Cover image for The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report by Rosa Campbell (Melville House, 2026)
What do Shere’s correspondents mean when they write, over and over, ‘I feel normal’? The ‘normal’ is a powerful idea. It can seem like it has always been with us, like perhaps there has always been a broad, overarching scheme of normality to compare ourselves to and wonder how we measure up, particularly when it comes to sex. But in actuality, it is a relatively new way of explaining the world, a fairly novel anxiety. So, while women wrote to Shere stating that she had helped them to feel sexually normal, a hundred years earlier this would not have been the way they understood themselves, their lives, and the sex they were having. There would have been no scale of comparison, no norm or average that people were constantly measuring themselves against. Instead, they would have used divisions like natural versus unnatural or proper versus improper.
The idea of ‘normal’ was born from the boom in statistics collected by governments, from medicine and eugenics and the racist colonial expansion of the nineteenth century. Historians suggest it was through eugenics that the mathematical notion of the normal meaning ‘average’ and the medical concept of the normal meaning ‘healthy’ converged and became culturally dominant. This replaced, at least in part, the old system of rigid binaries where you were either one or the other, with a scale, or spectrum, where people could be more or less normal, closer to the middle or dwelling at the edges. As historians Peter Crye and Elizabeth Stephens convincingly show, it was in the twentieth century that the power of the normal really began to be felt. It was through literature on sex and psychology that the ‘normal’ swirled through the culture and became ‘a precarious and elusive state that must be actively cultivated’, a desire held by everyday people, particularly when it came to their sex lives.
When women wrote to Shere celebrating that they were normal, I think they meant that they were one of the majority, that is, statistically likely. They saw themselves in the statistic Shere gives of the 70 percent of women unable to orgasm from vaginal penetration, and they saw themselves reflected in other women’s testimonies too, on every page of the Report, as some said in their letters. But this bled into a second meaning; ‘normal’ meant they were fine, and they felt relieved and happy about that. ‘Normal’, then, was something good for these women; it meant socially acceptable and valued. To read these letters is to see the idea of sexual normalcy changing before our eyes. The idea of the ‘normal’ orgasm was changing from vaginal to clitoral, and with it the kinds of sex women could have, even the people they might be. Seeing this norm change shows us that ‘normal’ is not fixed, impartial, or common sense. Instead, it is political, often reflective of what the ruling minority finds desirable. As one woman wrote, ‘Up until now we have had to rely mainly on men to define what is “normal”’. As we saw in the previous chapter, psychologists, sexologists, and doctors, along with husbands and male partners, had told women they were abnormal because of their lack of vaginal orgasm, their desire to masturbate or have sex with women.
Today, many of us are sceptical of the very idea of the ‘normal’. It seems oppressive and something to avoid, especially as the far right mobilise around the concept. Eric Kaufman, a right-wing intellectual, writes that ‘If politics in the West is ever to return to normal, rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed’. Similarly, participants in the violent protests in Britain and Northern Ireland against asylum seekers in the summer of 2025 suggest that the protests are ‘what happens when you get normal people like us and no-one listens to them’. ‘Normal’ is doing heavy lifting here; it is used to legitimise the racism of the right as the values of the majority, so we distance ourselves from it.
Normal sex, too, seems drearily conformist, but this is a result in shifts from the left rather than the right of politics. Queer theory and culture has waged war on normal, not just on particularly restrictive and oppressive norms but the entire concept of normal sexual behaviour.
While Shere’s book replaced one idea of normal sex with another that was more liberating to many women, queer theory challenged the idea of the ‘normal’ entirely and showed that while the ‘normal’ was a spectrum, it still relied on certain people being pathologized and excluded as ‘abnormal’. But contra our feelings today, these letters show us how a sense of ‘being normal’ can inspire political change.
These feelings of normalcy inspired women to speak up in sex, to try masturbating, and to change their lives. Many women spoke of how the book helped them be more direct in sex: ‘I am basically inarticulate with my husband, your book helped change that’. Sometimes speaking up led to things changing, quite rapidly: ‘your book has caused what I can only refer to as a major miracle in my life. The day after I finished it I had the extreme pleasure of experiencing the first orgasm I have ever had during intercourse after more than 20 years of nothing and worse than nothing’. When they found out that other women masturbated, they cast off their own feelings of guilt or tried masturbation for the first time, often using the book as erotic material: ‘After reading, I decided I must have been crazy to go my whole life without trying to masturbate. So I tried and WHAM, I came within four minutes’. Another woman wrote, ‘Tonight I found my clitoris! Such a beautiful pearl I’ve never seen before’. The book also made her feel that her lesbian desires were normal, and she ended with a P.S.: ‘I’m 86’.
This feeling of belonging inspired women to make changes beyond their sex lives. Reassured that they were normal, women felt part of a community with one another: ‘I feel so close to womankind, a wonderfully warming feeling’; ‘I laughed and laughed about some of the quotes because they were exactly my experience. I wanted to dash out and find the women quoted so we could laugh together’. As we saw in chapter two, Shere wanted the book to be like a consciousness-raising group. I think she had women in the suburbs in mind here, women who may not have had access to CR in person but would get the feeling of a group through reading stories of women’s similar lives. Like CR, the book challenged women’s politics; one reader, a ‘closet woman hater’, now felt a genuine sense of closeness to other women, because of ‘this marvellous book—glory be’. Another woman who had always thought of lesbian relationships as ‘disgusting’ was beginning to consider the possibility for herself. ‘This is what your book is doing—giving people a chance to think over relationships [beyond] what is culturally ingrained in their heads’. While reading was an individual experience, women built community where they were. One woman told Shere she was ‘like your no.2 PR person’ because she told so many friends about it. Another wrote that she was ‘passing the book around my office for everyone to read’. She reported that lots of the ‘ladies are reading it with the book hidden so that no one else knows they are reading “that kind of book.” But I am not ashamed’.
The Hite Report was a bold feminist book, but it appealed to these women because it required no prior knowledge of feminism. It was practical, with suggestions about how women could change their sex lives for the better by applying feminist principles, without needing to adopt an entire feminist programme, though because of the book some of them did. One woman who wrote several letters to Shere over a ten-year period joined her local NOW chapter after reading The Hite Report. She became an active organiser for reproductive rights. In the last letter she sent to Shere, she attached two small badges in the shape of coat hangers, symbolising women’s refusal to return to a time of unsafe illegal abortions. ‘Never again’, she wrote.
The book’s reception changes the story we tell about feminism. Usually, the history of this extraordinary social movement is located in the cities and on university campuses. The suburbs are seen as the place where women were trapped in their houses and isolated, where ideas of what a ‘normal’ woman was pressed heavily upon their lives. Maintaining normal standards could have a violent edge, as in the horror novel The Stepford Wives, where women are killed off by their own husbands, replaced by automatons who glide around the supermarket declaring ‘housework is enough for me’ and who always orgasm vaginally. Suburban women would soon be mobilised by the New Right, which claimed normal women had been silenced by feminism. But The Hite Report changes the story; it shows how feminism did reach right into the heart of the suburbs, changing sexual norms and the lives of these allegedly ‘normal’ women.
Excerpted from The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report by Rosa Campbell (Melville House, 2026). Used with permission.
Click here to read Rosa Campell’s conversation with Rachel Potter about the loss of Hite in popular culture and how can we bring her back to life.
