The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a cogent documentary that argues for the late sex researcher’s contributions to the feminist movement, starts with a bracing news clip from 1976: Hite, her signature strawberry blonde curls tied in a low ponytail, responds coolly to a female news interviewer’s question about her book’s focus on masturbation. Hite calls the popularity of masturbation among the thousands of American women she surveyed a “cause for celebration”, as it shows that women know how to have orgasms when and how they want. Cut to 1994, Hite with another news interviewer shocked at Hite’s frankness 18 years before – her confidence on the language and centrality of female sexuality was startling then, and still invigorating now.
The Hite Report, as her groundbreaking 1976 survey of thousands of women’s individual sexual experiences was called, is according to the film (and to the surprise of some who helped publish it) the 30th bestselling book of all time, but it’s unlikely you’ll find it mentioned among younger feminists today. The nearly two-hour film from director Nicole Newnham (also behind 2020’s Oscar-nominated Crip Camp) interrogates that absence. It persuasively makes the case that Hite, who argued that most women cannot orgasm from penetrative intercourse alone, deserves renewed recognition as a feminist trailblazer, particularly in the still-fraught arena of sexual politics, self-knowledge and liberation.
The film opens in medias res, when the young Hite, who died in 2020 after a long illness, moves to New York as a poor graduate student in the late 60s. Hite’s journals, read in at times awkward voiceover by executive producer Dakota Johnson, reveal a fiery intellectual passion and painful self-awareness. Desperate for money to fund her academic pursuits and stifled by the chauvinism of male-dominated Columbia, she turns to modeling for money and the women’s lib movement for purpose. (Both her modeling photos – Hite had a doe-like, pre-Raphaelite beauty, even in Playboy shots – and archival footage of feminist protests and meetings provide the film ample and enjoyable visual material.) Hite’s surveys – she queried over 15,000 anonymous women in her lifetime, according to the postscript – grew out of her participation in the 70s feminist scene. She was a friend of Flo Kennedy’s and associate of the National Organization for Women, with a type of gamine glamour that mirrored Gloria Steinem.
Newnham’s film ably conveys the rise and fall of Hite’s reputation in the US. She started as a firebrand eager to spar with those who dismissed her findings or, as demonstrated in numerous teeth-grinding clips, viewed women’s ability (or biology) to orgasm without intercourse threatening to men, and hardened into a celebrity haunted by negative press. The latter half of the film, which covers Hite’s less successful surveys on men and women’s ideas on love as well as her self-imposed exile to Europe, attempts a swift summary of the rise of the religious right and conservative backlash to sexual rights. It works, assuming that the viewer has some background knowledge of American political history to fill in the broad sweep.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite echoes numerous other films which have reconsidered media treatment of public women, especially those who challenged rigid cultural roles for women – Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, Britney Spears, Monica Lewinsky and Pamela Anderson, among others. The talking heads attest to Hite’s personal feelings about criticism of her methodology and defensiveness of her findings, but the archival television clips speak for themselves: an ambush interview by Maury Povich; a condescending Australian interviewer who mocks her anger when she walks out; the target of literal finger pointing at an Oprah taping with an entirely male audience (even Oprah seems to realize, in the moment, that the stunt was a bad idea.) Who wouldn’t feel frustrated?
Still, the film could’ve stood to press a little harder into Hite’s methodology and complicated reputation without discrediting her work. As full-throated as the sexism was against her, to the point where she lost her book deal and spent her later years with vaguely discussed money problems, surely there was substance to some criticism of her work’s limitations. Discussion of that wouldn’t undercut her legacy, which is convincingly argued in this ultimately absorbing portrait of a complex, at times contradictory woman – shy and flamboyant, unyielding and wounded, a truth-seeker who deserves resurged acknowledgement.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
