On September 10, Cher · Sherehite died at home at the age of 78.
In interviews later in life, she said she had Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Figure | Cher Heidi (Source: life images collection, via getty images)
In 1976, Heidi published the Heidi Report: A National Study of Women's Sexuality (the Chinese translation is titled Heidi's Sexuality Report: Women), which for the first time showed women's sexual experiences and feelings from the first perspective and on a large scale. Like a thunderclap on the ground, these women's sexual experiences are directly shocking and uproaring.
The Heidi Sexology Report is a testimony to a voice in the United States in the 1970s. Women who experienced the baptism of the sexual liberation movement in the 60s revealed a variety of erotic experiences in their questionnaire answers to Heidi.
Figure | Translation of The Neighbor's Wife and its Chinese
The 1960s and 1970s were a period of upheaval and change in American moral and ethical concepts. Contemporaries also famous recorders include Guy Tris, who began his writing project for The Neighbor's Wife in 1971, chronicled all kinds of sexual games and erotic entertainment in the American middle class for 9 years.
Through Heidi's report, what has been seen is that 70% of women do not orgasm through penetrating intercourse, but are able to easily orgasm through clitoral masturbation. This challenges previously argued by Freud, who believed that "a thorough vaginal orgasm" can only be achieved through penetrating sex. This greatly challenges the inherent position of men in sex.
Playboy and some magazines named her book "Hate Reports," calling it "anti-male."
Heidi completed the report with her own funds after earning a master's degree in history from Columbia University. She surveyed 78,000 surveys of women aged 14 to 78 in the United States, retracted 3,019 of them, and finally used 1,844 for statistics. Sampling bias calls into question the academic nature of its report.
Dr Ng Man Lun, the first president of the Asian Federation of Sexology and an expert on sexology in Hong Kong, once said: "Heidi's sexology report is more like a work of sexual politics than a scientific work. Fang Gang, a doctor of sociology of sex, an associate professor at the School of Humanities at Beijing Forestry University, and an executive member of the World Association of Chinese Sexologists, told deeptech: "Heidi cannot be considered a sexologist, but a journalist; the value of this book is not academic, but in presenting the diversity of sexual experiences and impacting the general public." ”
As soon as she came in, the whole venue suddenly fell silent. She was personable, very temperamental, very beautiful, and everyone was stunned. Ma Xiaonian, vice president of the Chinese Society of Sexuality, recalled to deeptech about his interest in Cher. Heidi's first impressions.
In 2005, the Chongqing Association for Science and Technology allocated 200,000 yuan to successfully hold the first international medical symposium in China. It was also the only time China held an international conference on sex medicine, and that was Heidi's first visit to China. Taking this opportunity, Heidi also accepted the invitation of Chongqing Medical University as a visiting professor.
Figure | Heidi at the International Medical Symposium (Source: Ma Xiaonian)
Figure | Heidi and Ma Xiaonian (Source: Ma Xiaonian)
Ma Xiaonian's first exposure to Heidi's work was in 1982, when Heidi's works had not yet been translated in China, and there was no "sexual medicine" related specialty in China. He had read sexual medicine textbooks in English before, but had never read a text that talked directly about sex. Heidi's book became an enlightening reading.
He was able to read the book thanks to the carelessness of customs. After obtaining a master's degree in family planning - reproductive pharmacology from Peking Union Medical College in China, Ma Xiaonian studied in the UK from 1981 to 1982. When he returned home, he brought with him 10 books on sexology, including Heidi Sexology Report: Men.
When he returned to China during the period of "removing spiritual pollution", all sex-related books were seized by the customs, and the books were placed in the trunk in reverse, with small words on the cover, and luckily missed inspection.
When Ma Xiaonian read the first English medical textbook, there was also a period of twists and turns. He found specific shelves according to the index given by the library, and found that the corresponding places on the shelves were always empty, so they were empty for several months. He wondered, how could the book be lent out forever? And the library staff is mostly women, and he is not embarrassed to ask. It wasn't until one day, when he met an old man, that he was able to ask him.
The old man asked him with a serious face: What is your major? -- Family planning. The old man checked his library card again, determined that it was a family planning major, and then relaxed his mind: you can read it.
The sex medicine textbooks that Ma Xiaonian won from the boss at the Concord Library were the sex medicine textbooks of Masters and Johnson. Masters and Johnson studied human sexuality for the first time in the lab, and they are also the character archetypes of the American drama "Master of Sex".
Another thing may better reflect the conservative and even hostile attitude of Chinese society towards sex education in the 1980s: in 1982, Academician Wu Jieping from the field of urology organized the compilation of the first sex medicine textbook "Sex Medicine". In 1989, during the "Sweep Pornography" movement, the textbook was removed from the shelves despite the fact that Wu Jieping was the dean of Union Medical College at the time.
Fang first came into contact with Heidi's books in 1998, when he was already a father. He read Heidi's Report on Sexology: Volumes for Men, which was very shocking to him with the diverse sexual depictions: "I just found out that the original man's body can be used in this way, and I didn't know it before. ”
Figure | "Hai Characteristics Report Man Volume", Future Press, 1998 edition
Heidi's Report on Sexology: Men, which shocked Ma Xiaonian and Fang Gang, was Heidi's second book, published in 1981, for which Heidi distributed 119,000 questionnaires based on 7,230 recycled papers.
Heidi's work has been translated into China since 1993, and the earliest Zhongyuan Farmers Publishing House only published the "Report on The Characteristics of the Sea", which only included his 1976 survey report on women. Fang Gang recalled that the publishing house was shut down because of the book.
In 1998, Future Press continued to publish the "Sea Characteristics Report (Men's Volume)" and "Sea Characteristics Report (Love Volume)". The Love Volume is a translation of Heidi's third book, Heidi's Family Report: Growing Up in Patriarchy, in 1994, which focuses on women and men in marital relationships.
