Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hite Report stands as a polemic and a pep talk. See, she's telling all her readers, most women are absolutely normal when they fall short of the avidity that Playboy and Penthouse magazines try to fob off on them. Women can overcome their sexual dependencies--the last stronghold of a male-dominated society--only if they make demands, and both men and women will be better off when that happens...
...Hite would have us believe that sheer insight will stimulate women to effect a complete change, to revitalize all their relationships and become more assertive. She tends to limit her commentary to recapitulations of the sufficiently eloquent statements her respondents offer, where she could use their explication of pervasive sexual problems as a springboard to solutions. Such annoying pretension toward analysis hardly justifies Hite's designation as the author of this study. Ultimately, it is not Hite but the collected quotes which make this book remarkable, worthwhile and--at least from a female perspective--authentic reading...
...parents, but in mimicking their gab and strut, he made them sympathetic and worthwhile in spite of himself and of them because he saw where they were authentic beneath their fraudulence. He found the poetry in a whore; for all the disgust, indifference and thoughtless obeisance to some purely sexual nerve communicated by the images, there is something totally absorbing in his spasmodic narrative. You just can't tell what it means to see corruption and what it means to see sublimity any more. Carrying this from the level of human interaction to human transaction, there are no longer...
Henry Miller knew how to get along with life, and the genius of his novels is that he also knew how to write in the idiom of getting along with life. That good old euphimism "the facts of life" is a more profound statement about sexual matters than those who generally resort to it would care to admit. Sex really is the single most unavoidable fact of human existence. If the total abandonment of Miller's men and women to the demands of their bodies, to all kinds of fucking and anything they can think of to go with...
Some of the comments Rich makes about sexual relationships and relationships between women lead one to believe she turned to lesbianism after her husband's death, which might explain some of the inconsistencies in her argument. Parenting--a concept she hardly considers in her eagerness to show the problems with mothering--is a two-gender operation, and her one-sided focus on mothering ignores the satisfaction that both parents could get out of dealing with children. What she really objects to, it seems, is her feeling that her three sons expected her to repress all anger in their interest...