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In her heyday, pioneering sex therapist Ruth Westheimer was so recognisable and so trusted, that when she got into a New York taxi, the driver immediately pelted her with intimate questions “for a friend”.
“Dr Ruth”, who has died at age 96, revolutionised the way Americans thought and talked about sex. Her call-in shows, dozens of books and frequent appearances on late-night television shows helped normalise the public use of words such as condom, penis and vagina. Her rising prominence in the 1980s also served as an important counterpoint to the anti-gay and anti-sex rhetoric that had been triggered by the Aids epidemic and the growing power of evangelical conservatives.
A middle-aged woman of just four foot seven with a pronounced German accent and a tendency to giggle, she was both unthreatening and easy to parody. But that helped make her particularly effective at delivering her message that intimacy between consenting adults should be fun, non-judgmental and involve planning for safe sex.
“There’s no such thing as normal,” she would say to listeners who were worried about the appearance of their private parts or unusual sexual turn-ons. She attributed her ability to connect with her audiences to her very ordinary looks, saying in a 2019 documentary, “I think it has to do with me not being tall and blonde and gorgeous.”
Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Germany in 1928, she had already lived through tragedy and adventure by the time she hit the airwaves. The only child of an Orthodox Jewish haberdasher and his wife who settled in Frankfurt when she was one, she was smuggled to Switzerland after the Nazis took away her father and put him in a work camp. She never saw her immediate family again.
After the second world war, she moved to Israel and trained as a sniper in the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organisation. “I never killed anybody, but I know how to throw hand grenades and shoot,” she told USA Today. Severely wounded in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, she moved to Paris to study psychology at the Sorbonne. She went to the US in 1956, working as a maid to help fund graduate study in sociology. She also earned a doctorate in education from Columbia.
Two failed marriages helped inform her world view, as did her long third union with Manfred Westheimer, another German Jewish immigrant. Long after his death in 1997, she paid tribute in an Esquire interview to their initial meeting while skiing in the Catskills, saying, “Skiers make the best lovers because . . . they take a risk and they wiggle their behinds.”
Early on, she taught others sex education, while managing a sex therapy practice. Then in 1980, a New York radio producer offered her $25 a week to do a 15-minute slot called Sexually Speaking. It proved wildly popular, expanded to an hour and became the top-rated show in the largest US market.
“She embodied aliveness, vibrancy, pleasure, and joy. That bold message resonated deeply with me,” Esther Perel, the best-selling psychotherapist, wrote in an X post after Dr Ruth’s death was announced. “She spoke to millions, challenging the social status quo.”
Dr Ruth’s frank language and catchphrases, including “Get some” and “Life is too short to have bad sex”, captivated listeners. She became ubiquitous, as her radio show went national, she got a TV show, and wrote books and a syndicated advice column.
As a mother of two who became famous in middle age and stayed relevant into old age, Dr Ruth stood up for a demographic group that had historically been marginalised. She insisted that women had the right not only to seek their own pleasure but also push back if they felt they were being unfairly pressured to have sex.
“One of her legacies is sexual empowerment . . . She also normalised sexual diversity,” said Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of Tell Me What You Want.
That message wasn’t universally popular. Conservative critics, including activist Phyllis Schlafly and Catholic prelate Edwin O’Brien, complained that Dr Ruth was promoting hedonism and immorality.
But her lasting influence was undeniable. The New York governor Kathy Hochul tapped her last year to help address the problem of widespread loneliness among the elderly, and the US Library of Congress recently acquired her papers, including thousands of letters sent by ordinary listeners and viewers who wanted help.
Comedian Adam Sandler spoke for many of her fans when he posted on X after her death that he “loved Dr Ruth . . . She always made us smile.”