Since then, Hainan Publishing House has been republished in the form of a series of books four times in 2002, 2008, 2011 and 2016.
Fang Gang told DeepTech that in the process of sexual counseling and marriage counseling over the years, he will recommend the Heidi Sexology Report to women with sexual arousal disorder as reading therapy materials. He also recommends this when training consultants.
It is estimated that few people will question Heidi's own sexual charm. From the photos, Heidi's blonde hair and red lips exude a strong feminine atmosphere, which is exactly the type favored by mainstream American aesthetics.
Figure | Cher Heidi (Source: Heidi official website)
Heidi was born in Missouri in 1942, and her mother was only 16 years old when she was born, and her mother even expressed to Heidi that she was reluctant to support her at that time, thinking that she was a burden.
In order to make money in college, Heidi once accepted nude photos in Playboy, which later described her as "anti-male". She shot an advertisement for the Olivetti typewriter. The ad appeared in Playboy magazine with a tagline that read, "The typewriter is so clever, she doesn't have to be." She quickly joined a group of women protesting the ad in Olivetti's office.
In 1989, Heidi moved to Europe with her father. As Heidi continued to publish her book, the attacks she received in the United States became more severe, which led him to renounce his American citizenship in 1995 and opt for German citizenship. At that time Heidi and her then-husband, the German pianist Friedrich Vuitton, who was 19 years her junior, were married to her. Herrick lived in Germany. The marriage lasted a total of 14 years, and the two divorced in 1999. Later, he married her second husband, Paul Thompson. Sullivan married and eventually settled in north London.
Today, it is not uncommon for works of art to present women's experiences from the first perspective, most notably in 1996 by Eva Berger. Ernst's self-written and self-starring film Vagina Monologue, which won the 1997 Obi Award for Best Screenplay, has been staged in more than 140 countries.
In 2018, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of British women's suffrage, bbc filmed the mini-series "She Said: Moments of Women's Lives", which consists of 8 female monologues of different ages, identities and statuses, telling representative private stories.
Figure | BBC's miniseries "She Says"
Around 2004, university students from Shanghai and Guangzhou performed the drama "Vagina Monologue" on campus, and in 2009, the Beijing Salary Transmission Drama Troupe embarked on a series of tours after receiving the original authorization. In addition, some students in Shanghai and Beijing have also made localization attempts, writing plays and performing multiple performances by interviewing Chinese women's vaginal stories.
In the exchange at the end of the 2018 performance, there were questions from the audience, unlike the American version, the Chinese original version did not have a performance of groaning. The director said that this is considering the previous performance of the American version, many male audiences enter the theater, most of the time sleepy, just waiting to see the moaning part, and then leave satisfied.
Inspired by "Vagina Monologues", in 2019, Fang Gang wrote and directed "Man Monologues" performed by Chinese white ribbon volunteers, telling topics such as "masculinity anxiety", "impotence", "rape in intimate relationships" and so on from the first perspective of men.
Fang Gang believes that the mainstream concept of Chinese has not changed much so far, but it has changed in the tributaries of subculture, but it is not as fast as imagined and expected.
Ma Xiaonian's feeling is that since the 2005 International Symposium on Sexual Medicine, the concept of sex has been "fine in 2013 and 2014, but in recent years it has been a bit withdrawn." After 2016, the Vocational Education Research Institute of the China Association of Old Professors wanted to set up a "sex yoga instructor" project, but the name could not be approved when applying, and it was eventually changed to "happiness yoga".
In 2017, the mother of a second-grade child in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou, complained that the "Sexual Health Education Reader for Primary School Students" distributed by the school was "too large" and posted pictures containing "introduction to male and female genitalia", which immediately triggered heated discussion among netizens. In the end, the school withdrew the textbook prepared by Beijing Normal University. However, in the public opinion noise, some netizens also expressed their affirmation of the textbook.
Professor Xu Tianmin, president of the Chinese Society of Sexuality, once said in an interview with Phoenix Weekly: "In the early 1980s, the sexual trend of Chinese mainland society was in a closed and conservative state. Later, it gradually opened up, and the coming momentum was still very fierce. "At the same time as this process, it is precisely the works represented by Kinsey and Heidi that are translated into the country, and they are all written by conducting behavioral research on the main respondents in a sociological way, and the specific means is to distribute questionnaires in large quantities and collect them for statistics.
Ma Xiaonian said that Heidi's questionnaire is characterized by open-ended questions, rather than letting the respondents do multiple choice questions. However, when the questionnaire is recycled and analyzed, various attitudes are still divided into three types: support, neutrality and opposition.
However, behind the questionnaire design, Heidi's own ideas are inevitably hidden. Professor He Chunrui, one of the pioneers of the Taiwanese women's movement, pointed out that she no longer regards sex as the realization of reproductive function, and the questionnaire only asks women how and how to achieve pleasure, does not presuppose the norms of marriage or moral stance, and naturally summons "souls who struggle to build a little joy in life."
He also pointed out the limitations of Heidi's 1976 survey, which only revolved around a small number of physiological parts of women. This overestimates the association between pleasure and organ sites, without considering whether discrimination and repression of women are still hidden in the overall culture of lust.
In Heidi's later writings, she also consciously expanded her perspective, and in 2006 she published Cher Cher. Heidi Reader: New and Selected Works on Sex, Globalization, and Private Life, attempts to explore women's identity from a cultural perspective.
In 2006, Heidi expressed this view in an interview with the American media: "I advocate that sex should be two bodies trying to communicate. We should arouse each other's sexual desires as much as possible, rather than competing with each other for orgasm. ”