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Ruth Westheimer, “Dr. Ruth” to tens of millions of people around the world, died at her home in New York City on Friday surrounded by her family. She was 96.
She was known for her frank, funny, approachable advice on sex and intimacy for individuals and couples. Prudish in her personal life, the German Jewish refugee and daughter of Holocaust victims took a long, winding road to celebrity.
“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.”
Indeed, she never advocated risky behavior. She had an open approach to what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their bedroom.
“Tell him you’re not going to initiate,” she told a concerned caller on her ground-breaking radio show “SexuallySpeaking” in June 1982. “Tell him that Dr. Westheimer said that you’re not going to die if he doesn’t have sex for one week.”
Part of her charm was the incongruity of the 4′ 7″ grandmother dispensing frankly titillating advice in a high, accented voice.
The columnist William E. Geist, who wrote a New York Times Magazine article about her in 1985, said that “she looks for all the world as though she is about tell us in her cheery mittel-European accent how to make a nice apple strudel.”
“But when she opens her mouth it’s Code-Blue-in-the-family-room all across the country,” he added.”
She never used “street” terms for body parts.
