Back in the 1970s, the movement for women’s liberation built itself on the idea that the personal was political. But as revelatory as that idea was, nowhere was it more controversial than when it focused on sex. In articles and manifestos like “The Politics of Orgasm” by Susan Lydon and “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” by Anne Koedt, radical feminists declared sexual pleasure, who got it and how, to be an inherently political issue, bound up with structures of power and social control.
Of all the work on that topic that came out of second-wave feminism, far and away the most influential was The Hite Report. Written by Shere Hite and published in 1976, it became a global best-seller of stratospheric proportions, the 30th best selling book of all time. Yet over the course of the next five decades, that phenomenon would be largely forgotten, and as histories of the women’s movement came to be written, The Hite Report and its author would be ignored.
That case of historical amnesia is what Rosa Campbell set out to untangle in her new book, The Book That Taught the World To Orgasm and Then Disappeared. Campbell is an historian of global feminism who became fascinated both by the worldwide reach of Shere Hite’s work and by the scale of her demonization. In this conversation, we discuss the impact of Hite’s work, her complex relationship to women’s liberation, why her work was effectively cancelled, and the advantages and pitfalls of biography as a way to unpack the vexed legacies of feminism around the globe.
