Review: Hite 'lite'

'Sex & Business: Ethics of Sexuality in Business and the Workplace'
By Shere Hite
Financial Times-Prentice Hall, 221 pages

Tell us whether you think women are seen more positively in the workplace today than 10 years ago.

October 24, 2000
Web posted at: 2:24 p.m. EDT (1824 GMT)

In this story: Bad boys, bad men Living in the past Girls in the (victim)hood Sexual harassment, more or less RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Larry Keller
CNN.com/career Senior Writer

(CNN) -- Feminist researcher and author Shere Hite envisions a working world in which nary a sexual tension exists. It's a world in which men and women become "teammates" and "office buddies."

Presumably, you can visit this place when you read Hite's latest book, "Sex & Business." The dust jacket declares: "No other book delivers such innovative and decisive solutions for the new workscape."

The truth is that "Sex & Business" is woefully short on solutions and excruciatingly long on male-bashing diatribes. It should have been titled: "The Hate Report."

Here are some of Hite's tenets in what she describes as a kind of continuum of discrimination against women by men from boyhood.

•   Around puberty, Hite tells us, boys are taunted, hazed and bullied by older boys, teaching them to fear and respect men in groups and to avoid and feel nervous in the presence of career women.

•   Men, Hite writes, are preventing significant numbers of women from serving in upper management and on boards of directors because they're prejudiced. Hite goes on to undermine her own bias by quoting the editor of a newspaper who cites marriage, pregnancy, child-rearing, lack of day care and valuing of women at work among reasons more women aren't in top positions.

•   Women working in corporate offices, Hite writes, feel divided loyalties between male executives and female colleagues. Why? Because they grew up scared of their fathers, as did their mothers, and this "creates a habit of acceding to males, especially males in power."

Hite writes: "What needs to be developed is a new friendship between fathers and daughters -- relationships in which fathers reach out a hand to their daughters, provide a real relationship that neither excludes the mother, nor ridicules or trivializes her." She gives no credit to such organizations as Dads & Daughters, and doesn't mention ever seeing such sights as a group of fathers coaching girls' soccer games and other events.

Reading "Sex & Business" is like going on a surreal sci-fi trip into the past. Many aspects of the workplace and society that Hite describes all but disappeared a generation ago, if not earlier.

Hite says the large number of women in today's work force generates a "new atmosphere" and "a new social experiment." You'd swear the women's movement was in its infancy.

A man, Hite writes, may decline to promote or mentor a woman for fear of office gossip that he's having sex with her. In 1960, maybe. But in 2000?

And women, Hite maintains, don't form close friendships, in part because they fear being labeled as lesbians: "'Lesbian' is the bogey-word employed to intimidate any woman who might try to form a primary relationship with another woman -- in business or buying an apartment with a friend," Hite writes.

Does anybody but Hite seriously think this is a widespread concern? Her time warp extends to what she says are societal attitudes about boys and girls, men and women.

•  Since childhood, she writes, "Most men have been taught to avoid thinking 'like a woman' (since women are illogical by nature, weak-brained!)." The parenthetical clause is Hite's.

•  When a man announces he has fallen in love and plans to get married, Hite maintains, the reactions are mostly negative. To buttress her point, the author alludes to a character in Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms." Never mind that the novel was published in 1929 and maybe -- just maybe -- men's attitudes toward women have changed since then. Suggesting that Hemingway reflects most men's views of women is about as realistic as thinking that Hite's harangues represent the thinking of most women.

•  The birth of a boy is greeted with jubilation as opposed to that of a girl. With a girl, Hite asserts, the attitude is, "Well, then, she can help her mother with the housework."

A favorite Hite tactic is to cite a purported example of a negative male attitude toward women and present it as a pervasive sentiment among all men.

HITE, HEARTH AND HOME
	In "Sex & Business," Shere Hite suggests that there's no place like a multi-mother home. More

She mentions Demi Moore's character in director Barry Levinson's 1994 film "Disclosure," and Glenn Close's role in the 1987 "Fatal Attraction" as evidence that men continue to wield a subconscious double standard in judging women. Career women are today's "bad girls," she says.

