Traces Shere Hite’s journey into sex research and the culture’s sexist reactions to the confessions about female pleasure she captured through anonymous surveys. We break down THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE by Nicole Newnham in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Distribution: IFC Films theatrical release on November 17, 2023, Available on Premium Video on Demand on January 9, 2024
From Sundance’s website: The Hite Report, a groundbreaking study of the intimate experiences of women, remains one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976. Drawn from anonymous survey responses, the book challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women’s pleasure. Its charismatic author, Shere Hite, a feminist sex researcher and former model, became the public messenger of women’s secret confessions. With each subsequent bestseller, she engaged television titans in unforgettably explicit debates about sexuality while suffering the backlash her controversial findings provoked. But few remember Shere Hite today. What led to her erasure?
Digging into exclusive archives, as well as Hite’s personal journals and the original survey responses, filmmaker Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp, Audience Award: U.S. Documentary, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) transports viewers back to a time of great societal transformation around sexuality. Her revelatory portrait is a rediscovery of a pioneer who has had an unmistakable influence on current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, as well as a timely, cautionary tale of what too often happens to women who dare speak out.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.588] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down. We're continuing our series of looking at the documentaries from Sundance 2023. Today, we're going to be talking about The Disappearance of Cher Haidt by Nicole Noonhan. This is about the feminist sex researcher, Cher Haidt, who did a number of different surveys and reports about female sexuality. I'm just going to read this first paragraph of the synopsis because I think it gives a good overview of the film. The Haidt Report, a groundbreaking study of the intimate experiences of women, remains one of the best-selling books of all time since its publication in 1976. Drawn from anonymous survey responses, the book challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women's pleasure. Its charismatic author, Sher Haidt, a feminist sex researcher and former model, became the public messenger of women's secret confessions. With each subsequent bestseller, she engaged television titans in unforgettably explicit debates about sexuality while suffering the backlash her controversial findings provoked. But few remember Sher Haidt today. What led to her erasure? So we're starting in this film of the disappearance. We know that she disappears or she's erased. And so we're following the logical progression of her journey, her career, the bold nature in which that she's trying to confront a lot of these broader aspects of the sexist and misogynist culture and providing a lot of information that is threatening different aspects of masculinity and Yeah, it's a pretty amazing film and introduced me to a character that I knew little or nothing about. I know you've come across her books at some point and that's how you were introduced. But yeah, I'd love to hear some of your takes of this film and your response to it.
[00:02:00.325] Wonder Bright: This is probably my favorite film that I saw in the last week, for the very simple reason that it has several of my very favorite tropes. It has the misunderstood woman, the disobedient woman, and also exile. 12th house, like being forced into hiding and away. And it plays with those themes in a number of different ways. And it does so through this redemptive arc through the filmmakers desire to bring forth this story and have it be revealed in the world in a way that is extremely restorative and powerful. I think I read a review where someone was talking about how it falls within the canon of the very popular podcast, You're Wrong About, where they go and recover the stories of women who were abused by their culture at the time and then rethink it in a contemporary framework. And Nicole Newman and her team really do a masterful job of bringing this story to life through that redemptive arc. and create a portrait of a woman and her time in a way that is directly relevant to today. It's a really powerful film and I highly recommend for me.
[00:03:22.082] Kent Bye: Yeah, I saw that you had pointed that there was a New York Times obituary about Cherheide that the director, Nicole Noonan, had come across, and it inspired her to dig into what happened to Cherheide. Nicole did Crimp Camp as a previous documentary, and so she was able to actually get some incredible access to an archive from NBC News. This is a time where she is talking about all these different aspects of her research, but also going on to these television shows and facing the constraints of that format in some ways. As I look at Cher Haydn, hear about her life through weaving together through her memoirs and through her own words. You get this fusion of her actions as she's taking it. I get the sense that she's like this deeply philosophical and incredibly brilliant woman who People don't know how to react to her. She's listening to this classical music. She's going to be one of the first women in this graduate program at Columbia University, but sees that there's this feminist movement that just have so much more vibrant and interesting conversations that she felt like she was running into some conservative boundaries for the type of research that she wanted to do around sexuality and the context of Columbia. She splits off and goes off on her own to start to do these surveys of women who were self-reporting, and it's through those self-reporting that she's able to get a much fuller picture about female sexuality that wasn't necessarily being talked about in a broader context. I mean, there was the Masters and Johnson report that had already been published that was showing their scientific research that women were coming to culmination of orgasm through clitoral stimulation, and that Cher Height was also coming to very similar responses, finding that through penetration alone, women were not having orgasm. And so this was the type of information that I think was threatening masculinity and male sexuality in a way. And I think as you see the reaction to her research, there's this deeper impulse to either delegitimize it or attack it or to put her on the defensive as she has to face all these different situations where she's really on the firing lines of people who are attacking her. So I think getting access to some of that footage, some of which had never really been seen publicly, apparently killed or scrapped, or some of it was published and other of the footage was in the archives that she was able to get access to. So just to be able to see that full arc of her journey with her own narration, I thought was really quite compelling. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your own personal connections to Cher Haidt and other reactions you had as you watched her face a lot of the resistance to her work.
