Rating: R | Runtime: 118 minutes
Release Date: November 17th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: IFC Films / Sapan Studios
Director(s): Nicole Newnham
Writer(s): Shere Hite

Every woman is going to want to read this. And men should too.

What a stat. The Hite Report is 30th on the list of best-selling books of all-time. Yet no American publisher would return her calls when the time came to finance and release Shere Hite’s third follow-up. If that doesn’t epitomize her findings, I don’t know what would. Because despite sexuality being the focus of her reports, one cannot consider the anonymous answers outside of how the political and cultural spheres of a capitalistic society will ultimately weaponize them. The millions a publisher might have made off Hite’s work couldn’t compare to the billions lost by crossing the Evangelical Christian right.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite isn’t therefore just a straight biography of its subject. Nicole Newnham’s film is also a documentary about male control. You see it in the hypocrisies spouted by Hite’s critics. You see it with the media cherry-picking stats to defraud the truths she discovered and how they always stacked the deck to drown out the purpose of those truths. And you definitely see it in today’s generation having never heard of the 30th best-selling book of all-time. Just like women in Hite’s generation never saw centuries-old diagrams of women’s bodies with the clitoris labeled. The patriarchy always wins.

Hite’s retort to an enraged man on “Oprah”—a man who never read her books—who said “women refuse to tell men what’s wrong” should have been a mic drop moment. She explains how women are literally telling him through her book only to have men react as if they had been shot, proving the problem remains men’s inability to listen. It should have forced him to sit down in embarrassment. Or open his eyes to at least consider his privilege in making baseless accusations about her book being “baseless.” His words instead helped ensured Hite would never live another day in America without constant harassment.

While footage from that episode is the linchpin connecting all the good will she earned beforehand and the slander that followed, Newnham does a wonderful job accompanying it with the context necessary to understand its relevance to both Hite’s life and America at-large. How our chaste society refuses to help the under-privileged, pushing them to make money by exploiting their bodies before vilifying them without offering any obvious alternatives. How research people don’t want to hear will be scrutinized beyond belief as biased research they do want is considered beyond reproach. How the thing we as a country fear most is honesty.

The sad reality is that this message will not be heard by the majority of people who need to hear it. Not really. How do I know? Because it’s the same message Hite’s books provided only to be erased from public consciousness. Thankfully, it will be heard by those who know it yet don’t know others do too. That’s where the true potency of Hite’s power lies. In bringing likeminded people together to create movements like Women’s Lib and Feminism to instill change. Yes, it’s often a one step forward, two steps back scenario (see the repeal of Roe v Wade), but that which satisfies bigots also tends to radicalize heroes. Case and point: Shere Hite.

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Shere Hite in Nicole Newnham’s THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE. Courtesy of Mike Wilson. An IFC Films release.