Ruth Westheimer

Introduction

Ruth Westheimer (4 June 1928 – 12 July 2024) was a German-American sex therapist and broadcaster who did more than any clinician of her generation to make ordinary talk about sex unremarkable. Trained first as an educator and only later as a therapist, she reached a very large audience through a late-night radio call-in programme, Sexually Speaking, and then through television, more than forty books and decades of public advocacy. Her trademark was the refusal to use a euphemism: she said penis, vagina and condom on American radio at a time when those words were largely absent from broadcasting.

Her biography is inseparable from her public work. She was an only child sent out of Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport at the age of ten, never saw her parents again, and was a trained sniper in the Haganah before she was twenty. She kept that history almost entirely private for forty years of public life, speaking about it openly only with the 2019 documentary Ask Dr. Ruth.

Early Life and Education

She was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Germany on 4 June 1928, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Irma Hanauer, a housekeeper, and Julius Siegel, a notions wholesaler. The family lived in Frankfurt am Main. In November 1938, days after Kristallnacht, her father was seized by the Nazis and taken to a labour camp. Her mother and grandmother arranged for her to leave Germany with a Kindertransport group for Switzerland, where she spent the next six years in a Jewish orphanage for refugee children. She never saw her parents again and came to believe they had been murdered at Auschwitz.

In the orphanage the children were expected to earn their keep, and the girls were not permitted to enter high school; she spent two years being trained as a domestic servant, and joked later that she was lucky never to have needed the qualification.

In 1945, aged sixteen, she emigrated to British Mandate Palestine. She worked on kibbutzim, taught kindergarten, and joined the Haganah, the underground Jewish militia, training as a scout and a sniper. She maintained that she never fired a shot at anyone. In 1948 — on her twentieth birthday, by her own account — a shell exploded at her kibbutz and severely wounded her legs; she attributed her ability to walk, and later to ski, to a skilled surgeon.

She married an Israeli soldier in 1950 and moved with him to Paris, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne's Institute of Psychology, having been admitted by entrance examination despite never finishing secondary school. The marriage ended in 1955, and the following year she emigrated to the United States with her second husband and daughter.

In New York she worked as a housemaid while studying on a scholarship for Holocaust survivors at The New School for Social Research, taking a master's degree in sociology in 1959. She then worked as a research assistant at Columbia University's Teachers College, where she completed a doctorate in education (EdD) in 1970.

Academic and Professional Career

Her route into sex therapy was accidental. Teaching public health at Columbia when her programme's funding ran out, she took a research post at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem. As she told an interviewer: all these people do is talk about sex. She decided she needed proper clinical training and did postdoctoral work for several years with Helen Singer Kaplan, the physician who had built one of the first sex therapy programmes in the United States.

In 1980 she was hired for a fifteen-minute recorded radio segment on WYNY-FM in New York, scheduled after midnight on Sunday nights, ostensibly because that was when frank talk about contraception and orgasm could do least harm. Audience response was immediate. Sexually Speaking expanded to an hour and then to two, and by 1984 it was nationally syndicated and she was known simply as "Dr. Ruth".

Television followed. The Dr. Ruth Show began in 1985 and reached roughly two million viewers a week; a later version won an ACE Award for excellence in cable television. She taught at Yale, Princeton and Columbia as well as Hunter and Lehman Colleges, wrote a syndicated advice column, appeared in films and sitcoms almost always as herself, hosted a line of Playboy videos, and became the subject of a one-woman play, Becoming Dr. Ruth, and a board game. Late in life she was appointed New York State's first Ambassador to Loneliness, a role she used to draw attention to isolation among older people.

Standing four feet seven inches, with a strong German accent and a manner that mixed grandmotherly authority with comic timing, she was an improbable pop-culture figure, and the improbability was part of the effect. Her signature line was "Get some."

Major Contributions to Psychology

Making sex discussable

Westheimer's contribution was not a new theory but a change in what could be said in public. She insisted that sexual problems were ordinary, that they were usually relational rather than mechanical, and that accurate information was itself therapeutic. Her summary of the principle — "when it comes to sex, the most important six inches are the ones between the ears" — put psychological factors ahead of anatomical ones at a moment when the medical model was gaining ground.

Sex education and public health

From the early 1980s she campaigned for comprehensive, scientifically grounded sex education in schools, for contraception and for AIDS prevention, at a time when the Reagan administration was hostile to Planned Parenthood and sex education was a partisan battleground. She was an early and consistent public advocate of safe sex, and she spoke in favour of gay rights and abortion rights throughout the period.

Sexuality within religious tradition

Less expectedly, she argued that her position came from Orthodox Judaism rather than against it. In Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition (1995) she described sex within marriage as a mitzvah and invoked the ideal of shalom bayit, peace in the home. The claim confounded the assumption, common on both sides, that religious commitment requires sexual repression.

Advocacy in later life

She remained professionally active into her nineties, publishing on relationships and on caregiving, and using her platform on loneliness among the elderly — a subject she took up after her husband's death and her own experience of living alone.

Major Publications

Dr. Ruth's Guide to Good Sex (1983)
Sex and Morality: Who Is Teaching Our Children the Truth? (1988)
Dr. Ruth's Guide to Safer Sex (1992)
Sex for Dummies (1995)
Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition, with Jonathan Mark (1995)
The Art of Arousal (1998)
Dr. Ruth's Guide for the Alzheimer's Caregiver: How to Care for Your Loved One without Getting Overwhelmed, with Pierre A. Lehu (published in the early 2010s; sources give 2010 or 2012)
The Doctor Is In: Dr. Ruth on Love, Life, and Joie de Vivre (2015)
Stay or Go: Dr. Ruth's Rules for Real Relationships (2018)

Impact and Legacy

Westheimer died at her home in Manhattan on 12 July 2024, aged 96. The Library of Congress had recently acquired her papers, and tributes from figures including the Governor of New York and the Librarian of Congress emphasised both the scale of her audience and the unlikeliness of her biography. She was married three times; her third marriage, to the fellow refugee Manfred "Fred" Westheimer, lasted thirty-six years until his death in 1997.

Her influence is easiest to measure in what stopped being remarkable. American popular media now discusses sexual function, contraception and consent in terms she normalised, and sex therapists no longer need to justify the plain vocabulary she insisted on. She also gave the field an unusual model of the clinician as public educator rather than private practitioner.

She was controversial for most of her career, and the opposition was organised as well as vocal. Phyllis Schlafly, in her 1999 essay "The Dangers of Sex Education", named Westheimer alongside Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Madonna and Ellen DeGeneres as promoters of "provocative sex chatter" and "rampant immorality". The Rev. Edwin O'Brien, then communications director for the Catholic archdiocese of New York and later a cardinal, wrote in a 1982 Wall Street Journal opinion piece that her message was "pure hedonism" — "just indulge yourself" — and called her work upsetting and morally compromised. Her willingness to appear in Playboy videos and her support for abortion and gay rights made her a reliable target during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Questioning also came from a different direction, and it concerned credentials rather than morals. Westheimer held a doctorate in education, not in psychology or medicine, and entered sex therapy through postdoctoral training rather than a clinical degree programme. Critics asked whether a radio performer with her background should be dispensing advice on sexual and psychological problems, and some clinicians objected that her format — short segments, no follow-up, no case records — was entertainment rather than treatment. She did not claim to be a physician and generally answered by pointing to her training under Kaplan and to her role as an educator, but the tension between the two roles never fully resolved, and it is the standing criticism of her career.

Her own account of the work was unapologetic. Asked what sex education required, she said three things: that it be taught, that it be based on scientifically validated data, and that it be taught with some humour.

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References

Westheimer, R. K. (1983). Dr. Ruth's Guide to Good Sex. Warner.