The politics of Dr. Ruth Westheimer

In 1984 Lifetime was only a few months old when it launched “Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer.” It was apt programming for a basic cable network that specifically targets women, an audience segment accustomed to speaking frankly about sex, although mainly in whispers and with trusted confidantes.

Westheimer broke that discussion wide open with a weeknight talk show where she spoke unabashedly and non-judgmentally about all facets of getting it on. Her Germanic accent and infectious giggle eased tensions or misgivings concerning whether one’s proclivities were “normal” or “healthy,” and the answer was almost always affirming. In Dr. Ruth's view anything is fair game as long as the activity is consensual, doesn't hurt anyone or involve minors.

Westheimer, who died Friday, July 12 at age 96, credited her diminutive stature and unsexy appearance for helping millions to be more receptive to her advice. She considered herself old-fashioned and endorsed relationships over casual intercourse, although in any circumstance she prioritized treating sex as a joyful endeavor, along with using prophylactics. Those qualities made the famous sexologist an attractive guest for Johnny Carson and David Letterman, who had her on many times during her 1980s heyday.

She was a fellow late-night luminary, after all. Her radio show “Sexually Speaking” launched in 1980 as a 15-minute radio segment on New York City’s WYNY-FM before expanding to an hour. By 1985, radio stations in 45 cities broadcast her show, often slotting it after 10 p.m.

That meant you didn’t need a cable subscription, which was still a luxury in the early ‘80s, to access Westheimer’s wisdom. Her radio show democratized access to her version of "sexual literacy," as she called it, although one regret she voiced later in life was that some of her listeners were as young as 12, if not younger.

Then again, for many teenagers and pre-teens in the 1980s, Westheimer’s show supplemented the bare basics of sex ed taught in school, if it was even part of the curriculum. Callers asked questions about all manner of bedroom-related issues and bewilderments — erotic fantasies, marital aids, performance-related dysfunctions and more. Using clinical language, Westheimer dispensed guidance in a friendly and understanding manner, sprinkling in one of her irresistible titters when appropriate.

Only one area of conversation remained off-limits. “From the start, I never went on television to talk about politics,” she says in the 2019 documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth.”

Westheimer’s reason for this was sound. “Somebody who talks about sex as much as I do has to stay away from politics,” she observed in the documentary, so as not to give anyone seeking her counsel a reason to distrust her.

Haranguing avowedly apolitical celebrities to weigh in on progressive or conservative stances is nothing new, although campaign season raises the heat on a star’s refusal to identify with one party or the other.

Related to this is the claim that said person’s mere presence in some spheres counts as a political act, although such responses tend to be seen as avoidant in times of cultural upheaval.

But in Westheimer’s case, it fits.

Her Lifetime series, which was eventually retitled “The Dr. Ruth Show,” was the first of its kind on TV and wildly popular, averaging 2 million viewers weekly at the peak of its 450-episode run.

Its debut coincided with the rise of the evangelical Christian church’s influence on politics, a whiplash response to the sexual revolution and feminist gains of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1984 the Republican party’s platform came out against the proliferation of sex education and sex and violence in the media, according to a 2012 timeline on BillMoyers.com. The GOP, led by then-president Ronald Reagan, also called for a “human life” amendment to the Constitution and pressed for “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”

Within that climate, Westheimer used her fame to present reproductive health as a pillar of healthcare. One archival clip from a TV episode featured in "Ask Dr. Ruth" shows her counseling a woman wracked with guilt over choosing to end a pregnancy that happened despite her using protection.

Instead of responding with empty soothing words, Westheimer concisely explained that her unexpected pregnancy was the result of a contraceptive failure. She made the unthinkable make sense by providing a mechanical reason that it happened. “So don't blame yourself for not being responsible,” she said.

In the opening moments of "Sexually Speaking," Westheimer took care to let listeners know that she was not a medical doctor, and her radio appearances should not be considered therapy. "I am here to educate," she would say.

Even so, her media work had an impact beyond entertainment. Throughout her life Westheimer remained adamant that sex is a private matter and reproductive choice was not for politicians to determine. This was a revolutionary position in the United States and elsewhere. The Telegraph recounts that her appearance in a debate at the Oxford Union, and against the motion that “This house believes there is too much talk about sex,” coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The Telegraph wrote that she drew a record 2,000 undergraduates while nine watched the wall come down on TV in a nearby room. Among the issues she presented to these students was her dismay that abortion had been politicized. “I will be terribly upset if abortion becomes illegal,” she said then, “because before abortion was legalized, only women with money could obtain an abortion. It would be a terrible state of affairs.”

