Here’s a documentary about a vanished woman that is not true crime (unless crimes against feminism count). It is about trailblazing American sex researcher Shere Hite, exploring how she disappeared from the who’s who of 20th-century feminists. In 1976, Hite became famous almost overnight with the publication of her groundbreaking book The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. Based on an anonymous survey of 3,000 women about their sex lives, it sold 48m copies. Hite’s big finding was that 70% of women didn’t orgasm from penetrative sex – breaking news in the late 1970s.
Hite had been working as a model to pay her way as a PhD student when she joined New York’s feminist movement. The tipping point came when she appeared in a sexist typewriter advert (caption: “The typewriter so smart she doesn’t have to be”). Archive footage offers a vivid picture of the energy and revolutionary spirit of 70s feminism. Director Nicole Newnham gets brilliant interviews, too: funny and intelligent, with activists, academics and psychologists who knew Hite. And then there is Hite herself, magnetic presence from the archive: fragile-looking beauty with an intellect as sharp as nails, who could debate any politician under the table. Dakota Johnson does a wonderful voiceover reading her diary entries.
The Hite Report sparked something in women who had felt guilty or inadequate about sex for years. Some men felt threatened, accusing Hite of being a man-hater (for them, the message of the book was: women don’t need a man). Appearing alongside Hite on a chatshow is David Hasselhoff who, sniggering like a schoolboy, says he’s never had any complaints about good old-fashioned sex-sex. Hite arches an eyebrow, amused. Right, Hoff.
However, Hite was ridiculed for having posed in Playboy as a young model and her methodology was discredited. (Frustratingly, whether or not these attacks on her research credibility were valid isn’t discussed.) The backlash gained momentum in the 80s, with the rise of the religious right. There’s a clip of Hite on The Oprah Winfrey Show in front of an all-male audience; the hostility is almost unwatchable. She left the US, living in self-imposed exile in Europe, finally settling in London, where she died in 2020.
What a fascinating film about a fascinating woman this is. It’s beautifully filmed, too. Hite loved working with photographers and understood the power of images. The portraits she collaborated on with the German photographer Iris Brosch are astonishing: Hite poses in water, a pre-Raphaelite beauty like Millais’ Ophelia, but she is no victim. This is a woman in control, holding a pen, not flowers, with a steady gaze at the lens. If this documentary doesn’t make Hite a household name among a new generation of feminists, the biopic that should really follow it certainly will.
• The Disappearance of Shere Hite is released on 12 January in UK cinemas.
