Ruth Westheimer, "Dr. Ruth" to tens of millions of people around the world, died at her home in New York City on Friday surrounded by her family. She was 96.
She was known for her frank, funny, approachable advice on sex and intimacy for individuals and couples. Prudish in her personal life, the German Jewish refugee and daughter of Holocaust victims took a long, winding road to celebrity.
“I still hold old-fashioned values, and I’m a bit of a square,” she told students at Michigan City High School in 2002. “Sex is a private art and a private matter. But still, it is a subject we must talk about.”
Indeed, she never advocated risky behavior. She had an open approach to what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their bedroom.
“Tell him you’re not going to initiate,” she told a concerned caller on her ground-breaking radio show "SexuallySpeaking" in June 1982. “Tell him that Dr. Westheimer said that you’re not going to die if he doesn’t have sex for one week."
Part of her charm was the incongruity of the 4' 7" grandmother dispensing frankly titillating advice in a high, accented voice.
The columnist William E. Geist, who wrote a New York Times Magazine article about her in 1985, said that “she looks for all the world as though she is about tell us in her cheery mittel-European accent how to make a nice apple strudel.”
“But when she opens her mouth it’s Code-Blue-in-the-family-room all across the country,” he added."
She never used "street" terms for body parts. She was never vulgar, always clinical but with a broad, vaudevillian kind of sexual humor. And always, the mischievous twinkle in her eye that invited the audience into the conversation.
These days, some effort may be needed to recall that Ruth Westheimer had a radical formula and considerable influence on social mores. Talk shows abounded in the 1980s, but until she came along none had dealt so exclusively and clinically with sex. Nor could anyone have anticipated that the messenger of Eros would be a 4-foot-7 middle-aged teacher with a delivery that The Wall Street Journal described as “something like a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary.”
A talk show about sex? “Why not?” she asked. “Why not share a few recipes on the air. I am promoting sexual literacy in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom.”
Of course, her recipes were not limited to things you were likely to hear in a Sunday sermon.
Decidedly not. But many younger couples took her primary message — never to be ashamed to talk about sex, especially with your husband or wife — to heart.
Her rise to celebrity was beyond belief.
At the age of 16, she moved to Palestine and joined the Haganah, the underground movement for Israeli independence. She was trained as a sniper, although she said she never shot at anyone.
Her legs were severely wounded when a bomb exploded in her dormitory, killing many of her friends. She said it was only through the work of a “superb” surgeon that she could walk and ski again.
She married her first husband, an Israeli soldier, in 1950, and they moved to Paris as she pursued an education. Although not a high school graduate, Westheimer was accepted into the Sorbonne to study psychology after passing an entrance exam.
She divorced her first husband in 1955 and moved to New York. Her marriage to a Frenchman was short-lived. A single mother, alone in New York, she lived a hardscrabble life, taking house cleaning jobs for a dollar an hour.
She earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research in 1959 and got a job as a research assistant at Columbia University’s School of Public Health.
After receiving her doctorate from Columbia in 1970, she became a teacher. It was there, instructing other professors on how to teach sex education, that she found her calling.
It was another decade before she managed to get a radio job and started her show "Sexually Speaking" — a 15-minute show that aired after midnight on Sundays. The show was a sensation, and three years later, the show was nationally syndicated. A year after that, Dr. Ruth had her own TV show.
Ruth Westheimer got into trouble with conservatives who believed that talking about sex, as well as advocating for early sex education, served no moral purpose and did great harm to society. Westheimer was also a strong advocate for LGBTQ rights. At times, her homilies were too frank with no moral framework to put them in.
But Dr. Ruth almost singlehandedly changed the culture. Urging people who love each other to talk intimately about their relationships was groundbreaking and probably saved an uncounted number of marriages. At the very least, it made men and women happier.
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