I will never forget the afternoon I spent, about 30 years ago, with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, interviewing her for a now-long-lost magazine article — my first ever. We met at the door of her New York City office in Washington Heights. In a gesture of mingled affection and authority, she thrust her top-handled pocketbook into my hands, while she fished for her keys. Once inside the cozy, cluttered space, I saw the many footstools she kept stowed beneath every chair. At 4-foot-7 Dr. Ruth used them to keep her feet from dangling when she sat down.
We were there to talk about a book she had written about sex and Jewish spirituality, but she turned it into a two-way conversation, quizzing me about my studies, my new job, my love life. Unsatisfied with what she had heard, she began trying to fix things. She mused about job interviews she might set up for me, and where I could find suitable young men (she recommended joining B’nai Jeshurun, the famous, progressive synagogue on the Upper West Side). She was personal, concerned, connected, and she encouraged me to connect more with others. Fostering connection was one of her special talents.
Dr. Ruth’s office testified to her own engaged and connected life. The many photographs lining the walls and crowding the tabletops showed her posing with family members as well as with numerous celebrities and dignitaries. Several photos showed her smiling through goggles on various international mountaintops. Dr. Ruth, it turned out, was an avid and accomplished skier, a fact that should not have surprised me but did. She just didn’t seem the type. And that was always the point.
Ruth Westheimer posed a perpetual contradiction: Her form never seemed to match her content. A tiny woman with an old-fashioned “beauty parlor” bouffant, high-pitched voice (with distinctive Old World accent) and grandmotherly demeanor, she was the last person you’d expect to hear talking about orgasms (or slaloming down an Alp). But “sexual literacy” was her field, and she dispensed learned, serious advice to the general public for over 40 years — in dozens of books, articles, her wildly popular radio and TV shows. She was even the subject of a one-woman Off Broadway show.
Being a sex educator, though, would never have sufficed to create all this fame. Dr. Ruth owed her celebrity precisely to the incongruity she embodied, which disarmed audiences, distracting them from the discomfort and embarrassment that sex talk can provoke — especially in America.
The slight amusement of hearing a middle-aged, then elderly lady cheerfully discuss “masturbation” (can’t you just hear her now, pronouncing that word?) provided the ideal deflection from the topic’s awkwardness, allowing listeners to relax and pay attention. Dr. Ruth understood this perfectly and cultivated that warmth and humor to great effect.