91av

How do you study sex? Stick electrodes on penises and vulvas? Place hidden cameras in people’s bedrooms? Do face-to-face interviews with embarrassed subjects? Shere Hite should know. After all, she showed in her famous Hite reports that the clitoris is more than button-sized. For her, there’s much more to sex than measuring electrical stimuli or chemical secretions. But if sex research isn’t about crude calibration or producing a better Viagra, then what is it? Liz Else was curious.

Weren’t you the first to try to prove that the clitoris is two to three times larger than the textbooks said?

Probably. The clitoris is not just the small button we think of in the front of the vulva, it is just as well served by blood vessels as the penis, and just as blood engorges the penis during erection, so the blood vessels swell up for women during orgasm.

Does this mean the textbooks are wrong?

Absolutely! Almost all the anatomy and sexual textbooks need rewriting.

Didn’t you actually commission the dissection of a clitoris?

Yes, in 1981. I needed illustrations for my book and the existing drawings were abysmal, ugly, and there was no detail whatsoever. I asked the artist, who was also a nurse, to provide more detail. She went to a place where there were cadavers. I think a medical student did the dissection and she was allowed to watch and draw.

Did anyone have any idea about this before?

The French had known this in the 1890s.

Why had word not got around? Did Freud not accept it or not want to know?

It’s a good question. I don’t know whether it was because of his German medical training. My sister’s friend studied to be a nurse for 10 years in Germany and in her medical textbooks there was a drawing of the penis but there was nothing showing the female genitals. On balance, Freud could have been more scientific, he could have tried harder.

Do many women still not know about this finding on the clitoris?

I have scarcely seen it mentioned at all in magazines for woman. I mean, men are not such wimps that they can’t accept the reality, I hope. So are some of the male editors really afraid of something?

How did someone with your fundamentalist Christian background get into sex research in the 1970s?

I was involved in a feminist group in New York City and we tried to discuss these matters. But we were very shy. Like other women we were brought up to believe that you don’t talk about sex in public. My family didn’t discuss masturbation and so on. In one of our meetings in 1972 I volunteered to do a questionnaire and then gather data and report back. By 1976, this research had turned into The Hite Report on Female Sexuality.

What exactly did you want to find out about the female sexual experience?

It was assumed that women should have orgasm from intercourse. Lots of male hippies and their counterparts in the Playboy Club were still thinking that the key to women coming during intercourse was the man not coming too soon and being “sensitive”-whatever that means. In 1970, sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson wrote Human Sexual Inadequacy, in which they said that the clitoris was the source of all orgasms in women. Yet at the same time they defined it only as the external portion. They said that orgasms come from clitoral stimulation, but at the same time that stimulation should happen automatically during coitus, with no hands involved. On the other hand, I believed that the key lay in discovering how women could masturbate to orgasm. Since this behaviour was almost never taught or passed on (especially in girls, as opposed to boys), it would be direct evidence of the stimulation that most efficiently leads to orgasm. It was “common knowledge” that girls and women could masturbate-though it was not believed that the majority would do this.

How do you study sex? You can’t really observe it in the way an astronomer tracks the movement of planets.

Another leading researcher, Alfred Kinsey, used to ask questions face to face. Masters and Johnson, on the other hand, tried to investigate female orgasms via direct observation using electronic equipment such as electroencephalographs or special cameras. One of Masters and Johnson’s students, Mary Jane Sherfey, hypothesised that female orgasm occurred because a large interior venous network filled with blood, which then was expelled during the contractions after the peak of the orgasm. There’s still very little further research, particularly on the state of the interior sexual anatomy at the peak moment of orgasm.

What about the Australian research?

Yes, some excellent recent work by Helen O’Connell, a urology surgeon at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia, has confirmed and further refined Sherfey’s theory (91av, 1 August 1998, p 34). My own work has been to try to find out when women did orgasm by asking them a long series of questions. I had to invent new techniques to study private sexual behaviour and orgasm effectively.

It can’t be easy asking women to answer honestly such questions as how do you masturbate?

I used a very private questionnaire in which complete anonymity was guaranteed. I decided to ask essay questions rather than multiple choice, even though multiple choice are easier to quantify and analyse. I did this because, given the world knows so little about female sexuality, predetermined categories for responses might have limited the data.

How do you know that research based on essay-type responses is objective enough?

