The Hite Report on Shere Hite by Shere Hite

The Hite Report on Shere Hite by Shere Hite

Author:Shere Hite [Shere Hite]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781909807419
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2013-12-30T05:00:00+00:00


After all the hype, I felt really embarrassed. Wasn’t there any way to correct the press statements? I felt sorry for the sensationalist things in the press (I couldn’t control them of course), and I hoped that women reading them hadn’t felt humiliated, yet again, by the way the papers portrayed it all, trivializing things a woman was saying, making sexual innuendos and so on. I hoped they could read between the lines.

I tried to take initiatives with good media, to show what the real issues were. I recorded a series for National Public Radio called ‘What It Means to Be a Man’, interviewing Floyd Patterson, the fighter, Roy Cohn, the right-wing McCarthy hearings attorney, and others.

I had always heard about libel suits and believed that in the US, if papers say something that is not true, a person has the right to make this public by sueing. This is part of America’s precious heritage of free speech, the ultimate safeguard. During the next year I did sue the reporter who wrote in New York Magazine. I won an out of court settlement – not for money, but in principle: he could no longer write about me or say I was not scientific.

But how would this get into the press data banks? I sent this complaint, which detailed the copying of the same story from one paper to another, to fifty newspaper editors in the US. I asked them to place this answer to their articles in the same computer that carried their stories, so that the next time a reporter accessed the data base, that reporter would have access not only to the damaging story but also to this legal answer. Not one that I know of did this.

Harriet Pilpel, an attorney and friend, and the first woman graduate of Harvard Law School, talked to the New York Times for me about an article they ran called ‘Social Science Fiction’ by Robert Asahina which berated me and several other women for our ‘bad methods’, and called us all non-scientific. (The nightmare insult!) The Times agreed it had made a mistake, and asked Harriet to ask me to write an article about my methodology, which they would run in their letters column. I did this. However, it was published months after all the newspapers had run their stories, and since it was in the book anyway, any reporter wanting to understand it could have done so anyway. In short, this letter made no difference.

Everyone kept telling me, ‘Never mind, people will still read your books anyway. The press is always crazy, don’t take it personally!’ They seemed to think the point was to appear calm. Others said it was ‘the second book syndrome – everyone who has a successful first book, gets attacked for the second’, and such things. It was confusing and there seemed to be no answer.



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