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

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.