THE HITE FILE Childhood: Shere (pronounced Cher) Hite was born Shirley Diana Gregory in 1942 in Kansas City, Mo., to a teenage mother and a serviceman. Their marriage was brief, and she was later adopted when her mother remarried. She was raised largely by grandparents and an aunt. Education: Bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Florida at Gainesville. Attended graduate school at Columbia University in New York, where she modeled part-time. Columbia is also where she began researching and writing about sex. She says she received a Ph.D. in international relations from Nihon University in Mishima, Japan. Personal:  In 1985 at age 42, she married a German musician 19 years her junior. She moved to Europe with him in 1989, revoked her U.S. citizenship and became a German citizen. They were married 15 years. She now lives in London. Books: 12, including The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, published in 1976, and The Shere Hite Reader: New and Selected Writings on Sex, Globalization, and Private Life, 2006. Other activities: She says that she writes newspaper articles published in Europe and Asia and that she is  a visiting professor at Nihon University in Japan, and teaches at Chongquing University in China and at Maimonides University in North Miami Beach, Fla., which trains sex therapists.

Q: You mention that your publisher told you only 2,000 copies of the originalHite Reportwould be published because he said "people are tired of feminism and sex." Now the book has sold more than 48 million copies worldwide. Why was it so successful?

A: It became so popular because it was the only book to say there is nothing wrong with women — that women can have orgasms very easily, but the kind of stimulation women need isn't being included in sex.

Q: When The Hite Report came out in 1976, could you ever have imagined it would be so culture-changing?

A: I thought it was really important. And when I started getting the replies, then I began to realize that this is extremely important. But I didn't realize that until I was in the middle of it. When the book was published, I thought the book would go into libraries and be part of academic life. I never realized it would be part of popular culture. I'm really proud to see now that it has meant something and it stands for something.

Q: What impact do you think your work has had on women over the past 30 years?

A: I think it was trying to say that women need to be half of the equation, and, if we're going to have equality in sex, it has to be re-thought because female orgasm happens in a different way than during the act. This implies many things for redefining intimate activity. I'm arguing for sex to be two bodies trying to communicate. We should be trying to get each other as aroused as possible rather than racing each other for orgasm.

Q: A culture with more sexual freedom can have some downsides — how much responsibility do you feel for the rise of pornography and what you refer to as "raunch culture"?

A: What really bothers me is when feminism or my work is blamed for these kinds of images. They're not part of what women were striving for, and that was equality during sex.

Q: Since your research method involves analyzing anonymous questionnaires — some 30,000 total over the years — how do you know that people told you the truth?

A: I felt if it were face-to-face, then they would feel intimidated and wouldn't want to speak up and answer these questions, and it would be uncomfortable. I think this is especially true for women because women had never spoken up about sex at that time. Most of the answers I received were 14 and 15 pages long, usually handwritten. Can you imagine at that time how hard it was? I still have them. They would say things like they waited and stayed up late after they put their whole family to bed and they were answering on the kitchen table and things like that, so I didn't feel inclined to disbelieve them.

Q: You say all of your research has been self-financed. Why didn't you seek grants like most researchers do?

A: If I had applied, I don't know if anybody would have understood this and why it was important to do it. It was a breakthrough in something new, to ask women themselves and to quote what women said. I've spent most of the profits I've ever made. The advance on the second book was paying people back I borrowed for research on the first. I think it was a good investment, but at the same time, I don't really know the answer to whether I would do it all again. I really don't know.

Q: How do you respond to questions about your research methods not being scientific enough?

A: I wrote at one point a 50-page essay, which is at the back of Women and Love, the third Hite report, but I defy you to find anybody who had ever read it. So at that point, I had answered on paper (every concern about) why the questions were designed that way, and how I thought they linked to other tendencies in the social sciences. I did answer that all there. Now I can answer more simply and say the findings have stood the test of time. Therefore, that's the biggest test in science. The goal was to design a questionnaire of any type — whether you were studying snails or people — that would prove to be true later.

And so this is later.

Enlarge By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY Shere Hite has published a collection of her essays on subjects from sex to globalization.