Her death was confirmed by her publicist, Pierre Leff, co-author of several books, but the cause of death was not disclosed.
Described as the first superstar sex therapist, Dr. Westheimer was over 50 when she debuted “Sexually Speaking” on New York’s WYNY in 1980. The radio show originally aired in 15-minute increments but was later syndicated and expanded to two hours to accommodate the influx of phone calls. More than a few listeners professed to have credited her with saving their marriages.
Cable TV viewers knew her as the prim and proper granny host of “Good Sex with Dr. Ruth Westheimer” in the 1980s and as a regular guest on late-night talk shows, where, at 4 feet 7 inches tall, she could often be seen perched in a chair wearing a pearl necklace and doling out cheery advice on best practices in bed.
“Have good sex!” she said in her instantly recognisable German accent.
Dr. Westheimer’s archaic accent, which at times seemed at odds with her discussion of genital anatomy and its uses, was one of the few vestiges of her life before coming to the U.S. Born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany, she was placed in an orphanage in Switzerland before her parents died and survived the Holocaust.
“Having survived the Nazis left me with a sense of obligation to make an impact on the world,” Dr. Westheimer once said in an interview, adding that he didn’t know that the impact would result in him “talking about sex from morning till night.”
After the war, she went to Israel, where she joined the Haganah paramilitary group fighting for a Jewish state (and where, she said, she lost her virginity in a hayloft.) She then moved to France and New York, where she learned English and then studied counseling.
Dr. Westheimer taught college classes on human sexuality before producers at NBC affiliate WYNY picked her for a 15-minute program, which first aired Sundays after midnight. Within a year, she was promoted to a 10-11 p.m. slot. Early fans wore T-shirts that read, “Sex on Sundays? For real!”
The sexual revolution that began 20 years ago liberated the masses from taboo but did little to alleviate problems like erectile dysfunction and the inability to achieve orgasm. Just as Julia Child appeared on public television to teach French cooking, Dr. Westheimer took to the airwaves to demystify how to make love.
She wasn’t the first on-air therapist — there had been others a generation before, such as Joyce Brothers — but few could match Dr. Westheimer’s combination of forthrightness and unwillingness. Plus, she speculates, people didn’t find Dr. Westheimer a threat.
“If I had been a tall, blonde woman in a miniskirt and a décolletage, if I had been young and beautiful, it wouldn’t have worked,” she told The Sunday Times of London.
“Anything that two adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom is fine with me,” Dr. Westheimer told the audience. Masturbation, fantasy, sex dolls, etc. were all fine with her.
Newsweek magazine once quoted her response when asked for her opinion on an unconventional sexual activity: “As long as it’s a relationship, what’s wrong with a new way to use peanut butter or onion rings?”
Her biggest concern was safety. The New York Times recorded her response when she called a young woman who, like many others, was considering losing her virginity.
“Don’t,” Dr. Westheimer said, “I can see from your question that he’s pressuring you. Listen to your heart, which is telling you that you want to wait. Tell him that Dr. Westheimer said he can cuddle, kiss, nuzzle and stroke you, but that you just aren’t ready yet.”
Dr. Westheimer warned women to remember to use reliable birth control whenever they’re ready.
Many of the calls came from the opposite sex, and she noted that two of the most common problems Dr. Westheimer has treated over the years have been premature ejaculation and the inability to maintain an erection.
“Men, you’re all so ignorant!” she once said. “You’re always worrying about penis size. Let me shout it from the rooftops: penis size has nothing to do with a woman’s sexual satisfaction.”
She became a tempting subject for parodies, including on “Saturday Night Live,” and some mental health experts warned that it was impossible to properly diagnose or counsel her based on her brief on-air interactions.
Dr. Westheimer countered that she was simply educating her listeners on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies, avoid sexually transmitted diseases, and improve their sex lives. Critics aside, there was general agreement that her show was good television.
“If you talk about sex with Dr. Ruth, can you really have an equally good conversation with anyone else?” TV critic Tom Shales once wrote.
A tragic childhood
An only child, Carola Ruth Siegel was born on June 4, 1928, in Frankfurt, Germany.
She first learned about sex when she found an illustrated book in her father’s study, which her parents had tried to keep out of her reach: “The Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique,” a popular manual written in the 1920s by Dutch gynecologist Th. H. van de Velde. Far from being bound by the teachings of Orthodox Judaism, she says she was taught that sex in marriage was a good thing.
A week after Kristallnacht in 1938, the Nazis took her father to a labor camp. “I looked out the window,” she told the London Guardian, “and saw my father get into a covered truck… He had a forced smile on his face, and that was the last time I saw him.”
She last saw her mother the following year, from the window of the train that was carrying her and other Jewish children to Switzerland, and remembered her grandmother running after her along the platform.
At the orphanage, surrounded by young people who had also lost their families, “Karola” shared her knowledge on topics like menstruation. For several years, she received letters from her family at the orphanage. Then one day, the letters stopped coming.
Like many other European Jews who survived, she tried to build a new life in Israel. “I never killed anybody,” she once told USA Today about her service in the Haganah, “but I know how to throw a grenade and shoot.” During one skirmish, she was seriously wounded by shrapnel.
She married David, an Israeli soldier, and moved with him to France, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne, but they later divorced. In the mid-1950s, she moved to the United States with her French boyfriend Dan, whom she married after becoming pregnant, but they also divorced. In 1961, she married Manfred Westheimer, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who also died in 1997.
She worked as a maid while continuing her education, earning a master’s degree in sociology from the New School for Social Research in 1959 and a doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1970. One of her mentors was Helen Singer Kaplan, a leading psychosexual therapist.
Early in her career, Dr. Westheimer worked with Planned Parenthood and developed her sex therapy specialty as a sex education teacher. For many years, she also provided private counseling in addition to her broadcast program. Her franchise includes bestselling book series such as “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex,” “Sex for Beginners,” and “Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50: Increase Romance, Passion, and Excitement!”.
In her 1985 book, First Love: A Sexual Information Guide for Young People, she wrote, “Safe times are [for sex] “The week of ovulation is the week before and the week of ovulation.” A librarian in New Jersey noticed this typo (the intended word is unsafe), which led to the recall of over 100,000 books.
“Even bigwigs like me make mistakes,” Dr. Westheimer said at the time.
There were Dr. Ruth board games and Dr. Ruth videocassettes. She was the subject of Mark St. Germain’s play, Becoming Dr. Ruth, and made frequent cameo appearances on television and in movies.
Survivors include two children and four grandchildren.
An interviewer once asked Dr. Westheimer what she thought her legacy would be.
“People will say she had guts. In Jewish tradition, that’s called chutzpah. She had the guts to say things that other people might be too scared to say,” she told The Washington Post. “I don’t care if people say my radio show turned them on,” she continued. “I think that’s great. I gave you foreplay. But please take me seriously. Don’t let boredom creep into the bedroom.”
