The Hite report on the family : growing up under patriarchy / Shere Hite.

Author
Hite, Shere [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
New York : Grove Press, 1995.
Description
xxiv, 424 pages ; 24 cm

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    Summary note
    The Hite Report on the Family will cause you to rethink your childhood, your relationships, and quite possibly your life. It is a powerful and original analysis of the changing shape of private life, a profoundly optimistic and forward-looking answer to the dangerous nuclear-family-only nostalgia for the fifties that pervades the ongoing national debate on family values. Shere Hite has listened carefully to the real stories of real people and has developed a fascinating new framework for understanding growing up, based on first-person data rather than on a preconceived model or status quo. In this book, Hite becomes the first person to give theoretical legitimacy to all of the infinite ways that we live as "families," whether as single parents, as same-sex parents, in traditional family groups, or alone. In The Hite Report on the Family Hite challenges established views, arguing that the family is not collapsing but being democratized. Hite introduces a new theory of male eroticism by investigating why so many men and boys confuse sex and violence; she presents a lively new portrait of girls questioning their own sexual identity; and she confounds assumptions of a female "puberty" necessarily parallel to the male. Her questions are provocative and intimate: Do you know how your parents felt about having you? Did your father or mother look at pornography? At what age were your children closest to you? Do men raised by single mothers enjoy better relationships with women? Has children's respect for their mothers increased with the rise in single and employed mothers? With The Hite Report on the Family Shere Hite lights the way to understanding change in the family as the constructive result of choice - not as a moral crisis, but as a successful evolution toward private democracy
    Notes
    Originally published: Great Britain : Bloomsbury Pub., 1994.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • pt. I. Memories of early childhood
    • 1. The eroticism of the mother
    • Dream sequences of childhood
    • Memories of the mother's breasts, age six-twelve
    • The isolation of the body
    • When you're "too old" to be touched
    • Body intimacy in families
    • The family defines "sex" for the child (forbidden adult-child dialogues)
    • Archetypes of the mother
    • The mother as the erotic centre of the home
    • The taboo against women touching or being intimate
    • Mary the icon : clichés about mothers
    • Do parents own the child's body?
    • Mothers talk about their "sexual" feelings for their children
    • Sensuality, eroticism and sexuality in the family
    • 2. Violent physical intimacy
    • The construction of sexuality and eroticism through spanking and physical punishment
    • Love-hate for parents
    • Punishment, discipline and the definition of love
    • Spanking and sado-masochism
    • The influence of spanking and beating on fantasies
    • The hierarchical psyche ; Spanking and sexuality
    • What does the physical assault mean?
    • Sexual abuse of girls
    • Afterword.
    • pt. IV. Democratization of the family : a Renaissance for the West
    • A democratic revolution in the family
    • Towards a new theory of the psycho-sexual development of children
    • The "holy family" of Jesus, Mary and Joseph
    • The psyche of patriarchy : a new way of seeing how we group up : results of this study
    • History and theory of the family : personal and political
    • An authoritarian family does not support a democratic political system
    • The political history of the family
    • The family is a political institution
    • The politics of female sexuality in the family
    • Isn't the family a "natural", biological institution?
    • The family creates human nature
    • The rights of the child in a democratized family
    • Children need choices
    • Alternative homes for children
    • Thirty-three million "street children" : where is their home?
    • The cult of the "holy family" in twentieth-century psychoanalysis
    • Why psychologizing the family doesn't work
    • Definitions of love and power
    • Emotional categories created by patriarchy
    • Love and power between parents and children
    • Does "love" include sex? The body?
    • Inequality between mothers and fathers : is this "love"?
    • Love lost and making the wrong decisions
    • New families, building bridges
    • Single parent families
    • Democracy of the heart : a new politics for the twenty-first century-- Moving to the future of family and society with a more mature view
    • Hite research questionnaire on the family.
    ISBN
    • 0802115705
    • 9780802115706
    LCCN
    94042157
    OCLC
    31656098
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