ABSTRACT
The author discusses how feminism brought about changes in attitudes to sex and relationships in the 1970s when The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm hit the book shops. She recalls how, at last, women were talking, at least to each other, about getting to know their own bodies and what turned them on sexually, not just what they thought turned men on. She asks why this didn’t result in a new gender equality in sexual behaviour in the bedroom? She goes back to look at Kinsey’s discoveries in the 1950s about male, female, bisexual and gay sexuality. She discusses the work of the sexologists, Masters and Johnson, and she takes a fresh look at Shere Hite’s two groundbreaking reports: The Hite Report on Female Sexuality in the 1970s and The Hite Report on Male Sexuality in the 1980s. She discovers that many of the responses to Hite’s questionnaires remain as relevant today as they were when first published. She discusses the gender differences revealed in Hite’s two reports and asks, why, in this most intimate sphere of sexual relationships between men and women, it has proved so difficult to achieve a deep and lasting change?
