Out of love with men

Press, 1 December 1987, Page 22

Out of love with men

Mrs Sbere Hite, the author of books on sex which have brought her more than $2 million, is stirring up more than money' with her 992 pages on “Women and Love.” A huge proportion of women, she says, feel that their relations with their husbands and lovers are emotionally unsatisfying and still one-sided, despite the strides that women have made. ■. Professional statisticians raise their eyebrows at the sample used by Mrs Hite. Be sending out 100,000 questionnaires'to members of all sorts of women’s organisations, from church

groups to garden clubs, they say she addressed herself to certain types of woman: professional joiners and the discontented. And the 4500 replies she received fell far short of the proportion of replies insisted, upon by most researchers (40-70 per cent) before they start drawing conclusions. Mrs Hite might be taken more seriously if it. were not for her recent antics: slapping a taxidriver who called her “dear” and masquerading as her secretary when she rang up news- . papers to urge them to send

Reporters to the conference launching her book. Her original literary agent has walked out, though she has had ho difficulty in finding a successor to auction her paperback rights. . : Yet for aU this, many academic critics concede that Mrs Hite has identified big changes taking place in, the . relations between men and women. An article in the “Journal of Marriage and the Family,” based on 15 years of data put together by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Centre, backs her view. Copyright — The Economist.