Sexologist Shere Hite wrote one of the best-selling books of all time, The Hite Report; transformed the lives of millions of people through her eye-opening findings about the female orgasm; then vanished from public awareness in the course of a mere 50 years. That, at least, is the argument of a new book by the London-based academic Rosa Campbell, The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared, as well as a 2023 Dakota Johnson–narrated documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite. The framing of both these works is tricky; to say that no one talks about or remembers a thinker of the relatively recent past is a fuzzy practice, as it depends entirely on who you know and talk to. I happen to remember Hite and her books quite well, but Campbell—who appears to be younger than I am—maintains that when she told her colleagues and friends that she planned to write about Shere Hite, she got nothing but blank looks in response, and we’ll have to trust her on that.

Hite, born in 1942 to an unmarried teenage mother, was largely raised by her grandparents: devout, working-class Christians who frequently reminded her of her sinful origins. Later, Hite’s grandfather divorced her grandmother on the grounds that she’d refused him sex. As Campbell astutely observes, Hite learned early on that women walk a sexual tightrope: “If you had too much sex, you could be shunned like her mother was; if you didn’t have enough, you could be deserted like her grandmother.” Intellectually ambitious, Hite studied history at the University of Florida, then attempted grad school at Columbia, but encountered condescending attitudes from her fellow grad students and teachers, who all seemed to have gone to Ivy League colleges and looked down on anyone who hadn’t. She dropped out and from that point onward, Hite’s research was conducted independent of any academic institution.

Campbell is at her best when invoking the countercultural ferment of New York City in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Hite barely scrounged together a living working as a commercial model in ads for bodywash and posing for pulp-novel book covers. Eventually, she realized there was more money and less work in nude photos. She’d wanted to write a history of women’s sexuality while at Columbia, and these jobs provided her with additional insight into how sex shaped women’s lives. Even so, the exhausting work of maintaining a photogenic standard of beauty—the exercises, the hairdresser appointments, the home manicures, the false eyelashes that had to be applied one at a time every morning—consumed much of the time she’d hoped to devote to her work.

And Hite was beautiful, with long legs and a mane of rose-gold Pre-Raphaelite curls. She favored an extravagantly romantic and feminine personal style—lace gowns, white fur, gauzy florals, and satin, all of it vintage and scavenged from thrift stores. Her editor at Knopf, Regina Ryan, knew who Hite was even before she knew Hite was a writer. They lived in the same neighborhood, where Hite was a regular and mesmerizing sight on the street. At their first lunch meeting, Hite walked into the restaurant looking like “a shepherdess from a French eighteenth century opera, not a real shepherdess, but a beautiful shepherdess, singing.” The other diners stopped to take in this vision, which proved even more fascinating when Hite proceeded to talk all through lunch, in her distinctive high-pitched voice, about vulvas and orgasms.

The selling point of The Hite Report in 1976 was the stack of 3,000 anonymous questionnaires Hite had collected from women across the country. She distributed them willy-nilly, riding a motorbike, to people on the streets and via women’s groups, including the National Organization for Women, which she joined after she learned they were protesting a particularly irksome typewriter ad for which Hite had modeled. NOW provided some institutional support for her research, though many members considered her focus frivolous compared to more pressing issues like reproductive freedom and workplace discrimination. Campbell describes Hite printing up the questionnaire—in rainbow ink on “pastel-colored scrap paper” and decorated with “hearts, cupid bows and arrows and starbursts”—at “the 24-hour gay anarchist printing press and commune ComeUnity Press in the East Village. There was no door on the bathroom (privacy was bourgeois!), but there was a large risograph, which movement people could use if they provided their own ink.”

Hite’s findings contained a particularly explosive revelation: A significant majority of her respondents could not achieve orgasm through “heterosexual intercourse” alone—or, as Hite described it, a man “mounting and thrusting”—and required clitoral stimulation to come. While this hardly seems controversial today, in the 1970s, it ran counter to widespread public beliefs fostered by psychiatry. Freud claimed in 1905 that clitoral orgasms were “immature” and full womanhood could only be achieved with the acceptance of the feminine role embodied in the vaginal orgasm. Porn tended to reinforce this conviction, although in 1966 Masters and Johnson would conclude that all female orgasms are clitoral orgasms. The cover of The Book That Taught The World To Orgasm. The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared

Hite wasn’t the first to highlight this reality for the public. Anne Koedt, a major figure in New York’s radical feminist circles, published an essay called “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” in 1970. But Hite had collected thousands of personal statements from women to back it up, and in a confessional form more palatable to a general audience than laboratory findings or political screeds. Many respondents admitted to faking orgasm during intercourse either because they were unwilling to tell their partners what they needed or because men were unreceptive to their requests. “What are you, a policewoman?” one woman’s lover said to her when she tried to redirect him. “Do I fake?” another wrote to Hite. “Like asking if the sky is blue.”

