Despite giving the world TV gems featuring powerful women such as Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman, and The Bionic Woman, the reality of women’s lives and human rights in 1970s America was very different. The National Organisation of Women (NOW), founded in 1966, had led the way in the development of women’s rights, but progress was slow. The organization consists of 550 chapters spread across all 50 states and remains the largest liberal feminist organization, currently with over 550,000 members.
One of NOW’s New York chapter’s more famous members was the legendary sex educator and feminist Shere Hite, author of The Hite Report, a study of the sexual experience for women. Published in 1976, this ground-breaking book redefined sex for women. To date, it has sold over 20 million copies in 36 countries and has been published in 19 languages. It is in the top 30 best-selling books of all time. Hite gave a voice to the unheard. However, mention Shere Hite to anyone under fifty years old today, and you are likely to be met with a blank expression. A new documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, aims to address this and educate the world on the history of one of America’s greatest-ever feminists and sex-educators.
Bisexual Hite began her feminist journey whilst studying for a Ph.D. in Social History at Columbia University in the late 1960s. Dismayed at the patriarchal environment at Columbia, she dropped out of her course and joined NOW, and actively participated in their various campaigns. Her studies evolved into the study of the sexual experience for women, building on the prior studies into sex of Masters & Johnson and Alfred Kinsey. In particular, she focused on how most women can experience orgasm through masturbation and other manual clitoral stimulation rather than through standard sexual intercourse with a penis. She spent the next few years living in poverty as she compiled a report, mailing out thousands of anonymous questionnaires to women across America, asking them many questions to detail their sex lives. 1976’s The Hite Report caused a storm and immediately became a best seller. Many men were not happy with the findings, in particular that women were far more likely to be better at sexually satisfying themselves than their male partners. Male ownership of women’s sexuality is, of course, at the core of patriarchy, and now this was challenged. The book’s promotion involved Hite on numerous TV chat shows where invariably she would be grilled by the affronted male chat show host as to how she could possibly be right. Her sample populations were accused of not being statistically accurate amongst other accusations. Undeterred, the glamorous Hite held her ground in the ensuing media storm.
More research and books followed including The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality in 1981 and 1987’s Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress which studied love, passion and emotional violence. The men’s book revealed how a large proportion of men felt lonely, anxious and insecure. Again, information many men did not want in the public realm. Each launch was met with increasing antagonism and push-back against Hite. The media tried to discredit her by mentioning her glamorous looks (Hite had a unique style and beauty) or her previous work as a Playboy model, done to fund her student days. Oprah Winfrey, in a very unsisterly act, brought Hite on to her show to answer questions from a uniquely 100% male studio audience, some of whom were very angry and aggressive, and almost none of whom had read any of her work. TV hosts increasingly featured Hite on her own against panels of aggressive men. Hite’s responses to being set up like this became increasingly angry and she sometimes had outbursts and walked off sets. This often led future TV hosts condescendingly to try and goad her into a reaction.
By the mid-1980s Hite was wealthy. She had bought a smart apartment in an upper west side block in Manhattan and had Donna Summer and Kiss’ Gene Simmons as neighbors in her building. She regularly hosted fabulous parties at home filled with New York’s finest. She was also in love, marrying a German concert pianist, nineteen years her junior in 1985. She didn’t need the right-wing conservative, religious media bullshit and so gradually withdrew from public life. The tabloid-baiting media also caused her reputation to suffer and publishing deals became hard to get, leading her to move to Europe in the 1990’s, where she led a quiet life before passing in 2020.
Directed by Nicole Newnham (who also directed 2020’s Oscar-nominated Crip Camp), The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a beautiful, very detailed, documentary about the trail-blazing Hite who was simply decades ahead of time. Newnham combines wonderful archive footage and imagery of early feminist protests, Hite at work, her TV appearances, and her modeling work, with interviews with many of her contemporaries. These include fellow activists, employees, researchers, friends and ex-partners. Gene Simmons gives an entertaining interview and executive producer Dakota Johnson supplies the voice of Hite. The resulting portrait details a supremely intelligent, complex and glamorous woman who has done as much as anyone for women’s rights and sex education for both sexes. A must-see.
Queerguru’s Contributing Editor Ris Fatah is a successful fashion/luxury business consultant (when he can be bothered) who divides and wastes his time between London and Ibiza. He is a lover of all things queer, feminist, and human rights in general. @ris.fatah
Labels: 2023, documentary, feminist, review, Ris Fatah, sex educator, The Disapperance of Shere Hite
