When Shere Hite’s study of female sexuality, ‘The Hite Report’, was published in the US in 1976, it became a runaway bestseller and its author was turned into a national celebrity. All of a sudden, talk shows and newspaper columns were discussing masturbation, the clitoris and the female orgasm, subject matter previously as mysterious to mainstream American audiences as the lost city of Atlantis. Even Baywatch star David Hasselhoff waded, not very helpfully, into the debate.
By the time Hite died in exile in Tottenham, north London, in 2020, a younger generation barely knew her name. The striking, red-haired feminist intellectual and former model, who had once modelled for Playboy and whose image had inspired the famous poster for the Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, was a forgotten woman.
Why has Hite been airbrushed from history? That is the key question asked in The Disappearance Of Shere Hite, the new feature documentary from Nicole Newnham (Oscar nominated for Crip Camp) premiering this weekend in Sundance’s US Documentary Competition.
The film, sold by Submarine/WME, is executive produced by Fifty Shades Of Grey star Dakota Johnson, who also voices Hite.
At the age of 12 or 13, Newnham first stumbled on the Hite Report in a chest which her mother had beside her bed alongside her other books about sexuality. She read it avidly.
“I was trying to glean information in a culture where frankly it can be challenging to glean the information that you need about female sexuality,” the director recalls. She describes Hite’s explosive study as a “portal” to another world “that taught me so many things I don’t think I’ve seen discussed, talked about or written about anywhere else, even to this day.”
Newnham was shocked when she read Hite’s obituary in 2020 and discovered the depths of the obscurity into which Hite had fallen.
By chance, the director was approached around this time by Molly O’Brien at NBC News Studios who was looking for ways to create documentaries based around material in the NBC archives. One of their potential subjects was Shere Hite. There was a huge amount of archive footage that had, by then, been sold to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard but was available to view.
The filmmakers made contact with German photographer, Iris Brosch, who had befriended Hite in the early 1990s and had taken some playful and provocative pictures of her.
Brosch, like many of Hite’s other old colleagues and friends, emphasised that Hite had a sense of humour. She may have been an academic but despite the austere, cold persona she sometimes projected in the media, she was “fun to be around.”
Hite’s research was attacked for its methodology. Her detractors questioned the extrapolations she made from the data she collected. She came up with percentages which some felt were far too generalised given the number of subjects responding to her surveys. Her response to her critics was that Freud had a sample size of three Viennese women – and no-one was attacking him.
The controversy over her research techniques allowed sexist commentators to dismiss her work, to ignore its obvious underlying value – and to keep discussions of female sexuality off the agenda.
Hite inspired devotion in her collaborators. Robert E. McGinnis, the master illustrator, artist and movie poster designer whose credits ranged from Breakfast At Tiffany’s to the Bond films, adored her. “He really does credit her with being his muse and playing an enormous role in his rise and career,” Newnham says of the period in the early 70s when Hite was modelling, partly to pay off her student debts.
Dakota Johnson has a production company, TeaTime Pictures, with her partner Ro Donnelly. When the filmmakers approached her, she was immediately interested in joining the project. “She [Johnson] stood out to us as this incredibly perfect person because I think she has this really rare combination of being very feminine and very, very strong. She also is a feminist and she is supportive of causes especially around female sex and wellness…she seemed perfect to us. We also wanted the voice to capture Shere at the height of her happiness in her work. We thought that having somebody about the age Shere was when the Hite Report came out would be perfect.”
Newnham agrees that Hite’s story would make a tremendous biopic. “Certainly, it does leap to mind that it would be astonishing.” The documentary itself is made with what the director calls “a big Hollywood aesthetic.”
“I really came to feel that Shere was truly an artist, not just her work but her whole life – the way she lived, the way she dressed, the way she dared to not be put Into particular boxes…she was like the big star of the movie of her own life.”
Robert Gottlieb, the legendary author and editor who appears in recent documentary Turn Every Page, is interviewed by Newnham. He worked with Hite on her book on male sexuality and clearly holds her in very high esteem.
“He [Gottlieb] was wonderful. He really did enjoy talking about it and he really did respect her. He said she was extremely serious, extremely diligent. They never had any conflict or trouble…and he was genuinely fascinated to discover what her method and thinking would unearth about male sexuality.”
Hite had friends like Gottlieb in very high places – but she was also best friends with the doorman at her apartment building in New York. He would show up at her parties, lent her money and even built her a patio.
Rock star Gene Simmons from Kiss was also one of Hite’s friends and neighbours. The documentary includes some slightly surreal anecdotes about Hite, disco singer Donna Summer and Simmons meeting up for chinwags.
As for the clip in which Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff becomes tongue tied as he tries to discuss clitoral stimulation, Newnham believes this is a very revealing moment. “I think I was overwhelmed by how much he communicated without saying very much in the scene,” she laughs.
When it comes to talking frankly about sexuality, is US society a healthier place today than when Hite’s studies were first published? “The answer is very complex…Shere was very prescient in how she thought about gender identity and gender roles and people needing to be freed from them,” the director reflects. “On the other hand, it is still shocking to people to hear someone say the word ‘clitoris’, and many of those things she was fighting then still exist now.”
Hite charmed her associates. That charm is still apparent today. Newnham admits she and her colleagues found her an utterly beguiling subject. “We were all just in heaven with every outfit that she put on, the colour palette she painted her apartments with. It’s unusual in a documentary to get to work with such very, very rich, beautiful material – and that was her. That was her artistry.”
