May I please suggest the Hite Report?

 “Parents aren’t sex education experts just because they are parents.” 

-- Pepper Schwartz

By Alex P. Vidal

 

I HAVE yet to hear or meet a fellow New Yorker who condemns outgoing Governor Andrew Cuomo for allegedly sexually harassing 11 women, except perhaps those sympathetic to the governor’s alleged victims; and the political zombies who wanted Cuomo in the slammer soon.

Cuomo is still extremely popular even among the Filipino-Americans in New York.

He has the image of a rock star even after being subjected to scurrilous attacks in the press when the “aggrieved” women started to tell their shocking and rather sometimes sleazy stories one after the other.

The Italian-American author and lawyer would have been president of the United States today had fate not intervened in Joe 

Biden’s favor.

He is a father figure to many families who lost their loved ones in the pandemic, and those who availed the social and health services championed by his administration when hopelessness and despair took centerstage during the dark days of the pandemic in NY.

For many New Yorkers, “touching” a woman’s skin “without any malice” (at least this was how his supporters and the governor himself had insisted) doesn’t make him a criminal—unless he raped and killed them.

Of course, his “victims” will sharply disagree. (The disgraced governor had apologized in his press conference in Albany August 10, in fairness to him, and denied all the charges against him.)

So does other do-gooders, sympathizers and advocates of the Me Too movement, with variations of related local or international names, a social movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment where people publicize allegations of sex crimes.

 

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Attorney General Leticia James’ report was so devastating that it prompted the entire Democratic committee party, including President Biden to not only rebuke him, but also demand for his immediate resignation. 

Without beating around the bush, I like Cuomo the politician too, not the deviant persona; his style of governance and the way he handled the COVID-19 pandemic crisis that nearly turned New York State into the biggest cemetery in the world in 2020.

I watched his regular press briefings “live”—almost nonstop since the day we were all prevented from leaving our apartments when the hard lockdown was implemented lock, stock, and barrel statewide in March 2020.

I thought he was the modern Pied Piper, someone who can pull us up during the calamity and enormous uncertainty.

He exhorted New Yorkers to sustain and overcome the “temporary setback” during the pandemic’s most deadly period and earnestly mandated the social distancing and wearing of a mask.

I thought Cuomo would be a the next president especially when then President Donald Trump’s popularity started to plummet due to his indifference and lousy handling of the COVID-19.

It is okay to admire and be attracted to women, we must remind Cuomo.

But it’s not okay to inappropriately touch and sexually harass them.

“Noli me tangere” or touch me not, Jose Rizal once wrote in an 1887 novel during the colonization of the Philippines by the Spanish Empire, to describe perceived inequities of the Spanish Catholic friars and the ruling government.

Amid the hullabaloo, may I please suggest to the governor and all other “macho” chief executives to read the controversial Hite Report?

Although it is seemingly archaic, the contents about female sexuality are still very much relevant in today’s debates among the pros and cons of sexuality education in schools and communities.

The Hite Report on Female Sexuality actually challenged the sexual status quo and defied male dominance. 

 

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It became a worldwide publishing sensation, and even turned its author into a hate figure among men.

There are articles in the book that contradicted the research done by famous sexologists, Masters and Johnson, which incorporated cultural attitudes on sexual behavior.

Masters and Johnson sustained the argument that “enough clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm should be provided by thrusting during intercourse,” and the inference that the failure of this is a sign of female “sexual dysfunction.”

Society must understand the cultural and personal construction of sexual experience to make the research relevant to sexual behavior outside the laboratory, insisted Shere Hite, the book author. 

She offered that limiting test subjects to “normal” women who report orgasming during coitus was basing research on the faulty assumption that having an orgasm during coitus was typical, something that her own research strongly refuted.

The author’s biography detailed some revealing information: “Feminist and sexologist Shirley Diana Gregory -- better known as Shere Hite -- grew up in America’s bible belt, but her research into sexuality scandalized the whole country.

In her report, she posited a radical and utterly far-out theory: that women didn’t need men to give them an orgasm. 

From the time of Freud, it was widely accepted that women could only climax through penetrative sex -- ‘the great male thrust’ -- and if they couldn’t, there must be something wrong with them. 

For frustrated women faking orgasm, the report was a godsend, alerting women to their own sexual power, and informing men of the existence of the clitoris.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two dailies in Iloilo)