Back Off, Buddy

By Claudia Wallis

Ah, love in the '80s. Men who cry. Women who compete. Fathers who nurture. Mothers who assert themselves. Shared feelings between equal partners. Equal shares of housework and orgasms. Two rewarding careers; two fulfilling love lives. At last, a peaceful resolution to the war between the sexes. Right?

Well, not quite. Sure, there have been some improvements. Men do dishes after women cook, and some have even mastered the vacuum cleaner. Women, meanwhile, troop off to the office to discover the pleasures of the 16-hour workday and the rush-hour commute. Certainly, both sexes have come to appreciate better the tough role their opposite has traditionally played. There is more mutual understanding. More teamwork. Right?

Not even close, according to Shere (pronounced like share) Hite, the doyenne of sex polls, liberator of the female libido and self-described "cultural historian." With an uncanny zest for the provocative and an infallible instinct never to underestimate the popular appetite for intimate confessions, Hite is about to hit the bookstands and blitz the talk-show circuits with an elaborate (922 pages) report on American women and their relationships, her third major study in eleven years.

It is a lucrative business. The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality (1976) and The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (1981) together earned the coolly glamorous author $2.5 million. The new tome, Women and Love, a Cultural Revolution in Progress (Knopf; $24.95), is characteristically grandiose in scope, murky in methodology -- and right on target for commercial appeal. Having spent seven years analyzing a survey of the views of some 4,500 American women, Hite has concluded that they are fed up with the male of the species. "What is going on right now in the minds of women is a large-scale cultural revolution," writes Hite. "Over and over, women of all ages express their increasing emotional frustration and gradual disillusionment with their personal relationships with men."

Hite insists that despite women's liberation and the sexual revolution, women remain oppressed and even abused by men. Nearly four out of five women in her study said they still had to fight for their rights within relationships, though an even greater proportion (87%) maintained that men actually tended to become more emotionally dependent than women. They complained that they were expected to play the traditional nurturing, love- giving roles while helping out as breadwinners.

In Hite's view, one of her most disturbing and important discoveries was the pervasiveness of "private emotional violence" inflicted by men upon women. Such violence, she says, is conveyed through insults, hostility, teasing and aggressive behavior. Virtually all her respondents (92%) complained that men communicate with women in language that indicates "condescending, judgmental attitudes." Women are "caught between an anger that makes them want to leave and a longing to create love," charges the 44-year-old author. Who is to blame? No question there. "It's not us. It's men's attitudes toward women that are causing the problem," Hite told TIME last week.

Among Hite's more startling findings:

-- 95% of the women in the study reported forms of "emotional and psychological harassment" from the men they love, and 98% said that they want to make "basic changes" in their love relationships.

-- 79% said they are intensively questioning whether they should put so much energy into love relationships, making them their highest priority. Only 19% said their relationship comes first in their lives.

-- 98% wished for more "verbal closeness" with their male partners. The most frequently cited (77%) cause of women's anger: "He doesn't listen." Indeed, 71% of women in marriages of unspecified "long" duration said they have given up and no longer even try to draw their husbands out.

-- 91% of divorced women surveyed reported that they were the ones who initiated the divorce.

-- 70% of the women married five years or more said they are having extramarital affairs, more often for "emotional closeness" than for sex. The overwhelming majority (76%) said they do not feel guilty about their infidelity.

-- 87% of the married women said they have their "deepest emotional relationship" with a woman friend.

Even before Women and Love reaches bookstores at the end of this month, word of its conclusions has critics gnashing their teeth. "C'mon," says Maggie Scarf, author of Intimate Partners, a widely praised study of marriage, "this sounds like a one-sided view of the sexes. Anybody who has been married for longer than 15 minutes knows that there are problems. But this picture of pervasive and profound despair and alienation was not at all what I saw." Scarf considers certain figures, including the 70% rate of infidelity, highly improbable: "Maybe she can find that in parts of Manhattan, but I wonder about Iowa."

