The Disappearance of Shere Hite – a profile doc… | Little White Lies

The Dis­ap­pear­ance of Shere Hite – a pro­file doc with hid­den depths

11 Jan 2024 / Released: 12 Jan 2024

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Nicole Newnham

A woman with blond curly hair, wearing a nude-coloured dress, sitting at a desk and holding a newspaper or document.
A woman with blond curly hair, wearing a nude-coloured dress, sitting at a desk and holding a newspaper or document.
3

Anticipation.

Another day, another glossy profile doc.

4

Enjoyment.

Formally not doing anything new, but a fascinating about the birth of the "troll".

3

In Retrospect.

A melancholy tale about a true iconoclast.

The life of the idio­syn­crat­ic US sex­ol­o­gist is par­layed into a sto­ry of rank misog­y­ny and vio­lent moral conservatism.

We all know that social media is the main rea­son why pub­lic dis­course has lost any sense of cour­tesy and diplo­ma­cy in the mod­ern age. What Nicole Newnham’s doc­u­men­tary The Dis­ap­pear­ance of Shere Hite pre­sup­pos­es is, maybe it isn’t?

On the evi­dence neat­ly laid out here, it would appear that we’ve always found a way to be mouthy, illog­i­cal, obfus­cat­ing, nar­cis­sis­tic and just plain rude when it comes to inter­act­ing with peo­ple we don’t agree with. Maybe social media has empow­ered us to do it more often and with more feroc­i­ty, but the seed of intel­lec­tu­al antag­o­nism was there way before elec­tron­ic key­boards were a fan­cy new thing.

This is the sto­ry of best­selling author, sex­ol­o­gist and one-time glam­our mod­el Shere Hite, an ethe­re­al, silky-voiced go-get­ter who, fol­low­ing her rejec­tion from var­i­ous tra­di­tion­al seats of learn­ing, took it upon her­self to answer some tough ques­tions about the sex lives of the punch-clock Amer­i­can. Her project was born as a response to the cos­set­ed, male-skewed research by Alfred Kin­sey, William Mas­ters and Vir­ginia John­son, and she man­aged to tap into a pub­lic desire to talk can­did­ly about all mat­ters relat­ing to the bedroom.

This film offers a stan­dard bio­graph­i­cal run­down of Hite’s life and career, with the per­fect­ly-toned Dako­ta John­son brought in to nar­rate first-per­son excerpts from Hite’s notes and diaries. Fol­low­ing years of semi-pover­ty in a roach/rat-infest­ed New York base­ment, Hite struck gold with her par­a­digm-chal­leng­ing first book The Hite Report’, which was the prod­uct of data col­lect­ed via thou­sands of hand-print­ed ques­tion­naires all sent to women across the country.

It’s key find­ing – that most women achieve orgasm man­u­al­ly rather than with the aid of a thrust­ing penis – was a soci­o­log­i­cal dirty bomb in 1976, but the nov­el­ty of Hite’s study flung her into the world of lit­er­ary celebri­ty overnight. Even against the efforts of the publisher’s own attempts to bury the book fear­ing a back­lash from their male readership.

Yet, her time in the lime­light also led her to become a bête noire of the con­ser­v­a­tive right and the moral major­i­ty”, who would use her find­ings to fuel their own cam­paigns of rabid misog­y­ny, homo­pho­bia and puri­tanism. But it’s not the out­rage of paid-up wingnuts that makes this film inter­est­ing; it’s the way that seem­ing­ly nor­mal, lib­er­al men appear entire­ly unable to accept the real­i­ty as paint­ed (with caveats) in Hite’s books. Their out­rage man­i­fests as pet­ty pub­lic bul­ly­ing and is fuelled by the belief that Hite is say­ing men are fast becom­ing a bio­log­i­cal irrelevance.

The film’s sec­ond half makes for an excru­ci­at­ing if fas­ci­nat­ing watch, as Hite daisy-chains from talk­show to news pro­gramme to press con­fer­ence to defend her find­ings against a pha­lanx of sweaty bald­ing men and wannabe lothar­ios (includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to David Has­sel­hoff). It arrives at the point where you feel as if she is a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment, but in the end, such were the humil­i­a­tions she suf­fered, the only choice was to flit to Europe and renounce her US citizenship.

Hite is less of a known quan­ti­ty in the UK than in the US, but her sto­ry feels rel­e­vant as an exam­ple of the dif­fer­ent forms that vio­lence against women can take. And it also under­lines how long the road to per­son­al sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion is when there are so many regres­sive zealots who are set on bring­ing peo­ple down. The film is a cel­e­bra­tion of her life and work, but for such a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure it would have ben­e­fit­ed from some dis­sent­ing voic­es on the pan­el of inter­vie­wees, or at least gone a lit­tle deep­er into her home­spun methodology.

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