The Disappearance of Shere Hite: documentary on the feminist sexologist is as stylish and dynamic as its subject
Nicole Newnham’s documentary about sex educator Shere Hite, who wrote a landmark book on female sexuality, mines the life of a ‘forgotten pioneer’ in a way that really does feel like a rediscovery.
You’re likely familiar with the Kinsey Reports, but have you ever heard about the Hite Report? This ground-breaking study of female sexuality, published at the crest of feminism’s second wave in 1976, sold over 48 million copies worldwide and remains the thirtieth best-selling book of all time. So yes, you probably should have heard of it. Nicole Newnham, who co-directed 2020’s documentary on disability activism, Crip Camp, has pulled off the rare feat of mining the life and work of a forgotten pioneer in a way that really does feel like a rediscovery. As stylish and dynamic as its mercurial subject, The Disappearance of Shere Hite marshals a convincing argument for Hite’s deliberate “cancellation’ from the public discourse (to borrow a more contemporary term) in the wake of right-wing-fuelled culture wars and negative public press.
Even though we don’t get to Hite’s childhood until much later, the film follows a broadly linear chain of events, tracing Hite’s heavy-hitting intellectual ambitions in grad school through to a modelling career built off the back of her Pre-Raphaelite good looks and urgent requirement to make the rent – in fact, it was Hite’s involvement in the ultra-sexist “Olivetti girl” ad campaign for Olivetti typewriters that fuelled her participation in the women’s liberation movement, much to the delight of fellow activists.
Hite’s research process and subsequent fall from grace forms the meat and bones of the film. The Hite Report was compiled from thousands of anonymous questionnaires, much of which Hite disseminated across America from the back of a motorbike. Hite was later roundly accused of being unscientific in her methods – not only, it must be said, by those trying to discredit her findings, as the film implies. Regardless, the anonymity of her surveys granted women the freedom to open up about their sex lives in ways they hadn’t been able to before. Hite asked all the right questions, and they responded: freely and in droves.
It is a small niggle, but there is a creeping tendency in recent documentary portraits to get celebrities to stand in for the missing voice of their subjects, regardless of whether they actually sound like them or not. (One particularly egregious example had Scarlett Johansson reading an unpublished manuscript by the beautifully accented German-Italian actor and rock muse Anita Pallenberg.) Dakota Johnson’s voiceover may bring to life Hite’s writing, but it invoked that uncanny quality of familiarity that can frequently take the viewer out of the narrative. Nevertheless, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an fascinating portrait of a brilliant if difficult public intellectual who was unafraid to ask the questions others hadn’t, shining a light on the dark matter of female sexuality in ways that are still revolutionary today.
► The Disappearance of Shere Hite is in UK cinemas January 12.