June Reinisch, a clinical psychologist at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, also finds Hite's statistics to be of limited value. The sample is highly self-selected, she says (indeed, only 4.5% of the 100,000 questionnaires mailed were returned), and probably reflects a disproportion of malcontents. "Unhappy people are more willing to answer these questions than happy people," says Reinisch. Others object to the vagueness of Hite's subject matter and the questions she asks.

"What does love mean as it is used in this book?" asks Dr. Thomas Szasz, the maverick psychiatrist-author (Sex by Prescription), who teaches at the State University of New York at Syracuse. "Does it mean serenity or constant sex or something else?" The survey, Szasz contends, is "sensation mongering," designed to support Hite's preconceived feminist notions. Quips Ellen Goodman, the Pulitzer-prizewinning syndicated columnist: "She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic."

Indeed, the world according to Hite is just that, a subjective view. In her report, Hite makes no pretense of maintaining the distance from her subject matter customarily expected of a social scientist. Describing the radical feminist outcry against marriage, for example -- "exploitation of women financially, physically, sexually and emotionally" -- she does not hesitate to add her opinion that it is "just and accurate." Hite's analysis is colored by her entrenched view that today's men and women are incapable of getting through to one another, that most men are treacherous troglodytes and women are socially conditioned to serve them. "According to the 'male' ideology," she asserts, "there can be no such thing as equality -- 'someone has to be on top.' " In addition, much of her analysis seems to stray from the questionnaire upon which the book is based. Indeed, as with Hite Reports I and II, the survey often seems merely to provide an occasion for the author's own male-bashing diatribes.

That said, there is little doubt that Hite has tapped into a deep vein of female dissatisfaction with love relationships. "These are not happy days between the genders," observes Sociologist Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University. "All the rules have been thrown out, and everybody has to invent them as they go along. That's tough." Because of their traditional role as arbiters of relationships, many women see themselves as having to bear the brunt of that burden. "This nation is filled with burned-out women," says Joyce Maynard, 33, the New Hampshire author (Domestic Affairs) and mother of three who writes a weekly syndicated column.

"If women are unhappier," says Maynard, "it is partly because they are trying to pull off something that can't be pulled off, except on Thursday nights in The Cosby Show. Women have been told they can have -- even ought to have -- husband, children and career, all perfectly managed. It is a lie." Through her column, Maynard has conducted a survey of her own on extramarital affairs. Of 900 replies, 800 were from women who had been unfaithful. Observes Maynard: "They feel, 'I give all day long; I want to do something for me.' "

Women's disillusionment with marriage and love is affirmed in a number of recent surveys, studies and reports. Among them:

-- A survey of 60,000 women conducted last year by Woman's Day magazine found that 38% would not choose the same spouse if they had to do it all over again. In addition, 39% said they feel like their husband's housekeeper and 27% like his mother. Only 28% said they feel like his lover.

-- A report in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family comparing 15 years of data compiled by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center concludes that marriage in the U.S. is a "weakened and declining institution," primarily because women are getting less out of it. The authors, Sociologist Norval Glenn of the University of Texas at Austin ) and Charles Weaver of St. Mary's University of San Antonio, have found that women are less happy in marriage today than in the past, probably because having a husband now means an increased load of responsibilities rather than the traditional trade-off of homemaking for financial support.

-- A 1986 survey of 34,000 women conducted by New Woman magazine confirms doubts about marriage and fidelity: 41% of unattached women surveyed said they are not looking for a relationship or are undecided. In addition, 7% of the married women and 18% of those living with someone said they were hunting for a new man. One-third of women in steady relationships said they too were on the prowl.

-- A poll by Glamour magazine this year found that an increasing number of women approve of infidelity. Of the 800 women surveyed, 18% said extramarital sex was acceptable, compared with only 12% last year. Moreover, only half of single women say marriage is "very important" to them.

The change in attitude toward matrimony is especially striking. A 1985 study of trends undertaken for Cosmopolitan magazine by the Battelle Memorial Institute's research center in Seattle concluded, as Hite does, that marriage has become less central in women's lives. The authors point to Census Bureau statistics indicating that the percentage of women ages 25 to 34 who have never married has more than doubled since 1970. This is because women are not only postponing marriage, say the authors of the Cosmo study, but increasingly avoiding it. The old economic division of labor, in which men work outside the home while women provide what economists call "home production" -- cooking, cleaning, caring for children and so on -- is gone, and thus the "gains from marriage for women have declined."

