Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times:
In the Battle of the Sexologists, Alfred Kinsey probably wins: He was played by an A-list movie star. Masters and Johnson got a Showtime series. Having survived the Holocaust, Dr. Ruth lived long enough to podcast. Shere Hite? Even those who remember her influential book “The Hite Report,” a crowdsourced account of female sexuality published 50 years ago this month, are not 100 percent sure how to pronounce her first name: like Sherry but without the “y.”
One could be forgiven for assuming instead a charactonym, “sheer height,” that conjures both her champagne achievement — she popped noisily, then fizzled — and the plastic-shelled L’eggs pantyhose of her heyday. The “Report” is one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time, having sold some 50 million copies, but a weird layer of disrepute — like the Saran Wrap women were once advised to wear when welcoming their husbands home — clings to its auburn-tressed author, who died at 77 in 2020.
More here.
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