The Disappearance of Shere Hite Actually Tracks the Sex Educator’s Emergence

In a world of digital footprints, it’s amusing to think that anyone with a voice and a strong platform can simply “disappear.” Even those who make the radical decision to vacate their online spaces can never fully do so; once on the internet, always on the internet. So The Disappearance of Shere Hite, the latest film from Nicole Newnham, strikes a discordant tone by the title alone, though its metaphorical substance shouldn’t be discounted. The author and sex educator Shere Hite has, after all, fallen out of cultural consciousness, and for all intents and purposes, she did take a powder from public life in the 1980s. 

Nobody can blame Hite, who passed in 2020, for flipping the U.S. the bird, after her shabby treatment for the apparent crime of publishing books evincing the pervasive isolation in Americans’ intimate relationships. That’s just one finding from The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, released in 1976, and The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality, which came out in 1981. In those days, the very idea of anyone, especially a woman, writing frankly about people’s sexual habits and appetites, and their attendant behavioral and existential woes, was anathema at best and a declaration of war at worst. 

The Disappearance of Shere Hite slowly builds to the American public and media launching volleys of rancor back at Hite for her work, which ultimately influenced her choice to bid America farewell, following a series of on-air meltdowns fomented by the utter dismissive cruelty practiced by her critics.  The worst of Hite’s treatment is not seen until over an hour into the film. Until then, The Disappearance of Shere Hite might well just have been called Shere Hite. 

Maybe Newnham’s thorough documentarian efforts would land differently if Hite still enjoyed the position and esteem she richly deserved for daring to ask simple questions with groundbreaking implications (though admittedly, if that were the case, Newnham would have less reason to make the film in the first place). The Disappearance of Shere Hite starts out by examining Hite in her putative form, modeling for money where she could make it and living in a state aspiring to squalor; one interviewee describes turning on the light in her apartment and observing cockroaches scattering. But Hite’s origin narrative is rooted in struggle, something the film touches on briefly in its second half without truly delving into it. Hite’s mother, father and stepfather each abdicated the responsibility of raising her and put it on her grandparents. Tucked into this revelation is the sensation of being unwanted, which Newnham presents to viewers as important buttressing material for her profile of Hite. Who better to study American malaise and loneliness than the lonely? Who would be more vulnerable to the types of attacks leveled by whinnying chauvinist dopes than Hite?

There is perhaps a more cathartic film to be mined from Hite’s interior scars, the ones she kept well-hidden from onlookers for years, but without her around, that film is nigh-impossible to make. What Newnham does with the meager details she finds about Hite’s upbringing, though, is contrast the crushing sadness of being rejected as an infant by one’s parents against the irrepressible joy and enthusiasm that brims over in each of her conversations with Hite’s friends and colleagues: Martin Sage, Dylan Landis, Iris Brosch, Regina Ryan, Janet Wolfe, Frank Gaard and Gene Simmons (yes, that Gene Simmons) represent a fraction of participants Newnham invited to help her paint a full portrait of Hite. 

The Disappearance of Shere Hite suggests that to know Hite was to love her – and not the same thing as truly knowing her. This validates Newnham’s casting of Dakota Johnson as a vocal performer, narrating Hite’s writings in imitation of Hite’s gentle, ethereal voice. As Samuel L. Jackson did for James Baldwin in Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, so Johnson does here for Hite, giving her weight through her reading and affording us a medium for knowing an otherwise unknowable person. In Johnson, we recognize shades of who Hite’s peers tell us she was; through Newnham’s direction, we recognize Hite best of all for how she shone a harsh light on the state of American sexual pleasure and marital comfort with a series of straightforward if uncomfortable survey questions.

Between the two goals, the latter feels more crucial, so credit must go to Johnson for reining in her expression to avoid overshadowing the archival footage and interviews. Newnham isn’t telling a story of exodus, but hoping to usher along Hite’s re-emergence into popular awareness. This requires Newnham to take stock of Hite’s achievements, and then trace her subject’s humanity around and through those achievements. Maybe we know Hite only slightly better when The Disappearance of Shere Hite ends than when it starts, but because of Newnham’s rigor, we certainly understand her better.

Director: Nicole Newnham
Starring: Dakota Johnson
Release Date: November 17, 2023

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.