[00:06:09.209] Wonder Bright: Well, it's interesting that you describe the resistance to her finding that women didn't achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration as being something that's in the past, as if we don't still have that resistance, as if that isn't still something that people question. When in reality, I think the problem is that it's still pushed back against. And in fact, the whole idea of female pleasure as a whole is pushed back against. It's not just that female pleasure happens in the absence of like a big problem that men had with the book at the time was, well, you're saying that men are irrelevant to female pleasure. which on some level, obviously, it is in the past that we have that perception because in Wonder Woman, there is this wonderful moment where Diana tells Steve that she has sex with women as well, and she doesn't need a man to get off like she this is in like a major blockbuster film. So clearly, People have heard Cher Heights call to arms or call to put down your arms and just have pleasure. So there is a way in which it's in the past. But you know, this was one of a slew of films that really talked about how bodily autonomy is under threat. And although we're all clearly aware of this because of Roe v. Wade being overturned through the Dobbs decision, We're not necessarily making the same link to by curtailing a woman's right to choose whether to bring a fetus to term through pregnancy. We're also saying we have ownership over your body. The state gets to decide what you do with your body. and you don't get to have pleasure without experiencing the repercussions of it, should that pleasure, even if it doesn't come through your own body, but you're just giving that pleasure to someone else through vaginal penetration, you haven't because you didn't have clitoral stimulation necessarily achieve pleasure yourself, you're now going to be penalized for trying to have pleasure with someone else. But, you know, everybody's talking about as if it's about the life of this fetus when really the people who are at first impact is the body of the woman or the body of the pregnant person, I should say. And if we're talking about it in terms of somebody who has the female sex and therefore perhaps isn't going to achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration, then we're talking directly about bodily autonomy through the right to pleasure. And, you know, the irony is that, you know, as Cher Haight herself points out when she's on the record in this film, in interviews talking about that's like something that takes up like not even 2% of this book, but it has this outlandish response because immediately it situates female pleasure as being something that is not derived from contact with male genitalia. So then are men necessary for female pleasure? But you know, I mean, like, the deeper question is, are women necessary for male pleasure? Like, what is pleasure? There's like, so I'm like, so overwhelmed with emotion about this film. I'm finding it really hard to speak in a way that is at all articulate.
[00:09:36.709] Kent Bye: Well, I want to just sort of reflect that a part of the film is Cher Haidt herself is being attacked at these different levels. To some degree, there's people who hadn't even read the work and just were getting the digested view from the culture. And there were other aspects of the methodology that she was using that were, I guess, in some ways against how you would do like a standard probability model. So there's this question as to what degree is the information that she's getting, a representative sample, how much are they generalizable to the general population versus how much is she getting like a slice of an oral history that still has grains of truth that can be used to understand some dimension of these experiences. I feel like at the end of the movie, you get into a lot of these methodological debates. She was on Oprah with all men, and they were going after her. Part of the things that I'm taking away is that she's on the one hand talking about things about infidelity where CBS News tried to replicate aspects of her research, and did a random sample, called women across the country. And she describes like, imagine you're a housewife and your husband's sitting at the dinner table and you answer the phone. And the person on the other line is asking if you're being faithful to your husband, are you committing infidelity? And how many women at a random call like that are going to answer truthfully in that moment? And so her percentage was around 78% of people that were self-reporting having affairs. And so you have this selection bias dimension of that, but it was also a slice of reality that was happening that was disproportionate to what people thought was happening. I feel like part of the disappearance of Cher Haidt was that she was tapping into grains of truth, but yet there were certain dimensions of the methods of what she was doing that wasn't able to break through the most staunch skeptics of the time and that you'd see the spark in her eye slowly diminish over time because she's just tired of fighting against what is ultimately a very misogynistic culture that is not receptive on a certain level. You have this complete erasure of all of her work and people haven't heard of her. I think this is trying to restore her legacy, but there's also to what degree can we still look to these and find universal information or information that was true for this subsampling of people that she was getting information from, which still has a certain amount of truth, but then I guess it's what's happening at the mass culture versus what's happening in these subsections of the self-selecting women who wanted to share information and knowledge about what was happening with their sex lives. So I feel like there's this inherent tension that I got from this film that I wonder if that's going to continue to have this film not be distributed because of some of those debates or if they're going to break through and despite those still have that information out there and still have these types of conversations that are still really relevant today.
[00:12:41.543] Wonder Bright: I think a big part of what had this film resonate so strongly for me is watching a woman being silenced. And I'm not actually at liberty to talk about the ways in which I've been silenced in my life. So it's hard to directly have this conversation about what it's like to watch this happen to someone. And it's also hard for me to put into words what it's like to watch a woman stand in the face of such antagonism and such hatred and to be with it in the way that she is. There are some scenes you described earlier, scenes where she's on the Oprah show and she's the only woman in the audience aside from Oprah Winfrey. We learned through the documentary that she has her best friend waiting in the wings as support. But she somehow has put herself in the way of this vitriol, this hatred. It is hatred on these men's faces. The way Oprah tries to sort of intervene at a certain point and suggest like this alternate way of looking at things and the look on her face when her suggestion is met with such venom by the men in the audience is just very interesting because Oprah is reacting but Cher Height does not react, not on her face. To me it seems clear that she's bothered but she takes it on the chin. She is so fierce in her capacity to stand with her truth and to name it in the face of men who want to annihilate her. And this truth that she's offering is not even the thing that they hate her for. The truth that she's offering doesn't have anything to do with them. It has to do with women. And it also sometimes, you know, she brings out the Hite Report, a national study of female sexuality. And that's the book that is one of the best sellers of all time in the United States. despite the fact that there's so many people that don't even know who she is or who have ever heard of this book. You know, we were at lunch with three women who were probably all born in the 80s and nobody knew who she was. I was born in 1970 and I didn't know who she was until I picked up three of her books in a charity shop about a decade ago. And I was like, what's this about? And then I was reading the back and I was like, holy heck, put it in me. I mean, like, where is this book, Ben? This is really fascinating. Had no idea. Never heard anything else about her. Didn't look her up until this film showed up in this slate of films for us to watch this week. And of course, I wanted to see it. But the way that she was disappeared is astounding. I don't want to spoil the discovery that the film makes possible. So I'm going to try and avoid spoilers. But if you haven't heard of her, there's a reason for that. And this film starts to unpack what that might be. Spoiler alert, it's the patriarchy. long story short, that's no surprise. The way in which it occurs is actually quite shocking. I was shocked. And it's really discouraging. And it's even more discouraging because I keep looking to see if this film has been picked up, if it's been distributed. I mean, I feel like if course it will be. The filmmaker was Oscar nominated for Crip Cramp in 2020. You know, this is a heavy hitter in the documentary world. She's been to Sundance multiple times. She's been Oscar nominated more than once. you know, she was able to get this film made for Crying Out Loud. That alone is a huge achievement. But has it been picked up or are we just, you know, not that interested? No, let's watch a film about Michael J. Fox and his like transformation from illness. I mean, not again, not to make light of what Michael J. Fox has gone through in any way. It's just that the man has never been vilified or hunted or hated national television in the way that Cher Height was. And I don't know how she was able to sit in that truth and stay with that. It's terrifying to me. You know, I don't I don't have that capacity. I don't even know, like there's I could keep going right now, to be honest with you, but I want to like just stop and like I went so many different directions just now and I want to check in with you and see what you heard. And can you get me back on course?
[00:18:00.561] Kent Bye: Well, one of the experiences I had in watching this was this benefit of hindsight as you look back into the past and be able to recontextualize given what we know now about how culture has come to these different revelations about aspects of the patriarchy. I mean, it's probably most notable to mention the Me Too movement has this kind of before and after moment under which through social media, women around the world being able to have this objective recording of like, this is the statistics and numbers of how many women have faced sexual assault, sexual harassment, And it's such a large undeniable aspect that it brought this larger awareness of the patriarchy, sexism, misogyny. And it's through that awareness that now when we look back of things like You Were Wrong About, or looking at the Britney documentary, or even looking at all these other dimensions of like in hindsight, we can look at a number of these documentaries to see the degree to which these levels of sexism were impacting these women's lives in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond. So, this is a case where you have this woman who's tapped into some deep truths. Methodology issues aside, there's some deep truths that she's speaking and she's speaking on behalf of those and finding this deep sense of resistance at many different layers. Thankfully, she was able to find a publisher to get the book published in the first place, but the story kind of recounts over time how as a writer and an author, she could no longer continue to do her research in the United States. Just to go through the report on female sexuality, then she starts to look at male sexuality and come up with ways that men are oppressed and can't express their feelings and different dimensions that still men who were being vulnerable about what were actually happening would be penalized by the patriarchal forces. She was trying to cut through the plights of men and how they suffer on the patriarchy, but even in that context, there was a sort of a denial and a complete rejection of any of these different takes. And so you kind of watch these encounters that she has with these men who were saying, nope, I've never had that experience. And it becomes clear that there's a deeper pattern there that goes above and beyond the substance of what she's saying in that moment. But there's this deeper vitriol and deeper institutional misogynistic and sexist reactions to her. And I feel like this film is able to capture that in like almost a time capsule in her own life. And it's a tragedy in the sense that it does end up in this exile. moment, but the redemptive arc is to have all these cultural critics and people along the way to contextualize how much of a radical innovation that she was presenting this information from queer scholars and activists at the time that people had a lived embodied experience of these things. And she was actually doing the work to come up with the surveys and the writing to support these larger realities of these women's lives that were erased or invisible. So, in the moment, she was able to illuminate these dimensions to the people that were able to hear it to its full capacity. But there is a big part of this story that is about that resistance, and there's a part of the legacy of this film as to whether or not it will ultimately get distributed or not. Will we continue to see the erasure of Cherhaite? or will the truth of her story be able to be told for people to navigate for themselves what parts they want to take as true and what parts they want to discard as maybe being glimmers of the truth for a subsection of people, but not a universal truth for everybody. So yeah, as I watch this story, it's that recognition in this post-Me Too consciousness of these dimensions to see how that was playing back through this historical context, through this woman's life and how that directly impacted her work. and whether or not she could actually do the work.
[00:21:58.350] Wonder Bright: She's definitely one of the women that you were talking about in our first podcast on this series, where this is a badass woman. And it's also another film that we watched where I was looking up on my phone, what's her birthday? What's her birth chart? What the heck is happening? And something that became even more fascinating to me about her chart was the discovery that another biopic that we watched this week was done on Beth Ann Hardison, who herself is a badass woman. I'm excited to talk about that film, Invisible Beauty, as well. But Cher Height and Beth Ann Hardison were born within a month of one another. Beth Ann Hardison was born September 31st, 1942, and Cher Hyatt was born November 2nd, 1942, just a little over a month later. And what's notable about that month period of time is that Mars, which we've spoken about in a couple of episodes so far, in the Michael J. Fox episode and also in the episode about the cult at the end of the world, Mars is a planet that we associate with war, Mars, Marshall. So we associate, therefore, with the fight. We associate it with the experiences of severing and separating from things. So knives, anything sharp comes with Mars domain. And when Cher Height and Beth Ann Hardison were born, Mars was as far away from the Earth as it can get. It was on the other side of the sun from us. And so there's an association in those periods of time with people who are are called to have fight come through them in one way or another. But the main distinction between Height's chart and Bethann Harvison's chart is that Bethann, who was born a month before, is this October Libra personage. But a month later, by the time Cher Height is born, the sun is now in Scorpio and Mars is in Scorpio. So it's just past the conjunction in Scherrheit's case, but it's still combust. Mars is still combust, and it's only just now separating from the sun. But the main distinction between these two charts is that one is Venus ruled in Beth Ann Hardison's case, and air sign ruled So, talking and communication and communicating through this Libran Venusian desire to reconcile. And then in Cher Height's case, it comes about through the Scorpionic version of Mars and Venus, where it's going to come back to fight. Like, we're still fighting for something in both cases. But in both cases, the fight is going to show up in just this very different way. Sher Height shows up in a very scorpion like enigmatic, hard to read kind of way, not necessarily interested on the face of it on her face in reconciliation, but more in like really promoting the fight, like what the fight is for. And Beth Hahn Hardison, we'll get to her when we talk about her, but she's able to accomplish her goals through more of a conciliatory Venus ruled way. I'm going to leave her story for when we talk about her. She's so freaking cool. I never heard of her and I'm like now thoroughly a fan. But in both cases, these women are dealing with issues of visibility. Beth Ann Hardison, her film is called Invisible Beauty. And the Cher Height documentary, of course, is called The Disappearance of Cher Height. And in both cases, if Mars is on the other side of the sun from us, well, what happens? It becomes invisible. Your fight is rendered invisible in some way. The thing that you're fighting for is rendered invisible. And the edict is to bring that fight to the fore and to internalize it and externalize it in such a way that it begins to have meaning. But the film, like a lot of some of the best documentaries that we watched in this week, just leaves me with more questions than answers. But something that really remains for me in looking at both her chart and Beth Ann Hardison's chart is this question about what are we fighting for and what will we do in service of that fight? And how will we position ourselves so that we might be successful? And if it's even possible.
[00:26:42.305] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a way in which that Cherheit is actually using the modes of Venus through modeling in a way that she's able to sustain and make a living and continue the fight. And it's amazing to hear her memoir kind of deconstruct modeling. She takes this real feminist interpretation, but it's a kind of a utilitarian thing where she wants to survive and continue to do her work and sustain herself. She was able to, through her sheer determination, to find a way to do this research and to get all these different letters of people. I think that was another thing that was really nice to kind of dig into that archive of those letters and those direct, raw accountings. And I think eventually at some point, she starts to get these tape recordings of people that are sending in their accounts. And so she's really capturing a form of oral history and trying to synthesize it in a way that is a really rich capturing and reflection of what was happening with women in a safe context in a way that she realized that women were not willing to speak about this in a public context. And so she had to resort to these anonymous surveys. I think what this movie does is through the mode of documentary, give voice to these women who up to that point had been silenced, not had an outlet for them to express these things before. And also you get to see the resistance that she faced through that. And that's another document of someone who's on the bleeding edge of trying to fight against these structures of misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy that she's on the bleeding edge. And by bleeding on the bleeding edge, she's walking a pathless path and perhaps underestimates her own capacity for how far she could take that fight and what cost that she was going to have in her own career because of that.
[00:28:35.318] Wonder Bright: Or she just underestimates the resistance she would meet, you know, like the evidence of the systemic patriarchal oppression that the whole society at large is under. You know, one of the ways in which she's deeply misunderstood by the men who attack her is that they experience her as being unsympathetic towards men. when this is clearly not the case. Like if anything, she, like a lot of feminists, has a lot more sympathy for men who are also living under these delusional hierarchical edicts from a culture which is not interested in their vulnerability or their difficulties, where men are not allowed to have those things and that they must at all costs defend their outward expression of vitality and proof of manhood. You know, I remember reading in one of Brene Brown's books where she's talking about vulnerability and she comes off the stage and she's like signing books and this man comes up to her and he's basically shaking and he says, it's not okay for me to talk about being vulnerable with my wife. She dragged me here, but she doesn't want me to have a conversation about how I'm vulnerable. Like that's not safe. And he's really upset and he's really angry with Brene Brown. And it really shook her to her core. And she began investigating vulnerability in a different way as a result, because we don't allow men to be vulnerable in this culture. And we don't allow men to have a stake in intimacy. You know, that's the woman's role somehow. And like everybody suffers from that. nobody's safe when that's the case, you know? Like if people can't express that vulnerability, then that's the cause of quote, toxic masculinity, unquote, right? Like that's literally what it is. And that's the problem, right? Like this lack of sympathy and empathy for men that is causing this experience of outrage and violence. Like, if you care about women in your life, then you want them to have pleasure. Why would you be upset that it doesn't come to them through your dick? Like, it's just like, what? Like, why is that a problem? You know, like, that's not a problem. Just like it's not a problem for a man to cry, just like it's not a problem for a male child to want a doll. You know, like, let's just stop for a moment and think about what's actually important. It's human connection. It's like staying connected. It's being connected. It's witnessing one another. It's not supporting a structure that is punishing all of us.
