Sex Researcher Shere Hite Returns To Cultural Prominence, And The Oscar Race
By Matthew Carey
December 3, 2023
The groundwork was laid for Nicole Newnham’s Oscar-contending documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite back when the director was just a girl.
“I was 12 years old when I discovered The Hite Report in my mother’s nightstand drawer,” the filmmaker has written, “sneaking it to read for myself, to learn about the world of female sexuality, a world that remained cloaked in shame and mystery for me as for so many others.”
For a time, The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality could be found in nightstand drawers or displayed less surreptitiously on bookstore shelves and in library stacks across the country, its author a fixture on talk shows and top of mind in the zeitgeist. Interest in her work was by no means limited to the U.S.: Hite’s study was translated into more than a dozen languages.
Newnham got a sense of interest in Hite abroad when she took her film recently to the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. It screened in the Best of Fests section, reserved for documentaries IDFA considers the best of the year.
“I really didn’t know how a European audience would respond,” Newnham told us in Amsterdam, “especially given that so much of the story in our film is about the American cultural reaction to Shere Hite’s findings. But it was fascinating.”
Newnham added, “Many women my age and younger came up to me and said they had read The Hite Report as young women, and actually men too… I think that there has not been the sense of forgetting and maybe even that kind of puritanical shame that sometimes Americans have around discussions of sexuality, which I think plays a role in the disappearance of Shere Hite, why she disappeared. Here [in Europe], I don’t think people carry that shame. They carry the remembrance of what she did to open up society’s discussion of sexuality and female pleasure in particular.”
The film rewinds to the late 1960s when Hite did graduate work at Columbia University in New York. In the early ‘70s she embarked on an ambitious survey of women and their experiences with sex, distributing tens of thousands of questionnaires around the U.S. to women ranging in age from 14 to 78, from differing socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. The Hite Report, published in 1976, contained analysis of responses from 3,000 women to those qualitative survey questions. It became a massive bestseller.
Perhaps most stunning for readers was the revelation of how women typically achieved climax – through clitoral stimulation and not insertion of a penis into the vagina. That upended the conclusions of earlier sex researchers Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, and raised an implicit question of how much a woman’s experience of pleasure depended upon the male sex organ.
Hite was clear, Newnham says, that the research did not mean women “didn’t need a man in the picture, but just that that particular act of penetration was not going to result in orgasm for the majority of women. Her data was very strong, and also it went against the prevailing wisdom of the time. It was really like a bomb in our culture, provoking relief from a lot of women who suddenly felt like they weren’t alone, a lot of further exploration, then, of various things that did produce orgasm in women.”
If the book provoked relief in women, the reaction of many American men could be described as more ambivalent. “It engendered a lot of fear and the beginning of the backlash amongst men who started to worry about the shift in their position as a result of all of this.” To put it another way, some men perceived a loss of their primacy in women’s sexual fulfillment.
As the film explores, Hite faced attacks from some academics over her research methods. Proponents of traditional values were no more inclined to embrace her findings. In television appearances Hite was constantly put on the defensive; one suspects the critiques masked a deeper unease with sex and sexuality as a topic of conversation. And it’s hardly a stretch to conclude old fashioned misogyny played a decisive role in the urge to cancel Hite and what she had to say.
Hite violated taboos by speaking openly and frankly about sex in a public context. And she made the daring assertion that accepted sex practices were culturally embedded.
“She said a great thing in one of the interviews she did in the mid-‘90s,” Newnham observed. “She said, ‘The reason I’ve been attacked so much is because I connect sex to politics.’ And she said, ‘If I was just saying, oh, isn’t it cozy how women orgasm? nobody would’ve really cared, but the fact that I said this is a symptom of a political situation made [me] worthy of attack.’”
Hite spent the last decades of her life in Europe, away from the calumny she faced in America. She eventually became a German citizen and later relocated to London, where she died in 2020 at the age of 77. Hite had gone from being a name on everyone’s lips to a figure lost – or erased — from history.
Newnham’s film has rescued Hite from cultural oblivion and reminded people of the researcher’s relevance to contemporary debates about women’s bodily autonomy. In other words, Hite hasn’t lost her political edge.
“Even though it’s a historical film at this point about the ‘70s and the ‘80s, we worked really hard to craft it so that it would be in conversation in a really urgent way with the cultural moment that we’re in,” Newnham said. “It’s really thrilling to have her not just remembered, but actually to have her presence be still meaningful and still making an impact and making a change.”
