The War Over Love Heats Up Again : Author Shere Hite’s Third Report on Sexuality Fuels an Old Debate Over Her Methodology

Shere Hite had a headache. The release earlier this week of a Washington Post-ABC News Poll disputing her conclusions in a seven-year study on women and love was fueling another flap over her methodology.

It is a debate that Hite calls a “smoke screen” for what she sees as the real issue of how women feel about men and love. “The whole thing is missing the point,” she said. “They want to have a war over numbers.”

Numbers Are the Issue

To Hite’s dismay, numbers were exactly what was at issue. Her report, “Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress”--provocative enough to land Hite on the cover of Time magazine Oct. 12--found that, of the 4,500 women who responded anonymously to the 100,000 questionnaires she sent to women in 43 states, 98% were unhappy with some aspect of their relationships with men. In its telephone survey of 1,505 men and women across the country, the Washington Post-ABC News public opinion survey found that 93% of the women called their relationships good or excellent.

Hite’s critics took the discrepancy as ammunition in their argument that her sample was self-selective and hence too skewed to be viewed with credibility.

“The Hite Report is exaggerated and methodologically enormously flawed,” said San Diego psychotherapist Dr. Warren Farrell, author of “Why Men Are the Way They Are” and among the most vociferous of her critics. By blaming women’s woes on men, Farrell said, Hite is intensifying a pattern of “new sexism” he calls “every bit as dangerous as racism.”

“Her methodology does leave something to be desired,” added Richard Morin, director of polling for the Washington Post. “It raises substantial questions whether she can generalize her findings to the population at large.”

Morin confirmed that his telephone poll “essentially” took Hite’s answers and turned them into questions. “The attempt was to look at some of the claims she made and to test them,” he said.

Rushing to Hite’s defense and echoing her position that the methodology debate has obscured subjects many people would rather not talk about was University of Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Frank Sommers who called the debate “part of a defensive reaction where you shoot the messenger.”

“In my judgment this is much ado about nothing,” added Max Siegal, a former president of the American Psychological Assn. from his office in Boca Raton, Fla. “The big flaw I don’t think is methodological. I think it’s in society, in a society that is not willing to look at itself and the problems that we have in relating to each other.”

Hite’s subjects may indeed have been self-selecting--women who took the time to write to Hite because they did have steam to vent, said the current president of the American Psychological Assn., Amherst University psychologist Bonnie Strickland. But, she asked, “why shouldn’t they be heard?”

‘Speak-Out’ Proposed

Providing an opportunity to hear women’s voices on the subjects of sexuality, men and love was exactly Hite’s objective nearly 20 years ago when she proposed the idea of a “speak-out” on women’s private lives to fellow members of the then-fledgling National Organization for Women here.

Today, perched on a tapestry-covered settee in her palace-like Fifth Avenue apartment, where angels smile down from the hand-painted ceiling with its elaborate molding, Hite recalled the genesis of the Hite Report trilogy and its concomitant controversy.

Hite was in her late 20s at the time, and was modeling to pay off the “astronomical” tuition for her graduate studies in history at Columbia University (from which she later dropped out, charging sexism). Practically down to her last subway token, the blonde, willowy Hite modeled for fashion magazines and--because she needed the money, she has subsequently explained--also posed nude for such publications as Playboy and Oui. Hired to play the “dumb blonde” in a typewriter commercial, Hite abruptly decided to step outside and join a NOW picket line protesting the sexism of an ad whose tag line was “this typewriter is so smart she doesn’t have to be.”

At first, she recalled, she was too embarrassed to admit she was part of the event that was under attack. When she finally revealed her involvement, “the reaction was not to ostracize me, but to say, ‘Gee, we’re glad you’re here.’ ”

For Hite the experience was a major epiphany. She blossomed in the atmosphere of “intellectual ferment” of the early women’s movement. Soon she was a fixture at the NOW office at 54th and Madison.

Sexuality was hardly a lunch table topic at that time. “Radical feminists were still good girls,” Hite remembered. “We weren’t supposed to talk about ‘it.’ ”

But Hite, who was born in 1942 in St. Joseph, Mo., and reared first by her grandparents, later by an aunt and uncle after her parents divorced when she was a baby, thought women should talk about their private lives. In what became the foundation for her anonymous-questionnaire research technique, Hite left questionnaires in a box in the NOW office and invited fellow members to respond.

The answers--”long letters, essays, really, from people who obviously had no one to talk to about these things”-- “thrilled” her, Hite said. “It was filling in a whole universe for me of other women’s experiences.”

Swamped by replies, Hite knew she had more than enough for a speak-out, and decided to publish a pamphlet instead. A friend from NOW steered her to an editor at Warner Books paperbacks. For a $5,000 advance, Hite became the author of a collection of the replies called “Sexual Honesty by Women for Women.”

The advance money allowed her to quit modeling and devote herself full-time to her questionnaires. An editor from Knopf saw the paperback and decided the topic was worth $20,000 for the hardcover book that became Volume 1 of the Hite reports.

‘Quite a Feat’

“I lived for about five years on about $5,000 a year, which is quite a feat in New York,” Hite said. By the time she published the first volume of her Hite reports, “I was so broke I was borrowing money from my editor’s doorman.”