Hite is not alone in observing the demise of the notion that love " 'tis woman's whole existence," as Byron once put it. "The old female tendency to put all her eggs in the love basket has been muted," says Columnist Ellen Goodman. One by-product of this adjustment, thinks Goodman, is greater reliance by women on other women for friendship -- an observation that accords with Hite's. Psychologist Carin Rubenstein, co-author of the Redbook study, also finds this trend striking. "I've heard women say, 'Maybe I should date my husband and live with my best friend.' "

Further evidence that Hite is on to something can be found in the nation's bookstores. A brief sampler of some of the titles that have lined the shelves in the past five years: Men Who Can't Love (Evans; 1987); How to Love a Difficult Man (St. Martin's Press; 1987); Women Men Love, Women Men Leave (Clarkson Potter; 1987); Successful Women, Angry Men (Random House; 1987); Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them (Bantam; 1986); and the bluntest title of the lot, No Good Men (Simon & Schuster; 1983). Most are how- to books that advise women on dealing with the same troubling male shortcomings cited by the women in Hite's study: an inability to convey their emotions, a fear of commitment and intimacy, and an obsession with dominance.

Hollywood has begun to cash in on the undercurrent of women's rage at men. In Fatal Attraction, currently the nation's top box-office draw, Actress Glenn Close enacts the ultimate female revenge fantasy. While Close's character eventually reveals herself as a murderous psycho, she has a number of exchanges with her married lover early in the film that hit home with every woman ever scorned ( "I woke up. You weren't here. I hate that"). Says one Washington woman who saw the film with two girlfriends: "Afterward, we talked about all the boyfriends we ever had wanted to murder and schemed about how we should have done it."

Women's disappointment in the inability of men to communicate is perhaps the most universal of Hite's themes. "This is the No. 1 complaint of women," says Atlanta-based Writer Maxine Rock, whose 1986 book, The Marriage Map, chronicled the stages of matrimony. Psychiatrist Brian Doyle at Georgetown University notes that his male patients "often complain that they are not good at expressing their feelings."

Hite's observation that extramarital flings are largely a response to these deficiencies rings true in many female ears. "I know so many women who fool around outside their marriages," says Kathy Murr, 40, a twice-divorced Chicago dress designer. "Basically, it's the emotion and the attention they want."

Still, many of Hite's most shocking statistics seem dubious -- and indeed are at odds with other major studies. A 1987 Harris poll of 3,000 people found that family life is a source of great satisfaction to both men and women, with 89% saying their relationship with their partner is satisfying. A Redbook magazine survey released last month of 26,000 women found that sexual satisfaction has increased: 43% of respondents said they were "very satisfied," compared with 33% in a similar 1974 Redbook poll. Marital satisfaction was also up.

Reinisch of the Kinsey Institute is one of many social scientists who challenge Hite's finding that 70% of women married more than five years are having affairs. Kinsey's figure for infidelity, reported in 1953, was 26%, and more recent studies, including the Redbook poll, have shown little change. Others dispute Hite's allegation that 91% of divorcees initiated the split-up. Women do take the first step in the majority of divorces, according to Berkeley Psychologist Judith Wallerstein, but her own studies indicate that the proportion is closer to two-thirds.

Hardest to swallow is the unrelieved bitterness and rage against men expressed throughout the report's pages. Women and Love so resonates with angry voices that the volume fairly vibrates in one's hand. Charges one of Hite's women: "Every man you meet still tries to hump you every way he can. It's about time we humped them back." Blasts another: "Men think they are so mature, but deep down they are such babies. They expect to be catered to. They whine and complain about everything."

While some of Hite's women are more moderate, even conciliatory, the emphasis on the strident seems off-key to many observers. Grace Pierce, 31, a Houston architect, objects to Hite's portrayal of women as "total victims." Says she: "I don't buy that." Women used to blame themselves for everything, observes Eileen O'Grady, 31, a business writer at the Houston Post. "Now we are saying, 'It's his fault,' and that's just as bad."

