But a smaller, privately funded version proceeded, in part because of the HIV imperative. Thus, Congress withdrew funding for a large-scale survey that Laumann had begun preliminary work on. If, God forbid, a government-sponsored study had echoed Kinsey’s findings, the results would have been hard to dismiss. By this time, conservatives were heading off sex studies, afraid that the results would show high rates of homosexual and premarital sex and so make them seem normal. In the mid-1980s, with the threat of HIV looming, Laumann’s interest turned to sexual networks and the need for better data on sexual behavior. He’s wary of negative press, likes to downplay controversy, and giggles disarmingly over the boring headlines he’s generated over the years. Laumann is a former provost of the university, a venerable sociologist, and an expert on social networks. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that sex surveys caught up with statistics, in the work of Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago. Highly publicized surveys in the 1970s from Redbook, Playboy, and others had similar problems. Though Hite tried to include women of many different backgrounds-drawing on the mailing lists of feminist organization, women’s magazines, and some religious groups-her overall response rate was low, making it hard to generalize from her numbers.
Hite found that 82 percent of women said they masturbated, and of these, “95 percent could orgasm easily and regularly, whenever they wanted.” This was in contrast to the stereotype that “women are slow to become aroused and are able to orgasm only irregularly.” In an interview last year looking back on her heyday, Hite said that she trusted her survey respondents because they often told her they took her survey “after they put their whole family to bed and they were answering on the kitchen table.” But her results were, if anything, less scientific than Kinsey’s.
Researcher Shere Hite is a cultural critic whose 1976 treatise on female sexuality, The Hite Report, became a rallying cry for feminists and an international best seller. The same problem plagued the next wave of sex surveys.
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