My type of questionnaire data is often termed “subjective”-and indeed it is. But the questions asked on orgasm often pertained to strictly physical events and thus elicited clear, unambiguous answers, which were relatively easier to analyse. For example, I asked: “When are you most likely to orgasm?” In answer to this, women might list: “When I touch myself”. Or, they might say: “When he kisses me down there”, or “during oral sex on me”. All these detailed answers could still be aggregated. One-third of the women listed coitus as one of their times of regular orgasm. Two-thirds of women who orgasmed easily and regularly said they needed a more direct external stimulus, whether by hand or mouth.

What do you say to people who think your methods aren’t scientific enough?

My techniques have been considered controversial or questionable by some. But others, like specialists in social science research methodology, consider my techniques an advance on previous social science methodology. Today, quite a few researchers in related fields use my methodology. Those who are uncertain about my methodology should note that it is notoriously difficult to build and test a hypothesis in the social sciences. But I’ve succeeded many times. For example, when I was researching Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progressin the 1980s, my research showed that the majority of divorces were being sought by women. This ran counter to the prevailing assumption that men initiated most divorces because they dumped women not vice versa. Three years later, both the British and American governments published their own statistics for the first time, which echoed my findings.

What do you think your research has done for women?

In terms of self-confidence, women now feel that there is nothing wrong with them. There’s none of this: “I’ve got a terrible, dark secret that I must get therapy to treat.” They think that they’re fully functioning people and that it’s society that has hang-ups. I also think that men and women in their private relationships get along much better than they did.

What about men?

Men are beginning to feel relieved that they don’t have the pressure to have an erection for two hours. I have had quite a few letters from men. One was in his sixties and he and his wife had discovered 20 years ago that the only way she could have an orgasm was by manual stimulation and gradually they worked this out. But he also thought there was something wrong with his penis. It’s sad. So he said: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, now I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with me.” In my research for The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality, one of the most important conclusions was that most men don’t marry women they most passionately love. Not only that, but they’re quite proud of it. They said that it was the right choice because they want to keep control of their lives and that they prefer to focus on things they would do with groups of other men. They also felt if they were passionately attracted to a woman and she was responding passionately, it wasn’t the right time to marry. They couldn’t believe that physical passion was real love.

So the division between sex and love still stands, with porn on the Internet and women’s magazines full of articles about intercourse. Have you failed?

No, look at how much we’ve achieved. But I agree there’s still a long way to go. There are a plethora of old-style porn sites on the Internet, and most are viewed overwhelmingly by men. But I believe in part this reflects social models that tell men what they should like, and in part reflects a lack of alternatives. Our culture’s idea of “sex” and “the physical” is so pervasive, and centres so much round straight intercourse, that it is difficult for most people yet to design something different.

What do you make of the relationship between science and sexuality?

Today, there is a great emphasis on a much more biological approach to understanding human behaviour, including sexual behaviour. This has become extreme in that it denies the influence of social systems and beliefs on behaviour. This is probably because science is considered “less controversial” the less qualitative it is and more quantitative it is. Studying human beings is considered more respectable when it mimics the methods of the “hard sciences” no matter how inappropriate they may be.

In everyday life, do the science-educated health professionals help with people’s sexual problems?

If someone asks a gynaecologist or a urologist a question they tend to change the subject rather than honestly say: “I’m not the right person to ask, here’s the card of someone else.” Americans are accused of being prudes, but if you look at the history of British medicine and its relationship to sexuality you would think that the British Establishment is prudish. After the AIDS crisis, teachers and others began to speak about things like the penises and penetration-because anal penetration was one of the easiest ways to get HIV. But I think most of them are still very shy about the matter. In a way young gay men now are in better shape than many women because of information they get from the Net.

Are there more people now in your field?

We’re still a tiny band. Also, a lot of sex research is into areas such as Viagra that are apolitical. That was the difference with my research: that it included sexual politics. I wish more of the research did because it’s a waste of resources and energy to just research how to get a better erection.

Is it easy to get funded?

When you write about sex, people automatically think you make lots of bucks. It isn’t the case. I had to make lots of investments to finance my research. When you do masses of research for five years for each book on a wide scale, I think anybody in the academic community knows how much funding that takes. So it’s been an idealistic work on my part and I would at least like that known.

Are women still faking orgasm?

Some 61 per cent of British women said they often allow their partners to believe they orgasm when they have really only been highly aroused and excited. I met some Japanese editors of women’s magazines, and they said that they were really surprised to hear that Western women faked orgasm too because they thought it was a form of Japanese politeness!