Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive Jewish sex therapist who helped change Americans’ attitudes about a once-taboo subject, has died. She was 96.
The 4’7″ author and talk show host, best known as “Dr. Ruth,” normalized discussion about sex with her frank descriptions of the subject and her unembarrassed use of words like “penis” and “vagina” in an accent that The Wall Street Journal once called “a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse.”
Related:
Westheimer’s rise coincided with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when hysteria and ignorance about the disease were met with her clear-eyed explanations and calls for compassion. Westheimer said she felt an affinity for gay men described as “subhuman” by far-right Christians in the Reagan era because of her own experience as a Jew in 1930s Germany.
Stay connected to your community
Connect with the issues and events that impact your community at home and beyond by subscribing to our newsletter.
When it came to sex, Westheimer always maintained there was nothing to be ashamed of.
“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.”
And she did so in over 40 books; a nationally syndicated radio program called Sexually Speaking; her own TV talk show; she taught at Yale, Princeton and Columbia Universities; and served as a guest in hundreds of appearances on other chat shows. She was a favorite of late-night talk show hosts Johnny Carson and David Letterman.
“If we could bring about talking about sexual activity the way we talk about diet — the way we talk about food — without it having this kind of connotation that there’s something not right about it, then we would be a step further,” she told Carson in 1982. “But we have to do it with good taste.”
“Between the waist and the knees,” she said of the way people are brought up, “there is nothing.”
Westheimer, a strong supporter of abortion rights, had her critics.
Anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly criticized the doctor along with Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Madonna, and Ellen DeGeneres for promoting “provocative sex chatter” and “rampant immorality” in her 1999 essay “The Dangers of Sex Education.”
But over a forty-plus year career in the spotlight, Westheimer stayed relevant with another pillar of her success.
“I certainly believe in the need for sexuality education,” she told NPR in 2007, “and it has to be taught with some kind of humor.”
The grandmotherly doctor’s combination of deep knowledge, a lack of judgment, and her trademark humor proved irresistible for audiences.
“Tell him you’re not going to initiate,” she told a caller on her radio show Sexually Speaking emphatically in 1982. “Tell him that Dr. Westheimer said that you’re not going to die if he doesn’t have sex for one week.”
Out gay director Ryan White, who made the 2019 documentary Ask Dr. Ruth, said of her, “[She] wasn’t someone following the trend of like, ‘I’ve evolved on the issue of homosexuality.’ Or once abortion became legalized is then on the pro-choice train. She was at the forefront of both of those things throughout her entire life. I met her friends from her orphanage saying even when she met gay people throughout her life in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s she was always accepting of those people and always saying that people should be treated with respect.”
“I know a lot of my friends that are ten years, 15 years, 20 years older than me that are gay … that say, ‘I can’t believe you made a film on Dr. Ruth, that woman saved my life.’ And that to me is incredible that I can be a part of, as a gay person in the gay community, getting to tell the story,” White said.