Many of those who take the strongest exception to Hite's often harsh tone are men. Her report and the spate of good-women, bad-men advice books indicate that womenare adopting a "new sexism," according to California Educator Warren Farrell, author of last year's Why Men Are the Way They Are and one of the first male board members of the National Organization for Women. Charges Melvyn Kinder, a Los Angeles psychologist and author: "If there is a growing lack of communication between the sexes, it is precisely because of books like Hite's."

The explanation for the extreme views and exaggerated statistics in Hite's report may rest with her methodology. The author went about gathering her data by mailing 100,000 questionnaires to a variety of women's groups in 43 states, ranging from feminist organizations to church groups to garden clubs. Her questionnaire listed 127 essay questions on subjects ranging from dating to hobbies to parents, many of them rather abstract. (Admits Hite: "You can quantify orgasms, but you can't quantify love.") After receiving the first 1,500 responses, Hite says, she made a demographic comparison between her respondents and the general U.S. female population. Then she sought to fill in spots to ensure a sample more representative of all American women by age and geographic distribution, education level, religion and economic status. Hite admits that she did not conduct a truly scientific survey: "It's 4,500 people. That's enough for me."

Many statisticians take issue with this approach. Hite's choice of women's organizations means she was getting mostly one kind of person -- "joiners," observes Regina Herzog, a research scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. The very low 4.5% response rate is also worrisome. "Five percent could be any oddballs," says Herzog. "We get pretty nervous if respondents in our own surveys go under 70%."

Pollster Hal Quinley of Yankelovich Clancy Shulman also wonders about what this small group of respondents represents. "You would expect people who returned the questionnaire to be atypical," he says. "If sex was not very important, then the woman wouldn't answer. If it was a burning issue, she would." Other pollsters charge that Hite's questions are flawed. Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center is skeptical about Hite's finding that 98% of women want to make basic changes in their relationships. No one could disagree with the proposition that things aren't perfect, he says, but "any question you asked that got 98% is either a wrong question or wrongly phrased."

Nonetheless, even the experts are reluctant to dismiss Hite out of hand. "It's very hard to get a representative group," says Quinley. "I wouldn't say it kills the whole thing." Berkeley Psychologist Bernard Apfelbaum, a Hite supporter, believes it is not important to get a completely representative sample when delving into the field of sex and love. By virtue of their willingness to participate in the survey, Hite's women may be unusual, he says, "but they are giving voice to a problem in ways other women cannot."

How to explain the anger in Hite's survey? And, for that matter, why the more general pattern of anti-male literature at a time when, by many measures, women's lot has radically improved? "What has happened," offers Gloria Steinem, feminist author and a founder of Ms. magazine, "is that expectations have increased as reality has gotten better." The balance of power in relationships used to be about 60-40, she contends. "Now we're trying for 50-50. You have to point out the problems, and that's what some of these books are doing."

"Women are asking more of men," maintains Jennifer Knopf, co-director of the adult-sexuality program at Northwestern Medical School in Chicago. "As women assume more of the men's roles in society, it's expected and natural, like yin and yang, that men should balance that out." Unfortunately, today's "new woman" is too often contending with the same old man. Women continue to do the lion's share of the housekeeping, child care and cooking, even in households where both partners work. Glamour magazine surveys have found, for example, that the proportion of women who claim that they share child-care duties equally with their partners has actually dropped in the past three years, from 40% to 31%. "The big disappointment is that younger men aren't that different from their fathers," says University of Texas Sociologist Glenn.

Some observers believe the sexual revolution has directly contributed to women's restlessness and discontent. The liberated woman's adoption of freer sexual attitudes can get in the way of emotional intimacy, suggests Connaught Marshner, executive editor of the Family Protection Report newsletter in Washington. "Unless the woman basically coaches the man in how to achieve intimacy, he won't," says Marshner. "He has to be motivated and he has to be taught. If a man knows he can get you to go to bed with him, he's not going to bother to be interested in your personality. And that's what Hite is finding." Hite writes that most women, after the attempts of the past ten to 20 years to "have sex like men" -- by which she means they do "not connect sex to emotions or a relationship" -- have found this approach to be unsatisfying.