[00:31:35.490] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, and as we start to bring this to a close, one of the things that I really want to bear witness to the journey of Cher Haidt is just her courage and perseverance to continue to follow her own diamond, to capture all these accounts from women around the country and to compile them in these books. It was really a deep passion project for her. And As much as a lot of the work has been since erased in the sense that it's not a part of the current conversation, I think it was certainly a part of conversation of that moment of what was happening and for most different movements and that she was a key part of these different intersections of the feminist movement and the sex research and trying to bring about more awareness to these different conversations. It's just really amazing to see these archival footage of her speaking about these things in such clear and plain language in a time and a context where that just wasn't acceptable. She was breaking a lot of these taboos and It was really shocking for people at the time and still even today as we look back at this footage, it's still on the bleeding edge of the frontiers of culture. I just want to recognize and honor her journey and I hope that the powers that be will find a way to get this documentary into the hands of people so that they can make their own judgment about it. They can bear witness to Cher Haid's story, can bear witness to the culture in which that she was either being received in by the people who were supportive and also the culture that was very resistant. Was there something deeper there that was sensed perhaps evolved or still potentially entrenched in this more conservative aspects of the culture. So yeah, I'm just really reminded of this Saturn Square Uranus aspect where there is this dialectic between the conservative, constrictive, patriarchal resistance versus this more Uranian impulse that's trying to bring up this liberation and freedom and real innovation and creativity that is in tension with each other. with this conservative patriarchy and to what degree is that liberatory message going to break through and fingers crossed as to, you know, it ends up in a context that what people will be able to watch it and bear their own witness to the story.
[00:33:57.607] Wonder Bright: Yeah. It might be worth pointing out at this point that like in terms of whether or not share heights valor and her fight is going to be recognized that if you trace Venus Kazemi when Venus conjoins the sun. Venus conjoins the Sun in one of five signs for about a hundred years, give or take. And Hardison and Hyatt were both born when one of the Kazimis would happen in Scorpio. And Hardison was born a month and a half before a Kazimi in Scorpio. And Hyatt was born a couple of weeks before the Kazimi in Scorpio. And because that Kazemi goes in a retrograde fashion, the Kazemi is leaving that Scorpio sign and moving into Libra. So the last time that we have that Kazemi in Scorpio will be in 2026 and it will be on Cher Heights, Mars. So, there is this part of me because I think her story is so deeply connected to the expression of Venus in terms of its relationship to women. There may be ways in which her story is not really able to be fully seen or revealed until that happens. In October, we did have the first Kazemi in Libra at 29 degrees, so it was very close to that Mars. Perhaps that was as close as we get, or maybe there will be just that one more moment where Cher Heights Mars is illuminated by the Venus Kazemi in 2026. And her truth and the truth that she revealed through the respondents to her surveys can be revealed in a new way.
[00:35:52.285] Kent Bye: Yeah, and that's about a hundred year cycle, so we'll see how things kind of shift. So yeah, any other things that you're bearing witness to in the disappearance of Cher Haidt?
[00:36:02.974] Wonder Bright: Well, I think in this moment, I just really want to bear witness to her scorpion fixity and stubbornness of purpose and her capacity to stick to her truth in the face of such vitriol and animosity and opposition, and that she just stuck to it. She stayed with it. She was not deterred. She continued to send out surveys and write books on the basis of the responses that she received. And. Yeah, I want to bear witness to that stubbornness. And may we all be so stubborn in the face of the particular kinds of fights that we're up against now in the fight for bodily autonomy.
[00:36:47.325] Kent Bye: All right, so that was The Disappearance of Cher Haidt by Nicole Noonhan, and that was at the US Documentary Competition. It didn't pick up any awards, but it did make the top 10 list of critics choice for IndieWire. They did a whole survey of different film critics, and it was number seven of the top 10 documentaries that were shown this year at Sundance. Yeah, fingers crossed that it'll be made available for folks to be able to see. And yeah, this has been another episode of Story All the Way Down. And we just want to thank you for joining us. And if you want more information, check out storyallthewaydown.com and find ways that you can support the podcast. So thanks for joining us.
