Ruth Westheimer, a famous teacher on sex and relationships, has died at the age of 96.
People knew her as Dr. Ruth, and for decades she gave hot tips on how to have a hot sex life on her radio show.
Because she was honest and gave honest advice, she became a famous name for pillow talk and a star in her own right.
The New York Times reports that Dr. Ruth’s spokesman, Pierre Lehu, told the press that she had died at her home in New York.
Westheimer was born in Germany in 1928 and was Jewish. She lived through World War II and saw it from the front lines.
She almost went to one of the Holocaust’s concentration camps before she moved to the United States as a teenager.
A lot of the time, she said that her view of sex as something to be enjoyed came from bad things that happened to her when she was young.
She began her career in the 1980s by taking mailed-in questions from radio listeners about sex and relationships. She was in her 50s at the time.
She wrote more than 40 books, some of which were how-to guides on health and sexuality. These books talked about things that most doctors still don’t talk about openly.
After having a regular column in Playgirl magazine, Dr. Ruth even let an educational board game and a computer game use her well-known name.
People in college looked up to her, and getting her to come to campus was often one of the biggest events of the year.
Soon, her face started showing up in commercials and small roles in popular TV shows and movies.
In the French film One Woman or Two (1985), which starred Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver, she had a small but well-known part. The movie came out in the US in 1987.
NOT LIKE ANYOTHER
Dr. Ruth was famous for how she did therapy and how she thought about relationships and sex.
At that time, people usually only talked about sexual relations in very medical terms or behind closed doors, whispering about what their friends had learned in their private lives.
Westheimer was a short woman (4 feet 7 inches) with a wry smile and a light accent who gave out sex tips. This made her even more memorable.
“Something like a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary,” the Wall Street Journal said of the way she talked and acted.
A lot of the things she said on her radio show are now part of her legacy.
“Making your partner happy is the most important thing in sex.” She once said, “If you don’t, it’s bad for both of you.”
“Don’t waste your time with bad sex.
“Sexuality should be celebrated, not hidden or shamed.”
And well-known: “Sexual pleasure is the most wonderful thing in the world.”
A GOOD LIFE
Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany, on June 4, 1928. She was the only child of Julius and Irma Siegel, who were both Orthodox Jews.
It was nice for her to live with her parents and grandparents until Germany started to treat Jews worse all over the country.
In 1938, the Nazis took away her father. Her family then sent her to an orphanage in Switzerland, where she says she was treated badly.
It is thought that her parents and grandparents died in Auschwitz because she never saw them again.
The young Dr. Ruth then moved to Israel and married her first husband, but their marriage didn’t last long.
She later married a Frenchman and had a child with him, but she later said that marriage was also not sustainable.
In the 1950s, she moved to New York City and finally met her match in telecommunications engineer Manfred Westheimer.
When Manfred died in 1997, they were still married. They got married in the early 1960s.
Dr. Ruth’s son Joel Westheimer, her daughter Miriam Westheimer, and her four grandchildren will miss her.