Dr. Ruth Westheimer, America’s small and pioneering sex therapist, dies at the age of 96

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the pint-sized sex therapist who became a pop icon, media star and best-selling author for her candid readings on once-taboo bedroom topics, has died. She was 96.

According to publicist and friend Pierre Lehu, Westheimer died Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family.

Westheimer has never advocated risky sexual behavior. Instead, she encouraged open dialogue about previously hidden issues that affected her audience of millions. Her only recurring theme was that there was nothing to be ashamed of.

“I still have 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 topic we need to discuss. talk about.”

Westheimer’s giggling, German-accented voice, combined with her 6-foot-4 height, made her an unlikely-looking and sounding outlet for “sexual literacy.” The contradiction was one of the keys to her success.

But it was her extensive knowledge and training, coupled with her humorous, non-judgmental manner, that catapulted her local radio show “Sexually Speaking” into the national spotlight in the early 1980s. She had an open approach to what two consenting adults were doing in the privacy of their home.

“Tell him you’re not going to initiate,” she told a concerned caller in June 1982. “Tell him Dr. Westheimer said if he doesn’t have sex for a week, you’re not going to die.”

In a sign of her appeal across generations and social culture, a tribute came from actor-comedian Adam Sandler – “She always made us laugh,” he wrote on X – to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who appointed Westheimer as ambassador of the state. Loneliness. “May her memory be a blessing,” the governor said in a statement. “She was brave, funny, outspoken and brilliant.”

Her radio success opened new doors, and in 1983 she wrote the first of more than forty books, “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex,” demystifying sex with both rationality and humor. There was even a board game, Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex.

She quickly became a fixture on the late-night talk show circuit, bringing her personality to the national stage. Her rise coincided with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when frank sexual conversations became a necessity.

“If we could make it so that we could talk about sexual activity in the way we talk about nutrition – the way we talk about food – without it having the connotation that something is wrong, then we would be a step further . But we did it to do it in good taste,” she told Johnny Carson in 1982.

She normalized the use of words like “penis” and “vagina” on radio and TV, helped by her Jewish grandmotherly accent, which The Wall Street Journal once said was “a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse.” People magazine included her in their list of “The Most Intriguing People of the Century.” She even turned it into a Shania Twain song: “No, I don’t need no proof to show me the truth / Even Dr. Ruth ain’t gonna tell me how I feel.”

Westheimer defended abortion rights, suggested that older people have sex after a good night’s sleep and was an outspoken supporter of condom use. She believed in monogamy.

In the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, she stood up for gay men and spoke out loudly in support of the LGBTQ community. She said she was defending people considered “inhuman” by some far-right Christians because of her own past.

Born in 1928 in Frankfurt, Germany, Karola Ruth Siegel was an only child. At the age of 10, she was sent to Switzerland by her parents to escape Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom that served as a precursor to the Holocaust. She never saw her parents again; Westheimer believed they had died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

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 had never shot anyone.

Her legs were seriously injured when a bomb exploded in her dorm room, killing many of her friends. She said it was only through the work of an “excellent” surgeon that she was able to walk and ski again.

She married her first husband, an Israeli soldier, in 1950 and they moved to Paris while she attended college. Although he did not have a high school diploma, after passing an entrance exam, Westheimer was admitted to the Sorbonne to study psychology.

The marriage ended in 1955; The following year, Westheimer went to New York with her new boyfriend, a Frenchman who became her second husband and father of her daughter Miriam.

In 1961, after a second divorce, she finally met her life partner: Manfred Westheimer, a fellow refugee from Nazi Germany. The couple married and had a son, Joel. They remained married for 36 years until “Fred” – as she called him – died of heart failure in 1997.

After earning her doctorate in education from Columbia University, she went on to teach at Lehman College in the Bronx. While there, she developed a specialty: instructing professors how to teach sex education. It would eventually become the core of her curriculum.

“I soon realized that while I knew enough about education, I didn’t actually know enough about sex,” she wrote in her 1987 autobiography. Westheimer then decided to take classes with renowned sex therapist Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan.

There she discovered her calling. Soon she was, as she once said in a typically folksy remark, giving sexual advice “like good chicken soup.”

“I came from an Orthodox Jewish family, so sex was never considered a sin for us Jews,” she told The Guardian in 2019.

In 1984, her radio program was nationally syndicated. A year later, she debuted in her own television program, “The Dr. Ruth Show,” which won an Ace Award for excellence in cable television.

She also wrote a nationally syndicated advice column and later appeared in a series of videos produced by Playboy, preaching the virtues of open sexual discourse and good sex. She even had a series of calendars.

Her rise was notable because of the culture of the time, in which then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration was hostile to Planned Parenthood and aligned with pro-conservative voices.

Phyllis Schlafly, an ardent anti-feminist, wrote in a 1999 piece “The Dangers of Sex Education” that Westheimer, as well as Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Madonna, Ellen DeGeneres and others, promoted “provocative sex talk” and “unbridled sex talk.” immorality.”

Father Edwin O’Brien, the communications director of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York who would later become a cardinal, called her work disturbing and morally compromised.

“It’s pure hedonism,” O’Brien wrote in a 1982 op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal. “The message is: just enjoy yourself; whatever feels good is good. There is no higher law that overrides morality, and there is no responsibility either.”

Westheimer has appeared on “The Howard Stern Radio Show,” “Nightline,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” “The Dr. Oz Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman.” She played herself in episodes of ‘Quantum Leap’ and ‘Love Boat: The Next Wave’.

Her books include ‘Sex for Dummies’, her autobiographical works ‘All in a Lifetime’ (1987) and ‘Musically Speaking: A Life through Song’ (2003). The documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth” aired in 2019.

During her time as a radio and television personality, she remained committed to teaching, with posts at Yale, Hunter, Princeton, and Columbia universities and a busy lecture schedule. She has also had her own practice all her life.

Westheimer received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew Union College-Institute of Religion for her work in the field of human sexuality and her commitment to the Jewish people, Israel and religion. In 2001, she received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Leo Baeck Medal, and in 2004, she received the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from Trinity College.

Ryan White, the director of ‘Ask Dr. Ruth’, told Vice in 2019 that Westheimer was never one to follow trends. She was always an ally of gay rights and an advocate for family planning.

“She was at the forefront of both things all her life. I met her friends from her orphanage and said that even when she met gay people all her life in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, she always accepted those people and always say that people should be treated with respect.”

She is survived by two children, Joel and Miriam, and four grandchildren.

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