Dr. Ruth is fondly remembered as a pop culture icon, inspiring board games and making cameo appearances in commercials and movies, and inspiring a 2013 play, "Becoming Dr. Ruth," that ran off-Broadway. But her national TV platform, which she held for seven years via various shows, including one directed toward teens, helped reframe some of our thinking about bodily autonomy and acceptance regardless of a person’s sexual orientation.

She was married three times, first to an Israeli soldier with whom she moved to Paris in 1950, where she earned a psychology degree. After five years their marriage ended, and she soon fell in love with a man she married after unexpectedly becoming pregnant.

They emigrated to New York in 1956, but divorced after the birth of their daughter Miriam.

Westheimer became a working single mother devoted to her education, studying at night to gain a master’s degree in sociology from the New School for Social Research in 1959. She'd eventually earn a doctorate in education from Columbia in 1970. In between securing her graduate degrees, she met and married her third husband, Manfred Westheimer, in 1961, with whom she had a son, Joel. Their 36-year union ended with his death in 1997.

But the time she spent working at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem set her on the path to international renown. Speaking with the clinic’s clients piqued her interest in human sexuality, inspiring her to study under Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center.

In the eyes of those who knew her, Westheimer’s empathy was informed by her life experiences. Westheimer never assigned blame or responsibility to any group for any external force that posed a peril to society. This was especially important when HIV was being erroneously and dangerously characterized as a “gay” disease. She wouldn’t countenance efforts to bring up that viewpoint in discussion, often interrupting the broaching of such suggestion before it could begin. She knew what it was like to be a member of an ostracized community.

Born Karola Ruth Siegel in 1928 in Frankfurt, Germany, Westheimer recalled her early childhood being a happy one. That ended when she was 10 after Nazi forces and civilian mobs loosed violence against the Jewish populations in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9, 1938, an event known as Kristallnacht. Westheimer’s father Julius was among many Jews taken by the Nazis.

In 1939 her mother Irma and her grandmother arranged for her to be among the 100 Frankfurt children sent by train to Switzerland as part of the mass humanitarian effort known as the Kindertransport. Westheimer's parents perished in the Holocaust sometime after 1941, which is when the letters from her family stopped coming to her in Heiden refuge. What was originally intended to be a temporary home for displaced children became an orphanage.

Following the Allied liberation of Europe in 1945, the 17-year-old Westheimer moved to British-controlled Palestine and joined the Haganah, the military unit that eventually became the Israeli Defense Forces, as a sniper. But she never saw combat, since she was injured when her kibbutz was bombed, sustaining serious wounds to her feet.

“I’m a Zionist who believes that every person has to have a country of their own,” she told Interview in 2018, going on to add, “. . . but I wouldn’t touch a gun today — not since Columbine.”

Identifying herself thusly carried different connotations after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, and took more than 250 people hostage in an attack that launched the Israel-Hamas War. Two days afterward she posted this statement on X: “As someone who was severely wounded in Israel's 1948 War of Independence, of course I stand with Israel today. But those wounds also help me to identify with all the dead and wounded on both sides. This is a terrible tragedy which sadly won't end soon.”

To date Israel’s bombings and ground offensive in response to that massacre has killed at least 38,000 Gazans, most of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

This wasn’t the first time she made a public statement concerning a politicized matter not related to sexual health. During a question and answer session at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, she once again reminded the audience that she doesn’t do politics. “However, these days I do stand up to be counted that I’m very, very sad when I see children being separated from their parents,” a Vice report quoted her saying. “What kind of society are we in that we permit that?”

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Long after her radio and TV shows ended, and after inspiring series like Oxygen’s “Talk Sex With Sue Johanson” and MTV’s “Loveline” with Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla, Westheimer wrote columns for national publications and continued teaching classes and seeing patients at her private practice until she no longer could.

She survived a stroke in September 2023, but by then was well on her way to being named the nation’s first state-level honorary Ambassador to Loneliness by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.

At the end of her life, this was the position that most aligned with Westheimer’s views on happiness and health. Westheimer wasn't just a believer in a good sex, but in positive relationships and strong interpersonal bonds. Observing the unhealthiness of our nation’s divisions and how much of it resulted from our years-long epidemic of separation from each other, that also counts as a political act.

“Don’t just sit there and suffer,” she says in a voiceover at the start of “Ask Dr. Ruth.” “Don’t fake it. Don’t be unhappy and frustrated. But do something about it.”

“Ask Dr. Ruth” is currently streaming on Hulu.