Delayed Reaction: The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Premise: A documentary about forgotten feminist researcher and icon Shere Hite.

I admit, I knew nothing about Shere Hite before this movie. The Hite Report sounded vaguely familiar, but that's about it. I was excited to hear about who she was in this documentary.

When it comes to documentaries, I don't need them all to be groundbreaking. I'm perfectly happy to watch the equivalent of a really entertaining Wikipedia article. That's mostly what this movie is. It covers Shere Hite's life, from her early days as a struggling student and model, to her later days as a self-imposed American expatriate. She lived a very interesting life. Frankly, you don't expect a woman who was the cover model for a Bond movie to become a renowned researcher and best-selling author. It was fascinating to see the discoveries she made in her groundbreaking sex research. And it was interesting to see how her freshman and sophomore publications mirrored the responses to Kinsey's first two reports. As soon as a sex researcher starts talking about the other gender, they get shot down even more.

I think the movie missed some opportunities to use the gift of hindsight. It's heavy on the sexism she faced at the time. There were no lack of talk shows she was on where everyone missed the points and attacked her. The doc approaches it all as though no one has done similar research since her work a half-century ago though. A major point of this doc is that people weren't ready for the truths she was revealing. People at the time often criticized her results. Why not supplement this doc with results of future studies that confirm how right she was?

I often describe documentaries as theses or discoveries. Either they are investigations into something where the filmmaker wants to find out where they will end up ('discoveries') or they are arguments for a specific perspective with evidence to support them ('theses'). The Disappearance of Shere Hite is absolutely a thesis documentary. So, it should lean into proving how she was right. Or, if her findings don't hold up still, it should say that but argue that her work brought topics to light at least. As is, this doc feels like an incomplete argument. Still, it taught me something about a new topic and did so in a reasonably entertaining way.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend