Unlikely pop culture icon Dr Ruth Westheimer preached the joys of good sex, great sex and, especially, safe sex, to audiences around the world.
Just 140cm (4ft 7in), "Dr Ruth" was small of stature but through her forthright, explicit but perpetually cheerful advice on a subject long treated as taboo by broadcasters made a huge contribution toward demystifying the subject of sex.
Long a proponent of contraception, Westheimer herself was the product of an unplanned, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Born in Germany in 1928 as Karola Ruth Siegel, Westheimer’s youth was overshadowed by the rise of Nazism.
In 1939, after the arrest of her father Julius, her mother Irma dispatched her daughter to Switzerland on a Kindertransport. Westheimer lived for the next six years in an orphanage: both her parents and all her relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.
Aged 17 she emigrated to what was then Palestine and joined Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organisation.
"I learned to assemble a rifle in the dark and was trained as a sniper so that I could hit the centre of the target time after time," she wrote in a 2010 New York Times article.
Westheimer never tested her sniping skills against an enemy but was badly hurt in a bombing in Jerusalem, sustaining injuries which almost led to her losing both feet.
She married an Israeli soldier and they moved to Paris and went to college. They later divorced, and she headed to New York with a boyfriend, married him, had a daughter and continued her education.
After another divorce, she wed Manfred Westheimer, an engineer she met in 1961. That marriage produced a son and lasted until Manfred's death in 1997.
After earning a doctorate in education from Columbia University, she went on to teach at Lehman College in the Bronx. While there she developed a specialty — instructing professors how to teach sex education. It would eventually become the core of her curriculum.
"I soon realised that while I knew enough about education, I did not really know enough about sex," she wrote in her 1987 autobiography. Westheimer then decided take classes with the renowned sex therapist, Dr Helen Singer Kaplan.
Westheimer went to work for Planned Parenthood and caught the attention of a New York radio station executive when she lectured broadcast officials on contraception.
That led to a weekly 15-minute midnight radio programme in 1980 called Sexually Speaking. It was an advice show that took questions from listeners about orgasms, condoms and sexual dysfunction, and quickly won Westheimer a following.
"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. But we have to do it with good taste," she told Johnny Carson in 1982.
She normalised the use of words like "penis" and "vagina" on radio and TV, aided by her Jewish grandmotherly accent, which The Wall Street Journal once said was "a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse."
People magazine included her in their list of "The Most Intriguing People of the Century." She even made it into a Shania Twain song: "No, I don’t need proof to show me the truth/Not even Dr Ruth is gonna tell me how I feel."
Westheimer said it was a combination of her experience, training, and her quirky voice and accent that gave her credibility with listeners. They also liked the way she would cheerily wish them "good sex!"
In 1984, her radio programme was nationally syndicated. A year later, she debuted in her own television programme, The Dr Ruth Show, which went on to win an Ace Award for excellence in cable television.
Westheimer was by now a popular guest on TV talk shows. She built a "Dr Ruth" empire which included books, instructional videos, lectures, teaching, countless television appearances, a syndicated column and even a Good Sex board game.
In the 1980s, she stood up for gay men at the height of the Aids epidemic and spoke out loudly for the LGBTQ community. She said she defended people deemed by some to be "subhuman" because of her own past.
Westheimer believed in people doing whatever they were comfortable with in bed, or elsewhere, and that sex was better when accompanied by intimacy and communication. If it was between consenting adults and done with proper consideration of contraception, it was OK with Dr Ruth. But personally, she was no libertine.
"I am very old fashioned . . . and a square," Westheimer said in a National Geographic interview in 2003.
"I believe in love. I believe in relationships. I believe in people staying together for a lifetime or as long as possible."
In addition to an autobiography, Westheimer wrote nearly 40 books, including Sex for Dummies, Dr Ruth's Sex After 50, Dr Ruth's Encyclopedia of Sex and Dr Ruth's Top Ten Secrets for Great Sex.
Westheimer never gave up teaching and held posts at Yale, Hunter, Princeton and Columbia universities and a busy college lecture schedule. She also maintained a private practice throughout her life.
Westheimer died on July 12 aged 96. — Agencies
