The Disappearance of Shere Hite Review: A Savvy Tribute to a Feminist Trailblazer

Nicole Newnham’s The Disappearance of Shere Hite is so packed with ideas, timelines, and input from various participants that a documentary twice as long would have been justified. Such is the significance of Shere Hite’s life and writings in the 1970s and ’80s on the subject of sex, particularly women’s bodies and how they typically achieve orgasm.

Hite’s 1976 book The Hite Report has become an all-time bestseller, in large part due to the controversy it sparked following its publication. While the film’s title initially suggests a mystery, Newnham’s remarkable use of archival footage, especially of Hite being ceaselessly berated on talk shows, composes such a clear and coherent portrait of her eventual exile from American culture that the film becomes a furious indictment of an openly repressive society.

While Newnham takes a mostly linear approach to explaining the trajectory of Hite’s research and fame, the documentary begins with Hite in 1994, watching footage of herself discussing sex as “an institution” in 1976. The gap is significant, as Hite renounced her U.S. citizenship in 1995 and moved to Europe, where she would remain until she died in 2020.

Over the nearly two decades prior, Hite would often appear on talk shows and speak in various forums about The Hite Report, explaining how her extensive research found that most women were unable to achieve orgasm from intercourse alone. Masturbation and clitoral stimulation were preferred methods by many, a notion that shocked the majority of men and women in an era when “orgasm” and “clitoris” were words that many newspapers wouldn’t print.

Still, Newnham makes clear through various passages in voiceover, read by Dakota Johnson, that Hite didn’t passively accept the criticism of her ideas and responses to the brewing controversy over her book. She had, after all, posed for Playboy years before publishing The Hite Report, a detail that comes to define her distinctive style of feminist thought and action: Sexuality was something to own, discuss, and flaunt, not hide behind.

Throughout The Disappearance of Shere Hite, Newnham provides a fleet overview of Hite’s work, coupling archival footage with talking heads, many of whom knew Hite in the ’70s and beyond. Writer and activist Kay Whitloc, for one, looks back with equal parts fondness and awe at Hite’s brazen flouting of societal conventions. To her and Hite’s other contemporaries, Hite’s work remains a defining text on the subject of women’s sexual function. During this time, Hite was also busy speaking out against Anita Bryant and various anti-gay movements, recognizing that the conversations about women’s bodies and homosexual identity were overlapping.

The controversy surrounding The Hite Report arose over an emergent form of talk show—hosted by the likes of Geraldo Rivera, Maury Povich, and Mike Douglas—that insisted on turning everything into a gladiator-style duel. These shows also gave voice to the preposterous fear that men will become obsolete if masturbation is what most satisfies women.

The talk-show hosts all express some form of specious skepticism about Hite’s research or, in Povich’s case, use her appearance to stage a stunt-like ambush regarding a recent incident. The totality of these clips, infuriating for how they largely feature men dismissing Hite’s work without actually engaging with it, showcase Hite becoming at once exhausted and defiant in the face of such trite conversations. When Hite blows smoke from a cigarette into Douglas’s face as David Hasselhoff stutters incoherently about his own relationships with women, the film crescendos as an assertion of Hite’s almost rock-star-like persona.

In line with these notions of Hite’s spirit of defiance, Newnham mostly relegates Hite’s move to Europe, prompted by U.S. publishers being unwilling to print her new work, to a coda that marked Hite’s return to taking erotic photos and forming a tight-knit community with other artists and intellectuals. With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.