Word: hite
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Booksellers at the Harvard Bookstore and the Coop say that "The Hite Report" has been a prime seller among Cambridge area students, although sales have declined for no apparent reason in the past week...
Anyone with two cents worth of intelligence is going to wonder about Hite's methodology, an issue she has minimized in innumerable interviews. Most of the questionnaires were distributed through NOW, Oui, Mademoiselle, Ms. and The Village Voice--which obviously slants the sampling toward certain income levels, races and frames of mind. (I would bet no female Ford Motor Co. factory worker ever saw the questionnaires.) This is undeniably a flaw, but not of the magnitude that some reviews have made...
...dishonest to ignore the fact that almost every single response reflected the same discontents, fears, guilts. Two to three thousand women must communicate similar impressions about their sex lives and sexuality for very real reasons as opposed to a flukey coincidence. From the point of view of academic sociology. Hite's research and methods probably aren't tidy enough. But the problem of statistical skewing does not invalidate the gist of the verbal responses they elicited...
...Shere Hite is more vulnerable to attack for the dearth of information she presents about her own biases. She never specifies what motivated her to initiate the study. The theories and quotations Hite presents fit together so smoothly, one cannot avoid suspecting her of manipulating information. I suppose I would have felt this less if some distinctly anti-male sentiments didn't frequently creep into the book, affording an almost universally negative impression of men. In many ways, Hite seems overly anxious for the reader to accept that men are continually boorish, selfish, uninspired and non-emotional...
...short shrift given dissent reinforces one's suspicion that data was matched to a preconceived analysis. This "study" of female sexuality devotes only about a dozen pages to women who are able to orgasm during intercourse and who do enjoy satisfactory heterosexual relationships. Even though Hite was not primarily interested in examining contentment, this imbalance unfortunately abets those aiming to detract from the report's overall accuracy...