The Disappearance of Shere Hite, 2023.
Directed by Nicole Newnham.
SYNOPSIS:
Shere Hite’s bestselling book The Hite Report liberated the female orgasm by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous surveys. Her findings rocked the American establishment and opened current conversations about gender and sexuality.
The latest documentary from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp) practically feels like a feat of public service, so bafflingly little-known is the work of sex educator Shere Hite. Through an array of fascinating archive footage and contemporary interviews with Hite’s friends, lovers, fellow activists, and even her former neighbour Kiss frontman Gene Simmons (!), Newnham crafts a studious, entertaining portrait of a trailblazer still deserving of her full, fair due.
The doc’s shrewdly selected opening clip shows Hite attempting to conduct an interview in 1976 when, while discussing female sexuality, a male crew member can be heard sniggering off-screen. And when pressed on the “dangerous” nature of her ground-breaking research into both female and male sexual mores, retorts, “Equality doesn’t seem dangerous to me.”
There’s a deeply tragic irony that Hite, who passed away from illness in 2020, so desperately fought so long for women to be seen, only for her own work to be industriously downplayed over the last three decades. Newnham’s densely-packed two-hour doc examines not only the nature of Hite’s work and the means through which it evaporated into the cultural ether, but the wider life and times of the woman herself.
Hite’s controversial 1976 sex study The Hite Report sought to get to the heart of societal inequality by surveying women about their own sexual experiences and interests, given how women have historically been walled off from sexual education and expression by a patriarchy keen to preface its own pleasure. Hite’s decision to carry out the survey was informed by her own early experiences with sexism at Columbia University, where her authorship of papers was questioned and she was encouraged to instead use her beauty to get ahead.
And in one sense that’s what Shere did; a natural for the camera, she modelled extensively throughout her life, even posing for several Roger Moore-era James Bond movie posters and later modelling for Playboy. That Hite both challenged the patriarchy while herself being an openly sexual being was a dichotomy which naturally made conservative heads spin, and it was just a matter of time before the slut-shaming started.
The conclusions of Hite’s surveys of both women and men – that pleasure need not revolve around a man, many men feel emotionally neglected in their lives, and fidelity is near-equal among sexes – caused a major stir, enough that even her own publisher limited its initial print run, gave it little publicity, and later attempted to deny her owed royalties. The media, still averse to airing the word “clitoris” on television, quickly piled on knee-jerk criticism, often from people who hadn’t read the studies, misrepresented Hite’s conclusions, and framed her work as part of a wider culture war against men.
It’s tough not to cringe watching Hite fastidiously defend her work against masses of insecurely irate men; a segment in which she goes on Oprah and stares down an audience comprised entirely of men is especially harrowing, given the misplaced rage these men feel for Hite and her studies. On a broader level, there was a concerted effort to discredit Hite’s work as unscientific due to her non-traditional surveying methods, no matter that getting an even distribution of the population on a subject like sex almost a half-century ago was unsurprisingly incredibly difficult.
The unfortunate circumstances which caused Hite to become a pariah form a fairly small part of the doc’s back-end. Her exhaustion with defending her work from bad faith actors ultimately led to a disastrous interview on A Current Fair and, eventually, a quiet exit from the U.S. entirely, moving her base to Europe where her findings were considered less contentious.
The evaporation of Hite’s reputation dovetailed quite upsettingly into a wider backlash against feminism throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, after which Hite’s future works were largely denied publication in the U.S., financially stonewalling her in such a large market. Several subjects persuasively argue that this was merely another facet of a male-driven effort to silence a powerful feminist voice and conceal crucial knowledge for women.
But with any luck, Newnham’s film will shine a bright light on Hite’s achievements and legacy, while also serving as an intimate exploration of the woman self, brought to life by velvet-voiced narrations from her personal journals courtesy of producer Dakota Johnson. This comprehensive profile of unsung feminist-sexologist Shere Hite does belated justice to a crucial, infuriatingly erased voice. Don’t be shocked if Jessica Chastain gets cast in a biopic any day now.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
