It is nonsensical to suggest that researchers can discover something by talking to a small sample that millions of couples have not discovered over millennia. If this were the case, there would be much more awareness of the role of the clitoris in the population. Hite proposed that some women are successful with orgasm with a lover (while others are not) because they take conscious steps to obtain clitoral stimulation. Intercourse provides neither sufficient nor the right kind of stimulation to cause female orgasm. It doesn’t make sense to suggest that women need less stimulation than men do. But why would anyone engage in an act that only provides indirect stimulation? We can see from the male experience that men need penile stimulation to be direct and continuous. They found a position for intercourse that maximised the clitoral stimulation they obtained from intercourse. In Hite’s sample of women, 30% said that they could orgasm regularly through intercourse alone by using a hands-free approach. Both Kinsey and Hite used percentages to measure incidences of female orgasm while rates of male orgasm are usually 100%. If clitoral stimulation caused female orgasm with a lover, the clitoris would not be ignored as it currently is.
Researchers did not appreciate the issue of arousal. There was no evidence previously that heterosexuals (of either sex) had any interest in the clitoris.
By suggesting that women might stimulate the clitoris with a lover, researchers are encouraging women to say they do. The anatomical evidence for the clitoris as the female sex organ is overwhelming. Whereas the clitoral organ (containing the corpora cavernosa) is internal to the body. But the amount of development is much greater for the penis. The penis and the clitoris develop from the same genital tubercle in the foetus. They assumed that the clitoris should respond exactly as the penis does. This is the key reason why the clitoris does not respond with a lover. Men and women approach sexual activity with different levels of arousal. They didn’t take into account the fact that women often engage in sexual activity without ever achieving orgasm. In other words, the number of women who conclude that clitoral stimulation does not cause orgasm with a lover outnumber the women who think it does.īoth Alfred Kinsey, and later Shere Hite, noted that with no man present (when masturbating or having sex with another woman) women use clitoral stimulation. Only 42% could orgasm through oral stimulation. Only 44% of the women in her sample said they could orgasm regularly with a lover by stimulating the clitoris manually. Although four fifths (82%) of her sample said they could masturbate to orgasm, the same techniques were not as effective with a lover. Just as Masters and Johnson wanted to show that women orgasm through intercourse, Hite hoped to show that women use clitoral stimulation to orgasm with a lover.
Unlike Kinsey, Hite’s work had political bias. Kinsey had also noted that women’s experiences of masturbation provided the most convincing accounts of female orgasm. She found that women, who were confident about orgasm, referred to masturbation much more than to any sexual activity with a lover. Hite decided to ask women how and when they experienced orgasm. Women’s accounts of orgasm were less reliable, being written anonymously on a form rather than given via personal interview as Kinsey’s research was. So the percentages cannot be applied to all women. Shere Hite’s sample was not selected in a way that would make it representative of the general population. Hite circulated a lengthy questionnaire in the US through women’s magazines and to passers-by on the street in the early 1970s. Her research had much lower funding than Kinsey’s and so was more limited in scope. Shere Hite’s work was a thesis produced for her doctorate in sexuality.
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