Hite did not ask men to comment on the changes of the past 15 years in this study. If she had, she likely would have heard complaints from them too. Many seem to feel that women's elevated expectations are a little unfair. After all, men are still in the throes of adjusting to how women have changed, and to expect men to metamorphose overnight may be too much. "The past ten years have been damn difficult for middle-class men who have tried to reinforce their roles instead of adapting to the new era," observes Fred Rhodes, 34, publicity director for Texas Children's Hospital, who has been married for ten ^ years. "A lot of men are still making adjustments to the fact that their wife is not just like dear old mom." Says Randy Treichler, 31, a married graduate student at the University of California at Davis: "Both men and women in our generation have learned to open up and talk. I don't see a return to the old male-female roles. Our thinking is very influenced by the changes that came about in the 1960s."

Psychologists and sociologists defend postliberation men, saying that many have indeed become more sensitive and responsive in relationships. "Communication has been improved in recent years, though it is still a long way from where it should be," says Graham Spanier, professor of human development and family studies at Oregon State University. Observes E. James Lieberman, a Washington psychiatrist who specializes in couples therapy: "Women are still giving more than they get, but I think it's getting better. We are in the middle of a revolution, and it's moving in the direction we want."

But whether the recent flurry of accusatory women's books is promoting that revolution or setting it back is a matter of debate. Steinem believes some of the new volumes on women and their relationships, including Hite's latest study, are helpful. They enable women to examine what she calls the "internal barriers" to equality. In the late '60s and '70s, says Steinem, women focused on external barriers to equality such as a lack of job opportunities and low representation in government. With the help of books like Women and Love, she believes, women can now overcome internalized obstacles like their feeling that they must "define their success in terms of human relationships."

Others strongly disagree. "Books like Hite's encourage women to take the easy way out and just blame everything on men," charges Author Warren Farrell. He fears that the books are feeding into a "support system" in which women console one another by blaming men for their difficulties. He warns that this tactic will backfire. "This male-bashing makes women more suspicious and distrustful and demanding toward men," explains Farrell, "which causes men to withdraw, which causes women to get angrier."

Penny Kaganoff, who has reviewed several examples of the genre in her capacity as an editor at Publishers Weekly, agrees. "With more and more of these books, women are becoming more worried and more nervous about having a good relationship, and they are hearing their biological clock tick louder," % she says. "These books are less than helpful." Betty Friedan, godmother of the feminist movement, also warns of "books that prey on the transitional stage" in the sexual revolution, when women are still grappling with unaccustomed challenges.

Hite, for her part, sees her study as a positive force. Indeed, despite the bleakness of her data, the author is hopeful about the possibilities for change opened up by her research. "I'm providing the road map for men to see what women feel works in relationships. Society is creating a certain dynamic between men and women, and men are behaving badly because of this," she says. "I don't think men are born to behave that way." Pulling a sort of reverse Henry Higgins, she sees no fundamental reason why a man can't be more like a woman.

The hitch may be that for men to be so, women will have to further alter their expectations. As Farrell points out, despite their interest in openness and sensitivity, "most women still emphasize economics over intimacy" in seeking a male partner. Chances are they cannot have it both ways. "Many of the characteristics that make a man successful in his profession -- mental toughness, discipline, intensity, willingness to work long hours away from home -- can make him difficult for women to deal with," says Farrell. He believes there are many sensitive, willing "new men" out there, but they are rejected by women on the traditional grounds that they are not successful enough.

There is an irony in Hite's ideology. Women are finding that they cannot have it all: they are staggering under the burden of trying to be all things to all people -- the nurturing parent, the successful careerist, the sexual athlete. Now they are asking men to play all these roles too. Can this work, or will it merely leave everybody frazzled? And even if it can work, and both men and women can succeed in playing all these roles, what then will they need each other for? What will have happened to the partnership, to love? Maybe Katharine Hepburn has the answer. "Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other," she once said. "Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then."

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York, with other bureaus