The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared

Meet Shere Hite, the feminist hero whose notorious work revolutionised 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 revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?

Australian historian Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex—namely, that sex is sexist—the book explores Hite's fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.

In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Rosa Campbell's examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.

Rosa Campbell's intimate, compelling history reclaims The Hite Report as a lost feminist classic and restores Hite as a feminist trailblazer. The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared is the kind of feminist history we need right now: empathetic, carefully researched and brimming with insight. I devoured this vibrant, resonant work. — Michelle Arrow

Campbell tracks the explosive arc of late twentieth-century sexual politics, and brilliantly shows how Hite authored, exploited and was devoured by them. A book for our times of feminist boom and backlash. — Lucy Delap

Feminists keep losing our trailblazers to cultural amnesia. This book is a blessed antidote: A resurrection of a woman so charismatic, iconoclastic, frustrating, and brilliant that it seems impossible she could be forgotten, someone who practised sex-positive feminism before it had a name, and who understood that pleasure is always political. — Jude Doyle

Get ready, the next generation of feminist history is here, and it's fun, sexy, and outrageously smart. With all the swagger and passion of Shere Hite herself, Rosa Campbell restores The Hite Report to the pantheon of great feminist texts, and offers an exhilarating new history of the earthquake that was Women's Liberation. — Yves Rees

Rosa Campbell, with her deep and wide-ranging research, has brought to life Shere Hite's astonishing, courageous, and finally tragic story, and shows us how her book, The Hite Report, changed millions of women's lives and broadened the feminist movement to engage women at all levels of society. Campbell's vivid use of original source material to document the (infuriating!) backlash against Shere and her work makes clear the origins of where we are today—when women, particularly successful women, are being demonised and denigrated by trad wives, the manosphere and politicians. The book is a fascinating and important contribution to our intellectual history. — Regina Ryan, original editor of The Hite Report

Witty, erudite, engaging, and empathetic, Rosa Campbell is the perfect companion on this literary voyage of sexual (re)discovery. Scrupulously researched and superbly written, Shere Hite and The Hite Report give us the world inside a book—the millions of women and men who Shere introduced to that most joyous of organs, the clitoris—and the book inside a world perched between 70s feminist revolt and 80s masculinist backlash. Written in the aftermath of #MeToo, as we witness the rise of the manosphere and the reassertion of traditional gender roles, this history of feminist ideas and how they're silenced then 'disappeared' has never felt more urgent. In short: buy this book! Read it in one sitting! And, like The Hite Report back in its day, thrust it into the hands of every person that you know. — Alecia Simmonds

An essential account of an oft-overlooked feminist pioneer. — Publishers Weekly