The Hite Report on Shere Hite by Shere Hite

had sent him my master’s thesis. He was grumpy and arrogant (not elegant , as people said) throughout our meeting and finally told me, ‘I don’t even believe you wrote that thesis yourself.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because it is too well done, I doubt you could have done this – and all those books you cite. Where did you get them? I’m sure the library at the University of Florida doesn’t even have them.’ He managed to articulate in a semi-British style, perhaps having seen Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins with Liza Doolittle recently, and imagining us them.
    About Florida’s library: obviously, he had never been there. The university was founded in the 1890s, and had one of the oldest and most spectacular libraries in the country. But, snob that he was, he wouldn’t have known that. How he sneered when he said the word Florida. He was so shameless, I was amazed. Where I grew up, his behaviour was bad manners.
    â€˜Why don’t you ask me questions, to test my knowledge, then, if you doubt me?’ I offered.
    â€˜Oh, you could easily have learned what’s in there by now,’ he sneered, and stood up, dismissing me. ‘I’ve no more time.’
    This encounter was a rude shock to my idealism. I was upset, and hardly knew what to think. There were no words; ‘sexist’ or ‘misogynist’, weren’t in usage yet. I felt he had a problem, but just as much, I wondered what it was about me that didn’t inspire any faith. I felt very small, but at the same time I knew he was nuts. I never went back to see him again, and luckily someone else taught the seminar, though all the other students were male, and clearly, I was not really welcome. Anyway, I continued my studies at Columbia until about a year and a half later, when I began to run out of money.
    But New York, fortunately, was not only Columbia University. New York was New York! I learned at least as much about what was going on in the world from the city – well, much more, than I did from Columbia.
    New York was full of exotic cultures and languages. I loved it. From the moment I arrived, I was intoxicated by the mixture of hundreds of various nationalities and cultures, all spilling over into one another. From taxi drivers to stores to names of things, to how people looked and talked – everyone and everything was there. Many were from a kind of middle-European group that had arrived (or whose parents had) between 1900–40. (There are more Jews in New York than in Israel is a remark you hear all the time.) To me, something about this cultural background seemed so lyrical, so humanistic , and so sympatico. Why from that period and that place, I don’t know, but they were.
    I wasn’t anywhere near to coming from an immigrant background. Both sides of my family had been in theUS for one or two centuries. I was a WASP , a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, supposedly the ruling class, but not if you were poor, of course. I always tried to underplay my WASP looks, making my hair curly ( WASP s have straight hair, including me) or reddish ( WASP s have blond hair, dishwater blond). So the city of New York itself, more than Columbia, was an education for me. I was thrown into a cultural cauldron I had never imagined before. Not to mention seeing on the nightly local television news all the gang wars that had happened that day. We didn’t have gang wars in Florida or the Midwest, that was inconceivable. And hearing so many Italian names everywhere, I fell in love with Italian food, Italian popular music and Little Italy, the Italian part of Manhattan. I learned about the films made in California in the thirties and forties, films by immigrants, or children of immigrants, such as von Sternberg, Charlie Chaplin, Max von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Here too was yet another cultural input, a different way of seeing things.

    School had always seemed very democratic