Documentary Review: 'The Disappearance of Shere Hite'

The Disappearance of Shere Hite (2023)

Directed by Nicole Newnham

Written by Documentary

Narrated by Dakota Johnson

Release Date January 20th, 2023

Published August 27th, 2023

I pride myself on being aware of cultural phenomena, even ones that happened before I was born. I have made efforts to be aware of many odd little corners of pop ephemera from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And, of course, there were inescapable phenomena such as Woodstock or Disco, Roots as both a book and a TV Miniseries. I made it my business to know at least a little about a lot of things. So how did I not know about Shere Hite? Her series of books called The Hite Report were a massive phenomenon. She sold millions of copies, appeared on every talk show of the 70s and 80s and into the early 90s.

And yet, I don't recall anything about her. The documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite makes a remarkable case that Shere Hite's legacy was buried intentionally by a culture terrified of having a genuine conversation about sex and frightened of a woman who spoke openly about male sexual insecurities. What Hite did could not have been more rigorous and thoughtful and she was punished for it with exile after years and years of men, especially those who had not actually read her book, bashing her in print and in television interviews. It cannot be called a coordinated attack, there was no one man behind removing Shere Hite's legacy, but there were many men, a confederacy of dunces, who worked to dismiss, undermine and destroy a prominent female intellectual and feminist.

In many ways, the story of Shere Hite is the story of a woman living her life online in 2023. Even before the invention of Twitter where anonymous pundits can share uninformed opinions from the comfort of made up personas, Shere Hite was being met by waves of men who sought any reason to discredit and demean her work, her effort, and her life in general. Whether it was pointing out that she worked as a model and occasionally posed nude, including in Playboy, or just out and out lying about the methodology behind her writing, men called Shere Hite a whore and a liar all while rarely, if ever, confronting her actual findings and what they tell us about the modern sexual attitudes of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s.

Hite's first book, The Hite Report, sent out thousands of anonymous questionnaires with deeply personal and sexual questions specifically for women. The goal was to create a safe space for women to talk about their bodies, their desires and whether they are sexually satisfied in their current relationships. Hite received thousands of detailed responses from women addressing sex from different economic statuses, racial and religious categories, and so much more. What she found was that a lot of women were convinced that something was wrong with them and it meant that they could not reach orgasm. One of the most controversial theories that the book put forward was that clitoral stimulation and not vaginal penetration was more likely to produce a satisfying orgasm.

Many of the most vocal critics of Shere Hite read second hand accounts of this result and took it as an insult to their sexual talent. Hite's results were not that no woman could achieve orgasm via penetration. Rather, she merely pointed out that the most likely way for many women to achiever orgasm was through direct clitoral stimulation. This is not a controversial point but many who fear women's sexual power took it as an offense. Hite's only point, a very good one, was that if a woman is struggling in her sex life then she may be part of a large percentage of women for whom clitoral stimulation and penetration were needed to achieve orgasm.

It was advice and intelligent observation and, for reasons that add up to a lot of masculine insecurity, men came out of the woodwork to attack Shere Hite. But they could not stop her from being successful. The Hite Report sold millions of copies and she fought and clawed to be paid what she was worth for the book, battling her male dominated publisher every step of the way, from getting the book printed to getting paid what she was owed for the work. Then, Shere Hite turned her attention to male sexuality with her second edition of The Hite Report and found herself even more in the crosshairs of insecure, angry men.

Shere Hite collected the anonymous thoughts of thousands of men discussing sex, their life, their background, and their emotional health. Many of her critics attacked Hite for talking with anonymous men, but the reality is quite obvious, most men, most people in general, are not going to talk about deeply private information in a public fashion. Anonymous responses freed these men from the concern of being judged for answers. A public, in the open, survey would not get the same kind of depth or honesty in its findings and it was deeply disingenuous of critics to raise this as a criticism while knowing that they themselves would not answer honest, public questions about sex or even emotional or mental health.

But that's merely a side point because, once again, what Shere Hite discovered in her research was merely that men feel insecure sexually and emotionally on a regular basis but do not feel that they have an outlet for these feelings. Society conditions men to hide their emotions out of fear of being seen as weak or lesser than other men. This is not, in any way, a controversial result. Shere Hite merely confirmed basic common sense that most people, at their core, struggle with expressing themselves either sexually or emotionally and it tends to be more prominent among men who feel that they would be judged by other men for expressing any kind of weakness.

And for this observation and her genuine compassion and curiosity, Shere Hite spent decades being berated, belittled and undermined by men and by other women whose own insecurity drove them to cling to the status quo in public while suffering in private from the exact kinds of fears and feelings that Shere Hite was shining a light on. The Disappearance of Shere Hite uses archival footage of Hite's appearances on some of the biggest American talk shows in history to underline the point of how she was being reasonable and compassionate and how so many men felt the need to attack her in order to hide their own, quite obvious insecurity or genuine ignorance.

Shere Hite had a curiosity about humanity, about human nature and a desire to help people. She used the methodology of the survey to ask good questions that could draw genuine conclusions from which she extrapolated results that were intended to tell people they were not alone. You are not alone in struggling in your sex life or your emotional life. It's okay to talk about these things with people you care about and who care about you. It's okay to need help whether it is with sex or emotional health. You are normal. If you cannot have an orgasm you are not broken, you simply haven't found what works for you yet. Have an honest conversation with your partner and work together as a team. If you don't feel like doing that, and you'd be more comfortable being asexual, there is nothing wrong with that either.

Shere Hite was ahead of her time. She wanted people to find an outlet for their problems and provided a guide to show everyone the range of emotional and physical issues that everyday people struggle with. My God, what an amazing gift she gave to us all. It's a shout into the void that cries out to tell the world you are not alone. As long as your sexuality or physicality isn't a threat to someone or actively harming people, you are not alone. You can have good sex, you can be vulnerable and honest with people who truly care about you. It's a choice that you can make but only you can make it. Shere Hite said this, in a great deal more detail in The Hite Report and found herself ran out of the country. But she was not wrong.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a gift from Executive Producer and narrator, Dakota Johnson, and director Nicole Newnham to the world. Through their work they are bringing Shere Hite back to a world that can use her kind of sensitive, compassionate, and intelligent observation. Even with the mass of communication options we have today, honest conversations between partners, friends, couples, and so on remains elusive. So many people are crying themselves to sleep at night feeling as if they have no one who understands what they are going through. The Hite Report, even as it was released almost 50 years ago, is a reminder that these issues have persisted for decades while churches and other arbiters of morality or authority have almost inadvertently worked to keep people from expressing themselves, understanding themselves, and caring for themselves.

Entire industries exist to prey upon people who feel as if they can't talk to anyone or share anything. They turn to pharmaceuticals, they turn to self-help gurus, and to other types of confident hucksters who sell them back the idea that are less than who they really are. They prey upon your insecurities to sell you useless products that are little more than placebos covering up for the fact that you have been conditioned to feel helpless in sex and relationships. You are made to feel inadequate in your body, you've been told that what you are lacking are products when what you are really lacking is a genuine ability to be vulnerable and open with another caring, compassionate human being.

Thank you Dakota, thank you Nicole, and especially, Thank you Shere Hite. You may have been made to disappear years ago but your ideas, your goals, your shout into the void is still being heard and still needs to be heard. Watch for The Disappearance of Shere Hite on streaming services soon. No formal release has been announced yet. The film went to Sundance and is, apparently being distributed at some point. We have to make sure we do our part and pursue seeing this so that Shere Hite's contribution to the world is never allowed to disappear again.

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