What Shere Hite's Life and Work Tells Us About Women and Sex
-
A documentary about the life and work of American author Shere Hite, whose 1976 book The Hite Report into female sexuality sold 48 million copies worldwide, tells us much about gender inequality says therapist Camilla Nicholls
The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a new documentary directed by Nicole Newnham, produced and beautifully narrated by Dakota Johnson is out in cinemas now. This gripping film tells the story of the US feminist writer, researcher, activist and sex educator Shere Hite.
All therapists interested in the history of myth-busting about sex should see it. It’s a shocking tale of how a trailblazing, charismatic driver of learning about sexuality, and female sexuality in particular, has been all but forgotten. It’s a hard watch if you are at all sensitive to misogyny.
Hite’s first book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, published in 1976, debunked Freud’s widely accepted theory of vaginal orgasm, and his assertion that women who could not orgasm through penetration were ‘frigid’. Hite’s book based on thousands of women’s anonymous responses to a questionnaire about sex and pleasure told a different story of how pleasure was gained – a positive story of clitoral and masturbatory stimulation.
Erica Jong’s contemporaneous New York Times review said, “No woman I have ever met (or read about) would dare presume to tell a man what he feels during the sex act, how his orgasm is best obtained, whether he is feeling what he should be feeling, yet men have been telling women all those things about their sexuality for centuries. Read ‘The Hite Report’ if you want to know how sex really is right now.”
The book was a sensation. Hite was widely profiled and interviewed but the backlash to The Hite Report and Hite’s subsequent books was remarkably swift. The film shows us contemporaneous TV footage of knuckle-headed commentators, who have clearly not bothered to read the book, attacking Hite as if she had tried to ban all men from having penetrative sex with women and not just encouraged them to think more about when, how and why they engaged in it.
Despite the brickbats The Hite Report has sold over 48 million copies since it’s publication almost 50 years ago.
Hite was abandoned as a very young child first by her father and then her teenage mother and the resulting scar of over self-reliance and sensitivity to rejection may help explain why her seemingly endlessly gracious responses to the attacks on her in person, in print and notably via an all male audience baying for blood on an Oprah Winfrey show, gave way so abruptly.
Hite was a beauty in a nymphlike frame. The film charts how she shone and flamed through the early publishing and media engagements. She nonchalantly blew smoke into an impertinent, doubting David Hasselhof’s face in one TV interview. But in a few short years the hurt at the wanton misinterpretation of her message by a male-dominated medium leads to a depressingly dead-eyed interview on Larry King Live. Feeling abandoned and rejected by her original parent nation, she moved to Europe and renounced her US citizenship. The film leaves us almost as confused as Hite must have been about the failure of the prevailing structures to protect her from being ‘cancelled’ when it seemed she had so much more to offer a world in need of change.
There are a welter of resources available to therapists interested in informing themselves about sex today, including some very smart podcasts as well books and TV programmes. However, Hite’s research methods, her sensitivity with regards what and how to ask about sex, led to the documentation and wise interpretation of invaluable insights which could still find a meaningful place in the consulting room today.
Camilla Nicholls is a verified Welldoing psychotherapist in North London and online