These first-person testimonials to widespread sexual dissatisfaction caused a sensation. That was further stoked by Hite’s utterly tireless publicity efforts, launched after a (male) publicist declined an interview request on her behalf because he felt the book’s subject was too “ticklish” for TV. A gorgeous blonde happy to appear on broadcast television to talk about sex and the clitoris turned out, unsurprisingly, to be catnip for producers everywhere.

Campbell rightly points out that Hite framed women’s disenfranchisement in the bedroom as a symptom of their overall second-class status, and that The Hite Report is an inherently feminist work, even if it doesn’t address a conventionally political issue. More than a few of Hite’s readers wrote her to explain that her book led them into feminist activism. The Hite Report’s sexy subject matter and glamorous author attracted readers, many of them men, who might not have picked up a copy of The Feminine Mystique, and they wrote to Hite that she had changed their views on gender relations. Last but far from least, many, many people reported to her that she had sparked a dramatic improvement in their sex lives.

The conservative backlash of the 1980s hit Hite particularly hard. So harsh was the response to her perfectly innocuous third book, 1987’s Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, that several prominent feminists—including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Ntozake Shange—signed an open letter declaring that they considered the attacks on Hite to be covertly aimed “at the rights of women everywhere.” Nevertheless, Campbell is often too quick to dismiss criticism of Hite’s haphazard methodology. Of course, the type of anecdotal research—or any research on human sexuality, really—that Hite performed simply can’t be conducted in a rigorously scientific manner. And of course, the willingness of respondents to write about their most intimate lives and send the results off to a stranger precludes meticulous sampling. Nevertheless, Hite herself invited critique by presenting her statistics in misleading ways, allowing the 70 percent of women who responded to her questionnaire reporting that they could not orgasm from penis-in-vagina intercourse alone to be elided into 70 percent of all American women. This could well be true, but Hite hadn’t proven it.

Hite was also a victim of her own celebrity—or, rather, her own unskillful handling of that celebrity. Watching the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, Hite concluded that “any woman who talks about ‘sex’ deserves what she gets” in the eyes of the American public. But Nancy Friday—whose compilation of women’s self-reported sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, was published three years before The Hite Report and who is mentioned only in passing in Campbell’s The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared—doesn’t seem to have suffered the same vitriol during that particular vibe shift. The Hite Report, more importantly than its sexual content, amounted to a criticism of straight men and their lack of sexual knowledge. Which makes it all the more surprising that Hite, in 1987, agreed to appear on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which the entire audience consisted of men mad about feminism. (Also: WTF, Oprah?)

Furthermore, Hite was remarkably thin-skinned and had a habit of storming out of any broadcast interview in which she felt she had been slighted. She could be capricious and diva-like, once interrupting an interview with a journalist to send an underling off “to fetch her a coffee cup from a distant room because it was so much prettier than an almost identical cup in front of her.” Worst of all, Hite acquired a reputation for venting her temper on service workers, and “would turn against waitstaff or scream at taxi drivers, publicists, and staff on the lower rungs at publishing houses who sometimes refused to work with her.” In one notorious incident, she punched a limo driver whom she’d kept waiting for an hour, when he had the temerity to tell her they wouldn’t reach a taping of The Sally Jessy Raphael Show on time. Then she got mad when Phil Donahue insisted on querying her about the fracas.

The media—or at least, the media that was—is like the ocean. You can gain a lot from it and even make your living by it, but always on its terms, never on yours. Hite could not see this. The same outlets that happily capitalized on her beauty and frank talk on sexual matters were also delighted to make hay out of her outbursts and scandals. Campbell, who seems more than a little under the spell of her subject, speculates that Hite’s painful childhood led her to seek public acclaim as a substitute for the love she lacked in her early years, and plenty of magnetic stars have fueled their charisma with such longing. Hite certainly had charm in spades: In one particularly adorable moment, an old boyfriend of Hite’s moons to Campbell over his ex’s penmanship: “If the word ‘cursive’ means anything, it means her handwriting.”

While sexism played some role in the decline of Hite’s career, it was hardly the only factor. Her first book was a wonder of perfect timing, arriving at just the moment when the world was ripe to receive it. Her follow-ups—Women and Love and a book on male sexuality—lack the revelatory quality of the original The Hite Report, and she didn’t have the institutional affiliation and support to continue research in other, less mediagenic areas, perhaps with more statistical rigor. Fatally, Hite made the mistake of believing that being covered is the same thing as being loved and admired.

But, despite these setbacks, Hite ultimately succeeded. The key point of The Hite Report—that the clitoris is the central organ of female sexual response and pleasure—is common knowledge today. Hardly anyone now remembers the time when women berated themselves for their “abnormality” because they couldn’t reach orgasm from penetrative vaginal intercourse alone. Even if many people under 40 have apparently not heard of it, The Hite Report never truly disappeared. Because now, it’s everywhere.