The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality

BOOK DESCRIPTION

The Hite Report on the Family will cause you to rethink your childhood, your relationships, and quite possibly your life. It is a powerful and original analysis of the changing shape of private life, a profoundly optimistic and forward-looking answer to the dangerous nuclear-family-only nostalgia for the fifties that pervades the ongoing national debate on family values. Shere Hite has listened carefully to the real  stories of real people and has developed a fascinating new framework for understanding growing up, based on firstperson data rather on a preconceived model of status quo. In this book, Hite becomes the forst person to give theoretical legitimacy to all of the infinite ways that we live as "families," whether as single parents, as sam-sex parents, in traditional family groups, or alone.

This major study by a groundbreaking researcher has already been received with tremendous enthusiasm aborad, and Hite's books have sold over 20 million copies in 36 countries, including the United States. But with the 1987 publication of Women and Love, she became the vistom of aggressive media hostility. In February 1994, Susan Faludi was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "The media practically fell over themselves in their race to discredit Hite's... contrary and subversive political finding, and succeeded in depoliticizing and silencing it by sweeping aside Hite's chorus of angry women and painting the beaer of the evidence herself as a lone, angry woman instead."

In The Hite Report on the Family Hite challenges established views, arguing that the family is not collapsing but being democratized. Hite introduces a new thery of male eroticism by investigating whhy so many men and boys confuse sex and violence; she presents a lively new portrait of girls questioning their own sexual identity; and she confounds assumptions of a female "puberty" necessarily parallel to the male. Her questions are provocative and intimate: Do you know how your parents felt about having you? Did your father or mother look at pronography? At what age were your children's respect for their mothers increased with the rise in single and employed mothers?

With The Hite Report on the Family Shere Hite lights the way to understanding change of the family as the constructive result of choice not as a moral crisis, but as a successful evolution toward private democracy.

Shere Hite (1/5/1995). The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality: Growing Up Under Patriarchy. Hardcover. New York, N.Y.: Grove Press. 424p. ISBN-13: 978-0-80211570-6.