A Sex Researcher Reveals Her Intimate Survey Questions In Exclusive Clip From ‘The Disappearance Of Shere Hite’
By Matthew Carey
November 2, 2023
In the mid-1970s most American women remained silent about their sexual feelings – how they achieved orgasms, what they liked to do in bed. It was a major taboo to explore such a topic. Shere Hite changed all that.
The famed sex researcher, who published the runaway bestseller The Hite Report in 1976, is the subject of Nicole Newnham’s award-winning documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite, which opens in select theaters on November 17. We have your first look at the documentary from IFC Films in the extended clip above.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite premiered at Sundance and has gone on to screen at festivals around the world. On Nov. 9 it will play at DOC NYC after earning a spot on that festival’s prestigious shortlist of the year’s top nonfiction films. A day later, Nov. 10, the film screens at IDFA in Amsterdam, the world’s largest all-documentary festival. IDFA has invited Shere Hite to play in its Best of Fests section, which the festival reserves for the nonfiction films it considers the best of the year.
Newnham’s film also landed three nominations for the upcoming Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, including Best Archival Documentary, Best Biographical Documentary, and Best Narration, recognizing the work of Dakota Johnson, who voices Shere Hite’s writings in the film; Johnson also serves as an executive producer on the documentary.
As seen in the film, the publication of The Hite Report catapulted the author into the public spotlight. But it also exposed her to intense criticism, which from the vantage point of today seems due to Hite openly discussing a subject that made many people very uncomfortable. Hite was so hounded by haters that it essentially drove her into exile and she spent most of the last decades of her life in Europe (she died in London in 2020, at the age of 77).
Hite’s findings – among them, that many women enjoyed masturbation and didn’t need penetrative sex with a man to have an orgasm — were based on anonymous surveys of women around the country of all ages and backgrounds. The exclusive clip above is taken from an archival interview in which Hite shared some of the queries from her surveys. The sequence also contains excerpts from letters that women wrote to Hite, sharing intimate details of their lives.
