later protested against a sexist advertising campaign in which she herself was pictured as "Olivetti Woman".
Her bestseller, sold 48 million times, was panned by the conservative press
From 1972 to 1978 Hite headed the "Feminist Sexuality Project NOW" in New York.
In 1978 she became director of the "Hite Research International" research center.
She has held teaching positions and visiting professorships on the subject of women's sexuality at renowned universities in the USA (Harvard, Cambridge), France (Sorbonne) and Japan.
Hite was best known for her three reports on sexuality, which sparked heated discussions, initially in the USA.
In contrast to sexologists like Alfred Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, Hite's studies reached a broad mass of readers worldwide.
In 1976 she launched her first study on female sexuality ("The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality").
The content of her bestseller, which has sold over 48 million times and which the conservative American press pissed off because of the provocative results on marital and extramarital relationships, was based on the analysis of questionnaires.
Accordingly, of the women surveyed between the ages of 14 and 78, only just under every third (30 percent) climaxed through penetration alone.
Every fifth woman (19 percent) needed an additional stimulus: manual clitoral stimulation.
Four fifths finally masturbated - with the most lasting success: 95 percent of them reached their climax.
Methodically, Hite proceeded in the same way with the study on male sexuality, "The Hite Report On Male Sexuality", published five years later.
In 1987 she concluded the trilogy with a thousand-page report "Women and Love. A Cultural Revolution in Progress".
Because of the media campaigns against her person, Hite moved to Europe in the meantime.
In 1985 she married the German concert pianist Friedrich Höricke and in 1995 also took on German citizenship.
In 1999 the couple separated.
Most recently she lived in London with her second husband Paul Sullivan.
She had recently suffered from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
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