The Shere Hite Reader
New and Selected Writings on Sex, Globalism, and Private Life
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The Shere Hite Reader presents wide-ranging analysis on the individual and society from a renowned thinker on psychosexual development. The book includes new science in addition to previously published material, reflecting Hite's three decades of work probing the roots of human identity through questionnaires and theory.
For the first time Hite formalizes her thinking on male adolescence, that boys feel tortured by the new social role they are forced to assume at puberty requiring a show of superiority toward females. In new detail Hite advances her understanding that sex is political, linking the expectation on women to achieve orgasm through coitus with broader patterns of oppression. Hite discusses new research on female adolescence, challenging the "virgin" hymen concept, and documenting that sexual awakening often precedes puberty. Hite also argues that pornography misrepresents male sexuality (not to mention female sexuality), depicting it as singular and silly instead of "full of intriguing, nuanced behavior involving the entire body, not just the penis."
The authoritative collection of her work, The Shere Hite Reader challenges the reader to a new way of seeing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Somewhere between social science and pop sexology, this volume collects 40 years' worth of Hite's writings on the role of sex in our individual identities and our culture. Hite, a controversial figure when she emerged in the 1970s as an outspoken sex educator and feminist, has revised and condensed her best-known works as well as shorter essays and unpublished writings. Most of the book is founded on Hite's interviews and surveys of thousands of Americans, and while some have criticized her methodology, Hite's work is most compelling when she stands back and lets her respondents speak, openly grappling with the nuances and motivations of their sexual practices. Many of Hite's earlier conclusions seem surprisingly mundane (perhaps a testament to how far we've come in recent decades), and her more recent analysis of globalization and sex lacks the solid empirical foundation of previous Hite reports. By flattening decades of work into a single volume without offering the context in which that work emerged or its subsequent impact, the volume leaves readers with a general sense of the scope and breadth of Hite's ideas, but no greater understanding of where they fit in the big picture of research on human sexuality.