Of course she neglects to mention that Demi Moore also played a Navy SEAL trainee who was tougher than most of the men in Ridley Scott's "G.I. Jane" (1997). Or that Moore played a tenacious military prosecutor who got the best of Jack Nicholson in the 1992 Rob Reiner film of Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men."

Jodie Foster was hardly eye candy in Jonathan Demme's 1991 "Silence of the Lambs." And Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley character has always come across as being more rugged than her male colleagues in "Alien" (1979), "Aliens" (1986), "Alien³" (1992) and "Alien: Resurrection" (1997).

Shere Hite

Maybe Hite doesn't get to the movies much. In fact, "Disclosure," a screen adaptation of Michael Crichton's 1993 book, seems to be the celluloid equivalent of a hot poker to Hite's eye. She denigrates it repeatedly.

Hite also says career women and women in authority are depicted in the media as "screaming ogres and tyrants." As an example, she mentions the former British prime minister, the Lady Margaret Thatcher. But this isn't a depiction commonly suffered by former Philippine President Corazon Aquino, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto or Elizabeth Dole, former candidate for the U.S. Republican Party's presidential nomination. Hite doesn't mention them.

Time and again, Hite makes sweeping assertions about men and societal attitudes toward women without backing them up. She's entitled to her opinions, of course, but she peppers her text with references to Hite Research International -- her corporate base of operations -- to lend credence to her claims.

In a chapter on sexual harassment, Hite gives a misleading and incomplete explanation of what it is. She writes: "Basically it is sexual pressure by someone senior to someone junior whose job or income could be affected by their response."

HITE AND HIZZONER
	Shere Hite talked to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for her book -- before his exit from the United States Senate race. More

True, as far as it goes. But these quid pro quo incidents comprise a mere 5 percent of cases filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), according to Dennis M. Powers, author of "The Office Romance" Playing With Fire Without Getting Burned" (AMACOM, 1998).

Far more common, Powers reveals, are incidents of sexual harassment that create what's termed a "hostile environment" in the workplace. This less clearly defined area of the law can include everything from sexual touching to vulgar language, off-color jokes, sexual propositions and personal questions. And it doesn't necessarily involve a superior and subordinate.

Hite also refers to "the increasing number of sexual harassment lawsuits." While certainly a serious problem, the number of complaints filed with the EEOC in the past five years has fluctuated little. The number of complaints filed by men, however, has risen at a higher rate than overall complaints, a fact that Hite doesn't explore.

Perhaps Hite, who lives in Great Britain, is alluding to that country's sexual harassment issues. Clearly, many of the people she interviewed are British. But she lectures in the United States and sells books there, too -- it might be assumed she's familiar with the American scenario.

Today, many companies are combating sexual harassment by instituting written policies regulating employee behavior and conducting seminars on the subject. Hite's answer is for corporations to promote more women and hire more women as executives.

QUICK VOTE
	Do you think there's been much improvement in how women are perceived in the workplace in the past 10 years? Yes. I think women are much more highly regarded now in the career world than they were a decade ago. Yes and no -- or no and yes: I see progress in some areas, but a lot of improvement is still needed. No. Most of what's touted as progress for women in work is based on rare instances and not the norm. View Results

As for advice on how men and women can communicate more effectively so that they can become "teammates" and "office buddies," Hite offers what she terms "brain software commands."

•  "Software to delete: 'Women are inferior. Women are not made for business, but for love and sex.'

"Software to install: 'Women, like men, have many sides to their personalities and identity. Women vary.'"

•  "Software to delete: 'I grew up to believe work and business would be an all-male environment, and that women do not belong there.'

"Software to install: 'Working together with women is normal today, and offers new energy and vitality. I like it.'"

That's as profound as "Sex & Business" gets. Unless you've been in a coma for 25 years, these are lessons you've already learned.

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June 13, 2000
Global struggle for women's rights spotlighted at New York meeting
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Women poised for real revolution in the legal profession
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Clinton announces proposals to narrow women's salary gap
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Women walk the tightrope in Silicon Valley
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Women reach for equality in Africa, Asia
August 9, 1999

Dads & Daughters
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Hite Research International

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