Alison: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. After five years of researching, writer, Shere Hite published her 1976 blockbuster book, questioning the conventional wisdom about how women derive sexual pleasure. It was called The Hite Report. She compiled thousands of anonymous surveys filled out by women across the countries with questions like, how many orgasms do you have during sex or do you achieve orgasm by intercourse? She became instantly famous and then infamous. After the whirlwind of television interviews and magazine profiles, people, especially men, began questioning her methodology.

Playboy called the book The Hate Report, claiming it bashed men. After two more books and escalating abuse, Hite moved to Europe, becoming a German citizen in 1996. A new film, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, tells the story of Hite using her own writings, voiceovers done by a well-known actor, archival footage, and some gorgeous photographs. You see, Hite worked her way through school as a model and she also had a very specific style and aesthetic.

It's directed by award-winning documentarian, Nicole Newnham, who was nominated for an Oscar for her 2020 film about disability rights advocates Crip Camp, which is with the last first time she was on All Of It. Nicole is in studio with me today. Welcome back to the show.

Nicole: Thank you. It's so good to be here.

Alison: Listeners, we'd like to get you in on this conversation. Did you read The Hite Report? What was your reaction to it? What did you think of Shere Hite? How did it influence you that changed the way you approach relationships or your own body? Give us a call and share your story. You can join us on air, or you can text us, same number for both, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can text that number or join us on air, or you can reach out on social media @allofitwnyc, and because Shere was here in New York City, maybe you knew or worked with Shere Hite. We'd like to hear from you as well.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call in or text at the number, or you can reach us on social media @allofitwnyc. Nicole, to give our audience a sense of time and place of when this book was being researched and released early to mid-'70s, what's one or two facts about gender roles, that now would seem ridiculous or even provincial, that were the prevailing theory at the time?

Nicole: Well, I mean you know, the biggest bombshell in Shere's book was that women didn't orgasm from vaginal penetration by and large, the majority of women could orgasm from-- pretty much, all women could orgasm from clitoral stimulation, though not all, and that was completely counter to the prevailing wisdom at the time, which was that you should be able to have an orgasm from regular intercourse. Shere and her feminist colleagues in New York City, in the '70s, she was engaged with now, and she was really in the full heyday of the second wave of the feminist movement here.

Had a lot of discussions about that because it seemed to them like the way that Masters and Johnson had described that women should be able to achieve indirect clitoral stimulation through intercourse, wasn't really working for most people, and they decided to investigate that for themselves and Shere had this brilliant idea of sending out this anonymous survey to thousands of women to gather their real experiences about their sex lives.

Alison: What drew Shere Hite to study sexuality in the first place, even before she began to think about the report?

Nicole: She had gone to graduate school and she had studied intellectual history and the history of the Enlightenment and she had thought a lot about sexuality. She was a model. She was a nude mode and she was thinking a lot about feminism and it occurred to her that sex was sort of an institution like others that could be studied like that and so that-- I think one of the things that made her work so powerful is that she was really down in the trenches dealing with so many sexist tropes herself as somebody who was trying to navigate being both a PhD student and work in an industry that was rife with sexism and was about sex.

Those things really provoked a lot of profound thoughts. I think Shere Hite was, one of the things we really discovered in working on the film was that she was somebody who almost seemed like a space alien who had come down to earth and could look at it in a different way. She didn't accept the norms and structures of gender or sexuality that we accept. She questioned them and that was really radical at the time.

Alison: You get into this briefly in the film that she was aware and it became clear that she was also facing not just sexism as she was working as a student, but also classism.

Nicole: Yes.

Alison: Could you share that a little bit about how she came to that conclusion?

Nicole: Well, it was smacking her in the face. [laughs] She was from Florida. She had done her master's thesis at the University of Florida, and she came to Columbia. She was very excited about working on her PhD and immediately, she was struck down by the head of her department, Jack [unintelligible 00:05:24] Barza, who said, not only did he not believe she wrote her own master's thesis, but he couldn't imagine that she could have found the books she cited in the library at the University of Florida. She dealt with that all the time.

I heard lots of stories about when she originally had the idea for her research, her sharing it with men, and they would literally just laugh in her face. Not just because they thought the idea was outlandish, which they did, but they also couldn't believe that this person who was modeling on the cover of Pulp, sort of sexy novels and in James Bond posters and things like that was gaining to take on a massive study like this. She really did see that. She saw that that was classism and sexism in a related, and was able to articulate that in a really moving way.

Alison: She also, I mean, we should point out she was broke. She really was somebody for a long time who had no money, had to ask people to help fund her research, lived in a rat-infested apartment. What do you think kept her going?

Nicole: I mean, we had access to her most intimate writings which her archive is in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.

Alison: Oh, it's an awesome library.

Nicole: It's an awesome library. They have this massive trove of her material. She was, I think, a little bit hypergraphic. She just wrote all the time, all the time. She had a typewriter, so a lot of times, she would write on a typewriter, but sometimes with this beautiful handwriting and this red felt pen and scraps of paper were everywhere in the archive of her writings as she was living her life. She would come home from a long day of modeling and she would just write about her feelings, and those are the segments that we have Dakota Johnson narrating in the film.

I think from reading those writings and immersing myself in them for years, I really believe that what kept her going was her profound belief that she was witnessing, both through her activism with feminism and through her own thinking in life, she was getting access to truths about women's lives and about sexuality, and she could really show that to people it could really spark change. Even as things got really, really, really difficult for her, she never lost that belief that we could step back from this kind of patriarchal constructs that were oppressing us and create a more equitable society that would be liberating for both men and women.

Alison: When did you decide to bring in Dakota Johnson to do the tracking, and why was she the right choice?

Nicole: Dakota Johnson is an actress who I really admire. I think she has a quality, an ability to evoke a quality that's soft and feminine and steely very, very strong. That seemed right for Shere Hite. Also, Dakota really cares a lot about women's sexual health and wellness. She is part of a company called Maude that has intimacy products. She's really out there speaking about, she's pro-sex and is known for that. I thought she might be really passionate and interested about the story, but I didn't expect to hear that she already knew about it.

We reached out to her and she got back to us and said, "Let's get this straight. I love Shere Hite. I admire Shere Hite so much, and if I could have dinner with her tonight, I would." She loved the film and really wanted to be a part of it. She came on as an executive producer as well as narrating Shere's voice, but her performance of Shere, I think, just tapped into such a profound emotional space, and it really-- I felt like her performance brought me, even though I'd been immersed in the world of Shere Hite for years at that point, emotionally closer to the real Shere Hite. She just did an amazing job.

Alison: We're discussing the film, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, the documentary will be in theaters November 17th. I'm speaking with its director, Nicole Newnham, if you want to get in on this conversation, we would love to hear from you. Did you read The Hite Report when it came out, or maybe after? What was your reaction to it? How did it influence your life? Or maybe you knew or worked with Shere Hite here in New York City? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We got a text that says, "It took the shame out of no orgasm from intercourse." Then someone else texted, "Read it as a college freshman. Hope it enlightened my views about women and their pleasure."

It's interesting because even though the book was a success, originally, the publishing company kept the order very small and didn't do much publicity. What was going on there, where they would publish something but then not support it?

Nicole: Well, they had hired Regina Ryan who was the editor of The Hite Report, who's featured in the documentary, and she's really incredible. She met Shere through feminist circles and got onto what Shere was doing and had the idea that it could be a book like this. She faced a lot of backlash within the company. According to her, the men in charge were very hostile. Regina said that she felt like they were-- They pretty much had brought her into the job because they were in hot water with feminists, and they felt like-- I think she was the first major female editor at a big publishing company.

She said she thought that they would tell her, yes, just to kind of make her happy because she was new in the job and then they would just suppress the book and hope that it would go away, but it didn't go away. It just kind of went viral as things went viral back in the '70s.

Alison: We're discussing the documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, with its director, Nicole Newnham. After the break, we'll talk a little bit about Shere, the person. We'll take some of your calls and hear a little bit of Shere in her own words. This is All Of It. You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Director Nicole Newnham. The name of her documentary is The Disappearance of Shere Hite. It'll be in theaters tomorrow.

Of course, it is about Shere Hite, who wrote The Hite Report, which was this amazing report about women's sexuality that was called from all of these anonymous surveys that she sent out. We actually have somebody on the line who got one of those surveys. Elizabeth is calling in from the Bronx. Elizabeth, thank you for calling in.

Elizabeth: Hi. Thank you for your program.

Alison: Tell us a bit about your experience.

Elizabeth: I remember filling out the survey, and as I recall, it was pretty extensive. How I got ahold of it, I don't think it was just like randomly sent to me. I think there may have been an advertisement that I read in a women's magazine perhaps, or maybe through word of mouth, through like women's group that I belonged to. Back in the early '70s, the women's movement was just coming into its own, or at least the second-wave feminism. I can't remember exactly how I found out about it, but it seemed very important to me that this be investigated, and that I take part in it.

Alison: As you read the questions, what came to your mind? What were you thinking as you were filling it out?

Elizabeth: It gave me the sense that, "Oh--" The questions were so extensive and varied, a lot of different questions. That I thought, "Oh, there are other ways to do this." There are other ways to look at this than just the standard traditional way that people had been looking at women's sexuality. It gave me the idea that there was a freedom just because of the different questions that were asked.

Alison: Elizabeth, thank you so much for calling in. How did most women become part of the survey, Nicole?

Nicole: Well, that was one of the delightful things to discover in doing the research for the film, was the extent to which the gathering of survey respondents was such a kind of grassroots effort between Shere and her friends. Setting out, "How can we do this?" It was quite renegade. She was literally printing the surveys on a mimeograph machine in the basement of this place called Community Press. They were running their own anti-war leaflets and stuff during the day, but at night, they would let her come in as long as she paid for the ink and the paper.

She's borrowing money from people, going down there in the middle of the night, printing out surveys, getting on her boyfriend's motorcycle, zooming around New York City, figuring out how to raise money to send these things to church groups and women's groups, and anybody that would help distribute them. Then later, got some funding to put ads in women's magazines, which is maybe where this caller saw the advertisement. I think it speaks to the time and the hunger and the longing of women all over the country that so many women filled the survey out because there were over a hundred questions in that survey.

There were some audio cassette tapes in the Harvard Archives, where women would say like, "Shere, listen, I'm exhausted from trying to write this down, so I'm just switching over to an audio cassette tape," and then Shere would transcribe it and put that in. It was an intimate relationship between thousands of women and this one woman who really, really genuinely wanted to know for the first time how they were feeling and experiencing sexuality.

Alison: Someone has texted in that they went to Shere Hite's gorgeous townhouse on 5th Avenue. Described her as an otherworldly, exquisite, ethereal presence. She definitely had a whole aesthetic, sometimes it was femme fatale, sometimes she even looked sort of Botticelli-like, she clearly loved clothes and makeup, and she smoked. She just had this sort of aura about her. How much did you get a sense of that that was genuinely who she was, and how much of it was performance?

Nicole: I think that's a really good question because when someone has a need to perform something that's very, very deep in them, I think we sometimes try to separate that and say, "Oh, that's performance." Or, "Is that them? But isn't that them then?" That who they are is someone who needs to do that. I think Shere recognized that in people. They had so much inside of them that they could express through sexuality, through fashion, through clothing, through aesthetics. She didn't want to be tamped down. She didn't want to be suppressed.

She didn't want to sit there and analyze, "Why is it important to me that I want to put on makeup and look gorgeous?" She just wanted to, and she celebrated it and did it. I think that was something she really suffered for back in the day because of the double standard against women. Obviously, that's part of the story of the film, the backlash against that. On the other hand, one thing I love is that younger women now who encounter her, encounter the film, have no problem with that at all, obviously, and celebrate her love of her own femininity and her own beauty.

Alison: I want to play a clip from The Mike Douglas Show. She was very famous. She was on talk shows all the time, and it's a clip that you include in your film where she very frankly discusses sex. In it, she is smoking a cigarette next to David Hasselhoff, something you would never see now. The first voice you're going to hear is talk show host, Mike Douglas.

Mike Douglas: The women's movement, how has it affected the male's sexual response?

Shere: Well, the women's movement has affected men in general in the sense that men now feel--

Mike Douglas: Feel they have to perform, is that--

Shere: Oh, in a sexual sense, I think that the women's movement can only help men because men complained over and over in my study, and that's certainly not the first time they complained that they felt a lot of pressures on them to perform. They had to get an erection. You have to have intercourse long enough for the woman to have an orgasm. My study showed in the first book that most women can orgasm easily from clitoral stimulation and not from intercourse so much.

In a way that opens things up so that everybody can enjoy intercourse, women enjoy intercourse, but not worry so much about the woman's orgasm then as long as the man feels that he feels comfortable doing clitoral stimulation by hand.

Alison: That's Shere Hite. This made them squirm a little bit, but they went on to have a pretty decent conversation after that. There were many people-- You heard her kept saying, "My report, my study," who truly questioned her methodology, and whether this was science, what was the basis of the attacks? Was there any validity to the critiques?

Nicole: There were a couple of major critiques. One was her sample size, what percentage of people were responding to the survey. That, I think is a little bit-- Personally, from my reading on the topic, I just think there are so many studies that have a response rate of 6% to 8% that are considered valid. That, I felt like that was an attack that was really coming from people who were wanting to suppress her findings and suppress her.

On the other hand, the critique about-- She made an intentional choice to give women the option to only answer the questions that they wanted to because she didn't want to keep anybody from responding, because they felt uncomfortable about a particular question or whatever. But then in the reporting, she'll say, "X percent of women feel this way," but you don't know if it's the entire sample size of 3,000 people or if it's just the people who chose to answer that question, which could be very small, and that is true. That is true.

I think there are various ways that you can critique her work in terms of social science as we were looking at the time. But I think a lot of the criticism was also criticism by people who didn't really believe in the validity of qualitative research. That's really changed from the '70s to now. Actually, women in academia did a lot of the fighting for qualitative research like Shere Hite to start to become more accepted and to be taken more seriously as social science. Shere would always say, "Well, [unintelligible 00:20:18] only had a sample size of three women, and people took him seriously.

They just decided that he had made up his own version of methodology, and he had gotten at some truth that was important. I think all the people who responded to the survey and the millions of people who read the book felt that way, too. Certainly, there are valid critiques of the methodology from a social science point of view.

Alison: We got a text about The Hite Report. My husband taught his nephew about sex by pointing to the answer in The Hite Report about female orgasm. Let's talk to Marcia, calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Marcia. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Marcia: Hi. I'm 70, and I'm from that generation that was straddling the greatest generation homemaking [unintelligible 00:20:59] idea of femininity and my generation's idea of reclaiming our own power and our own self. I love the book. It even had me join a group of women, one of them who had passed the book on to me, who were exploring themselves. It was so important for learning how to speak up and say what it is you need when you're having sex. It's not just about having sex. It was about learning how to do that in every aspect of being a woman. I'm so grateful that Shere Hite existed for that reason.

Alison: Marcia, thank you so much for calling in. The film gets into the pushback, and it gets really personal. It's clear that it really gets to her. We see she intersects with the rise of exploitative daytime television, which you'll see when you watch the film. What was the moment that made her say, "I'm out. I'm leaving the United States. I'm done."

Nicole: Well, I'm not sure of the exact moment, but I think the most devastating thing that happened to her in the media, and this was the response to her book on Women in Love, which I think it was one thing to make a book about female sexuality. Then she made a book about male sexuality, and that was really a bridge too far, and that started to really anger men. She started to be treated much more hostilely in the media.

Then when Women in Love came out, and it basically said women were not happy in their relationships with men, and many women were unfaithful in their marriages because they weren't getting the emotional support and intimacy that they wanted from their relationships, then they were done with her. She really started to be batted around almost like a cat toy or something on all of these daytime shows. She had had an altercation with a cab driver, and Maury Povich brought her on the show allegedly to talk about her work, but then hauls out the cab driver--

Alison: Ambushed her.

Nicole: Ambushes her. It's very brutal. Then that in and of itself becomes a big story, like we live in that world today.

Alison: Reminded me of Britney Spears.

Nicole: It is like Britney Spears. It's so much like that and you see how that's building along with the rise of the Christian right. That's what Shere saw. That's what she wrote about. She thought that those two things coming together, the desire to put women back in the box and reverse the gains made by the women's movement along with the fact that this exploitative television was on the rise. It really created an environment that was just unbearable. She couldn't live within it and have any life or be happy or get her works published or have the space to create. Yes, she left and went to Europe.

Alison: To find out what happened next, you'll have to see the film The Disappearance of Shere Hite. It is in theaters tomorrow, November 17th. My guest has been his director, Nicole Newnham. Nicole, thank you for coming to the studio.

Nicole: Thank you so much.

Alison: Thanks to everybody who called in and texted your recollections. We really appreciate it. Coming up next on All Of It, we continue our full bio conversation about August Wilson. I'll be speaking with Patty Hartigan, the author of the biography, August Wilson: A Life.

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