Absent Friends

Dr. Ruth, meanwhile, was a sensation because she was tiny, ancient, and had a thick accent. No one could possibly accuse her of being salacious, which allowed her to talk in complete openness about subject matter that would have brought the FCC hammer down otherwise.

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) July 13, 2024

The famed "Dr. Ruth" Westheimer has died at the age of 96. She spent decades educating and giving advice on everything sex-related. https://t.co/XCs9Jde0Hf pic.twitter.com/kCqDCmTK1X

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) July 13, 2024

The Forward‘s tribute to “Ruth Westheimer — woman of valor, Lion of Judah and America’s most famous sexologist”:

Ruth Westheimer, who died July 12 at age 96, was called the Lion of Judah by New York City parks commissioner Henry Stern.

The sexologist’s giggly roar was redolent of accents from her own life trajectory: German, Hebrew, Swiss, French, and finally American. Her eventual life and career triumphs were examples of what the French Jewish neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik analyzed as resilience. Cyrulnik’s parents, like Westheimer’s German Jewish mishpocheh, were murdered by the Nazis.

Part of Westheimer’s survival strategy was to not dwell on the profound tragedies in her life as a German Jewish woman. A 1987 coauthored memoir offered surprisingly little of a personal nature and only for the 2019 documentary film Ask Dr. Ruth did she visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims, to find out precise information about when and where her parents were killed.

Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Karlstadt am Main, Westheimer found fortitude in a maxim from her Orthodox Jewish grandmother, “Trust in God,” even if this approach did not work for Bubbe during the Holocaust.

Westheimer only survived because she was shipped to a Swiss orphanage just before the war with a few dozen other German Jewish children and grew up there like a Jewish Jane Eyre, tutoring younger pupils, who may have empathized with her because of her diminutive stature and effervescent personality…

Westheimer was helped in difficult times with comparable benevolence. As a single mother in New York with no high school diploma, she was offered childcare by Jewish Family Services while she obtained master’s and doctoral degrees in education, working with Shirley Zussman, a Jewish specialist in family life studies and Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist.

A brief stint at Planned Parenthood in Harlem was followed by some adjunct teaching at, among other places, Brooklyn College, where she was fired for reasons she never publicly divulged. But unemployment allowed her time to begin radio broadcasting, which grew into an enduring media career…

 
Another loving tribute, by Louis Bayard, on “Why millions trusted Dr. Ruth for the most intimate advice” [gift link]:

It is in no way surprising that Ruth Westheimer, a sex therapist of indefatigable zest and zeal, lasted 96 years on this bitter earth. The only surprise is that, in memory, she seems always to have been something like 96 — or at least far enough along that she could be granted the exemption we normally grant the elderly, which is the ability to say exactly what’s on their minds.

And so she did, as Dr. Ruth, first with an FM radio call-in show called “Sexually Speaking,” then a cable TV program, then multiple platforms over multiple decades. At the peak of her popularity, she commanded — and, it must be said, discomfited — an audience of millions, for there was no issue of human sexuality that she wouldn’t snatch up. Masturbation, premature ejaculation, cunnilingus, the differing vaginal sensations produced by penises and vibrators: Everything was fair play. Even the silly questions posed by her prank callers she answered at face value, because the goal remained, in her words, for people to “get some,” and the end game was nothing short of America’s sexual liberation…

It’s hard now to explain her cultural ubiquity to someone who wasn’t around in the 1980s. In those days, you really could be everywhere. On every talk show, TV network, magazine cover, billboard. On the lips of every comedian and politician and pundit. Everywhere you looked, Dr. Ruth was waiting for you. We never asked for her, but, without knowing it, we needed her, because our country’s sexual revolution had triggered a counter-wave of punitive religiosity, which had, among other things, reconfigured a terrifying viral epidemic as God’s retribution against homosexuals.

And so, to many young gay men of that generation, Dr. Ruth was the thoughtful, nonjudgmental voice of authority we never expected to hear, even from the people who were charged with loving us. “There is no such thing as normal,” she would say, again and again, and it had the curious effect of making us feel normalized, or at least part of the vast continuum of human divergence.

Dr. Ruth’s zeitgeist moment ended pretty much with the ’80s, but to the end of her days, she was teaching, writing, speaking, showing up wherever there were eyes to see and ears to hear. Her compulsive need to fill her calendar, as revealed in the 2019 documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth,” had something in common with showbiz survivors like Joan Rivers and had behind it, I think, the same fear of being forgotten.

Maybe she needed us as much as we needed her, or maybe she grasped just how much we needed each other. The orphan refugee whose parents were swept away by the Holocaust would recall decades later “the importance of being touched, of being loved,” and would, in her final years, sound the alarm against human loneliness. From her angle, sex wasn’t just fun and games; it was death’s most fearsome enemy. It was Eros holding Thanatos to a draw.