Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the petite American sexologist, dies at 96

By Mark Kennedy | Associated Press

NEW YORK — Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive sexologist who became a pop icon, media star and best-selling author thanks to her frank discussions of once-taboo topics in the bedroom, has died. She was 96.

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

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

“I still have old-fashioned values ​​and I’m a little old-fashioned,” she told Michigan City High School students in 2002. “Sex is a private art and a private matter. But it’s something we need to talk about.”

Westheimer’s raspy voice and German accent, combined with her 4-foot-4 frame, made her an unlikely outlet for “sex education.” This contradiction was one of the keys to her success.

But it was her extensive knowledge and training, coupled with her humorous, nonjudgmental style, that propelled her local radio show, “Sexually Speaking,” into the national spotlight in the early 1980s. She had an open approach to what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their own homes.

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

Her radio success opened new doors for her, and in 1983 she wrote the first of more than 40 books: “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex,” which demystifies sex with rationality and humor. There is even a board game, Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex.

She quickly became a regular on late-night television talk shows, bringing her personality to the national stage. Her rise to fame coincided with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when frank discussions about sexuality became a necessity.

“If we could talk about sexual activity the same way we talk about diet, the same way we talk about food, without it having this connotation that there’s something wrong with it, then we’d be moving forward. But we have 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 television, aided by her Jewish grandmotherly accent, which the Wall Street Journal once called “a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse.” People magazine included her on its list of “the most intriguing people of the century.” She even made her name into a Shania Twain song: “No, I don’t need proof to show me the truth/Not even Dr. Ruth’s gonna tell me how I feel.”

Westheimer supported abortion rights, suggested that older people have sex after a good night’s sleep, and was a strong proponent of condom use. She believed in monogamy.

In the 1980s, she advocated for gay people at the height of the AIDS epidemic and spoke out for the LGBTQ community. She has said she defended people considered “subhuman” by some far-right Christians because of her own past.

Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1928, she was an only child. At age 10, her parents sent her to Switzerland to escape Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom that preceded the Holocaust. She never saw her parents again; Westheimer believed they had been killed in the gas chambers at 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 claims to have never shot anyone.

Her legs were badly injured when a bomb exploded in her dorm, killing several of her friends. She said it was only thanks to 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 continued her studies. Although she did not graduate from high school, Westheimer was accepted to the Sorbonne to study psychology after passing an entrance exam.

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 the father of her daughter, Miriam.

In 1961, after a second divorce, she finally met her life partner: Manfred Westheimer, also a refugee from Nazi Germany. The couple married and had a son, Joel. They remained together 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 taught at Lehman College in the Bronx. There she developed a specialty: teaching teachers how to teach sex education, a subject that would eventually become the core of her curriculum.

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

It was there that she discovered her calling. Soon, as she once put it in a typically popular comment, she was dispensing sex advice “like good chicken soup.”

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

In 1984, her radio program was broadcast nationally. A year later, she debuted her own television show, “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, extolling the virtues of open sexual discourse and good sex. She even had a series of calendars.

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

Phyllis Schlafly, a staunch anti-feminist, wrote in a 1999 article titled “The Dangers of Sex Education” that Westheimer, along with Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Madonna, Ellen DeGeneres and others, encouraged “provocative sexual chatter” and “rampant immorality.”

Father Edwin O’Brien, communications director for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and later a cardinal, called his work upsetting and morally compromised.

“It’s pure hedonism,” O’Brien wrote in a 1982 article for the Wall Street Journal. “The message is: Treat yourself; whatever feels good is good. There is no higher law that overrides morality, and there is no responsibility.”

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 has played herself in episodes of “Quantum Leap” and “Love Boat: The Next Wave.”

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

While a radio and television personality, she devoted herself to teaching, holding positions at Yale, Hunter, Princeton and Columbia universities and maintaining a busy academic speaking schedule. She also maintained a private practice throughout her life.

Westheimer received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew Union College-Institute of Religion for her work on 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 an honorary Doctor of Letters from Trinity College.

Ryan White, the director of “Ask Dr. Ruth,” told Vice in 2019 that Westheimer has never followed trends. She has always been an ally of gay rights and an advocate for Planned Parenthood.