The scene is a little girl's bedroom in Mom-and-Apple-Pie Land. The scent of lily-of-the valley wafts in from the immaculately-tended garden of the scrubbed American house in small-town Missouri; fresh white curtains blow in the summer breeze; a matching bed and dressing table in blond wood are covered with pure white chenille for the child inhabitant, who can be seen . . . what??? masturbating on the freshly laundered sheets?!
Who else could it be but Shere Hite, the woman who painstakingly surveyed women's sexuality and came to some conclusions which many men did not like.
She has now written her own biography, in which she describes her first intimations of unilateral sexual pleasure at her grandparents' home where she was raised. For Hite's childhood was in fact not exactly mom and apple pie, after her teenage war-bride mother heaved responsibility for the infant on to her own parents and headed off for Life. The grandparents were fundamentalist Christians, and as Hite writes later in the book, this has often been used as a one-stop-shop explanation for her life's work: because sex didn't exist in such an environment, she became obsessed by it.
She discounts this theory, but when seeking to answer the question, "Why did you do all this?" she appears just a little disingenuous when she insists: "I feel shy saying this, but in truth, I did it because I wanted to help people . . . Women like the ones I had known in my family." These included the granny who, despite being a puritanical fundamentalist, always left the bathroom door open when she was taking a bath, and the young mother who, on a rare outing with her young daughter, was so obsessed with the attention of the guys at the swimming pool that she ignored the fact that Shere was close to drowning.
Drowning would have been too good for the adult Hite, according to the many enemies her work created in the US. Surprisingly, it was not so much either The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976), with its ground-breaking observations on the female orgasm, or its companion report on male sexuality (1981), which caused the greatest storm, but Women and Love, in which Hite strove to get away from the physical manifestations of love to the emotional shortfall in many women's lives.
She writes of the hate campaign orchestrated by an ever more centrally-owned media (the Washington Post and Newsweek singing the same tune was no coincidence), and the never-ending criticism of her research methods (eliciting essays from unidentified respondents) rather than her undeniable conclusions.
She of course tells only one side of the story, but if even half of what she claims is true it is horrifying. Ben Bradlee, legendary editor of the Washington Post, laughed at her when she telephoned to complain about inaccurate and vicious stories. The head of a television network, to whom she had gone to make a similar complaint, wanted to hear about her first sexual experience, and then produced his penis for inspection.
Eventually it was all too much (and nobody would publish her) so she fled to Germany, native land of her musician husband, Friedrich Horicke.
Hite's chatty talk-show type of prose somewhat undermines this account of her life and work. She has to be a much more serious person than the level of the prose - and the tight red outfit she wore to launch the book in London last month - would suggest. Yet one wonders, if she has had to struggle so hard to be accepted as a serious researcher, why choose for the cover picture a photo echoing 1950s glamour shots, of herself apparently nude but clutching a large bouquet of roses, which match her lipstick and nail polish? This woman is full of contradictions. But it does take unusual people to do unusual things, such as spend most of their adult life painstakingly collating Americans' answers to questions on their sexual activity.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist