Shere Hite revolutionalised female pleasure – so why did the world forget about her?

These days, it’s not unusual to see celebrities or fictional heroines discuss the joys of clitoral stimulation. Cara Delevingne in her BBC documentary, Planet Sex. Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag. Emma Stone in the Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-tipped Poor Things. Everyone’s at it. In the early Seventies, though, such diddling was frowned upon. A 1976 book by sexologist Shere Hite, titled The Hite Report, revolutionised how we think about female pleasure. The question asked by a new film: why isn’t Hite then a household name?

In The Disappearance of Shere Hite, director Nicole Newnham tracks the giddy rise of an intellectual with working-class roots. Hite was born in Missouri but, à la Holly Golightly, reinvented herself in New York. Hite wore bright lipstick, jackets with cinched waists and had Tamara de Lempicka hair. Conventionally gorgeous, she modelled for the likes of Playboy to fund a PhD in social history at Columbia. She eventually dropped the course, and the photo shoots, when she discovered feminism (Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett and Florynce Kennedy were pals).

Fired up by debates within the women’s movement, Hite decided . She devised and sent out an idiosyncratic, 58-question