Her four-room, $1.5-million apartment in a 19th-Century building opposite the Central Park children’s zoo is a testament to the success--and controversy--that came almost immediately upon publication of Hite’s “Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.” In what would become a familiar refrain for Hite, critics branded her research methods soft, but the book, with its news that masturbation was a popular female pastime, was a best seller.

Hite indicates she is “sick to death--I’ve heard it all” of the questions about the credibility of her data. Her supporters, she points out, people like Washington, D.C., sociologist Jessie Bernard, the founder of the Society for Women in Sociology, note that Alfred Charles Kinsey as well as William Masters and Virginia Johnson took their share of critical knocks as well.

In any case, said Bernard, Hite “has a style that is meant to be provocative, and she succeeds.”

In the case of Volume 3 of the Hite Report, her contention that women are tired of bending and twisting themselves to meet the needs of men has fed into charges of “male-bashing.”

“My problem is that relationships are a dance,” psychologist Farrell said. “When there are problems in a relationship, the entire dance needs to be looked at. When the entire dance is looked at only through the eyes of one partner, the tone becomes self-righteous: ‘I’m right; he’s weird.’ ”

Hite’s 923-page tome fits into a 10-year pattern of often top-selling books that actually exacerbate alienation between the sexes, said Farrell, citing as an example, a recent title called “No Good Men.”

“You couldn’t do a book called ‘No Good Jews,’ or ‘No Good Blacks,’ ” Farrell said. “You certainly couldn’t do a book called ‘No Good Women.’ ”

‘Felt Picked On’

Richard Halgin, a psychologist at Amherst University, said that when he read Hite’s latest book, “I felt picked on and provoked. I felt angry. I wanted to answer back.” Yet Halgin called that same process therapeutic. “It’s good sometimes to be provoked,” he said.

“I really wanted men to read this,” said psychiatrist Sommers, a specialist in the problems of marriages and relationships. But many men wince at the “nerve” Hite has struck by “pointing the finger at them,” Sommers said.

In a living room so vast the Steinway concert grand piano all but floats unnoticed, Hite herself rejoins that much of the argument over her research techniques traces to “men who don’t like the issues.” Waving one slender arm in the air to dismiss the debate, Hite said, “They don’t know methodology from a tree across the street.”

While polling director Morin agreed that those people who call her 4.5% response rate low “are correct,” Hite insists that the figure exceeds expectations in comparable studies. She complains, further, that critics err in using the word survey to describe her work.

“I have never used the word survey, “ she said. “I defy anyone to find it anywhere in my book.”

“Absolutely,” Hite said, to the question of whether she considers her methods scientific. As for charges to the contrary, “Everyone was called unscientific. Freud was called unscientific. Kinsey was called unscientific. It goes back and forth.”

Besides, Hite said, “I was never interested in doing polling, samples of the population that are statistically representative in order to make out normative patterns. I just felt, what you’ve got to show is a range of behavior. You’re just asking for trouble if you try and make something that is statistically representative.”

Seven Years of Research

According to Hite, the ongoing “redefinition” of love she and her staff of 10 discovered in seven years of research on a book that began as a footnote on “sexual slavery” in her first Hite Report, may eventually help women view love in what she sees as a more reasonable and realistic light.

“We can still truly love a man,” she said. “But we see him as from another planet.”

Not that Hite--still model-slender with chalky white skin and tumbling strawberry blonde curls that create an ethereal, almost pre-Raphaelite quality--pretends to have all the answers. “I think the majority of women are having problems in their relationships. I think the problems may be caused by raised consciousness, or by women having more money or maybe women have always felt that way but weren’t organized.”

She shook her head.

“Who the hell knows?” she said. “I don’t know.”

What she does know is that in her own life, love is anything but a “trivial pursuit.” Spying the familiar figure of her husband of 2 1/2 years on the street outside, Hite’s face brightened and her voice softened.

“Oh look,” she said. “Here comes Fred.”

High-voltage electricity passes freely between Hite and concert pianist Fred Horicke, at 24, more than 20 years Hite’s junior. It was Horicke, for example, who introduced the author, self-described cultural historian and sexual annalist to the crowded press conference awaiting the findings from Hite’s latest report. “Well,” Horicke declared with unbridled pride, “I’m Shere’s husband.”

“Fred’s great,” Hite said dreamily. In the flurry of all the attention and in the face of all the accusations thrust at her, “Fred is just there every minute,” she said.

“Women and Love” will have no sequel, Hite said.

‘It’s Exhausting’

“I’ve done what I can do,” she said. “It’s too much work. It’s exhausting.”

Page 923 of her report does suggest otherwise. “Please state your views,” it begins, then goes on to invite readers to provide Hite with their views on such questions as, “Would you like to run for political office?” “How is your personal life going?” “What gives you the most satisfaction?” Or finally, “Please add anything else you would like to say.”

No responses have yet come in to those questions, Hite said. But maybe, she said, they might provide fodder for other books, books beyond the trilogy.

In the late afternoon light, Hite smiled and took a sip of her now-tepid coffee.