“Sex is a private art and a private matter. But it is still a subject we need to talk about.” The most famous American sexologist, Ruth Westheimer, who Americans simply called “Dr. Ruth,” died Friday, July 12, at her home in New York, her friend Pierre Lehu announced. She was 96 years old.
This little woman, 1.40 m tall, who claimed “old-fashioned values” and saw himself as a personality “a bit square”had become a pop icon and media star thanks to her outspoken views on sex, long taboo subjects.
Born Karola Siegel in 1928, the only daughter of Irma and Julius Siegel, an Orthodox Jewish couple from Frankfurt (Germany), this Holocaust survivor lived in Palestine under the British mandate, where she received training as a sniper in the main secret army of the future State of Israel, then in Paris before emigrating to the United States, where she always kept her German accent and her laughing voice.
After studying psychology in Paris, then sociology in New York, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, married three times, saw her media career take off at the turn of the 80s with the success of her radio show “Sexually Speaking” in which she dispenses her guilt-free advice on sex life, mixing humor and lack of judgment. The very serious Wall Street Journal will describe it as “the natural child of Minnie Mouse and Henry Kissinger.”
In particular, she rejected the idea of sexuality being described as “normal”arguing that anything that happened between two consenting adults in private was perfectly acceptable. An idea that, when the HIV epidemic emerged in the 1980s, was far from being shared.
In the wake of the #metoo movement, some have rejected some of the sexologist’s positions on consent. She said in particular to Guardian in 2019: “No one has to be naked in bed, if that person is not determined to have sex.”.
Author of around forty books and almost as many bestsellers, including Sex for Dummiestranslated into 17 languages, Ruth Westheimer, who considered Freud “as sexually illiterate”hoped “having convinced American women to take full responsibility for their sexual satisfaction.”