Come and meet Shere Hite—the feminist hero whose notorious work revolutionized how we think about sex, marriage, and the female orgasm…
Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionized the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?
Using original research material and sharp cultural analysis, Rosa Campbell's new book The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report explores Hite’s complicated life and literary legacy. Campbell expands on Hite’s ideas about sex — namely, that sex is sexist — and tracks Hite through her fraught childhood, her struggles working in the porn industry, and her eventual cancellation by the US religious right. All the while, Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality. With the far-right on the march globally and the anti-feminist backlash continuing apace, Campbell makes the case for the relevancy of Shere Hite and her work today. Rosa will be in conversation with Clare Fisher.
Rosa Campbell is a writer and historian based in London. She works on the global history of feminism and is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King's College London. She is the author of the forthcoming The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared (Melville House, New South 2026) More about Rosa and her work at: rosa-campbell.com.
Clare Fisher is a fiction writer and creative writing lecturer. Their debut novel, All the Good Things (Viking, Penguin, 2017) won a Betty Trask award and was described by the Guardian as ‘a sparky and unsettling debut.’ Their short story collection, How the Light Gets In (Influx Press, 2018) was longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story prize and the International Dylan Thomas prize. Their most recent short story collection, The Moon is Trending has been published by Salt.