The massive cultural changes that made Dr. Ruth possible

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who died last Saturday at the age of 96, had an amazing career as a sex therapist, combining professional expertise with a mischievous sense of humor. In her radio show, two television shows, nearly 50 books and countless public appearances, Dr. Ruth made it clear that she believed sexual pleasure was extremely important – and she took great pleasure in talking about it. She found joy in the world around her and encouraged others to have fun, too.

Her optimistic outlook was born out of a childhood of unimaginable loss and struggle, so her emphasis on joy was a choice, not just a character trait. Dr. Ruth left a legacy of sexual openness and the need to defend pleasure as a universal right – a theme that is more relevant today than ever.

In 1938, ten-year-old Westheimer (née Karola Seigel) was sent by her parents and grandmother from her home near Frankfurt to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. An only child, she never saw her family again. Instead, she made friends with other Jewish refugee children in the Swiss orphanage and met her first boyfriend. It was to this relationship that she owed not only her smile when she was forced to help with household chores for the Christian children living there, but also her education. Her boyfriend smuggled his schoolbooks to her at night, as girls were not accepted into the village school. The joy of learning and the joy of physical affection (at this point in her life, “a little kissing,” as she explained in her 2003 memoir) went hand in hand.

Read more: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, America’s pioneering sex therapist, dies at the age of 96

Her life was full of upheavals. She moved to Palestine in the mid-1940s and nearly died of shrapnel wounds in the Israeli-Palestinian fighting, followed a new husband to France, then moved to the United States and married a second and then a third time. She was happily married to Fred Westheimer, who adopted her daughter from a previous marriage and with whom Ruth had a son. In 1970 she earned a doctorate in education and then became a state-certified sex therapist with her own practice and teaching assignments.

Her career as a sex therapist was only possible because of dramatic changes in American life. Groundbreaking studies on sexuality, from the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953 to Human sexual response (1968) by William Masters and Virginia Johnson revealed that women’s sex lives were as varied and complex as men’s—and that many of the conventional wisdom about female sexuality, queer desires, and marital sex had little to do with reality. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and feminist demands for gender equality created new opportunities for open discussions about erotic desires. Feminists demanded unrestricted access to contraception and abortion, and insisted that sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy were fundamental human freedoms. Gay liberation fighters and LGBTQ+ reformers protested against discrimination in everything from employment to mental health care.

As Westheimer herself argued vigorously throughout her career, these activists insisted that there was no “normal” when it came to sex. They portrayed sexuality as an essential part of human self-determination and insisted on their right to the varied pleasures of consensual sex.

Yet non-judgmental openness about sexuality remained controversial. Comprehensive sex education, first introduced in the 1960s, almost immediately became a source of right-wing radicalization, as thousands of conservative white women mobilized to ban discussions of homosexuality, premarital sex, and masturbation in their children’s schools. In the 1970s, some states and municipalities introduced new anti-discrimination measures for LGBTQ+ people, but others tightened their anti-sodomy laws and banned gays and lesbians from public service. Advocacy for sexual equality and against anti-gay prejudice remained controversial. Many of the more mainstream sex guides of the time, such as Alex Comfort’s The joy of sex (1972) repeated older ideas about the primacy of male sexual needs and almost completely overlooked queer sexuality.

Some sexual iconoclasts remained. Betty Dodson, a less formally trained sex educator than Westheimer, achieved a certain degree of fame through her self-published treatise Liberating masturbation (1972) and its subsequent works, Sex for one person: The joy of self-love (1987). Dodson urged women to explore orgasmic self-determination as part of their political emancipation, but never achieved anywhere near the level of fame achieved by Dr. Ruth.

Dr. Ruth’s petite figure stood out from the crowd, and she became the country’s most visible advocate of a wide range of sexual pleasures during the conservative 1980s. In 1982, when Westheimer was in her 50s, she got her first radio show (initially only 15 minutes long, broadcast on Sundays at midnight). “Sexually Speaking,” as it was called, was a platform that allowed her to share her joyful sexual ethos with the American public at large. Only then did her career as “Dr. Ruth” begin.

Their ethos of sexual acceptance was downright radical in the United States in the 1980s.

As the HIV/AIDS crisis rocked the country and gay men were falsely blamed for spreading the disease, Dr. Ruth championed the rights of people with AIDS and insisted on destigmatizing sex between consenting adults, regardless of the sex of the partners. She ignored bans on sexually explicit language on television shows by talking about vaginas, orgasms and masturbation. Late at night with David Letterman, the Show at Arsenio Hall, Good morning Americaand other programs, all with her trademark combination of wit and candor, with winks and giggles as she explained everything from how to perform Kegel exercises to the importance of clear communication in sexual relationships.

The nation was moving to the right, but Westheimer stood firm. She spoke matter-of-factly about the value of masturbation (including recommending that vibrators and other sex toys be incorporated into partnered sex) even when Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the first Black and first woman to serve as U.S. Surgeon General, was forced to resign in 1994 after suggesting that sex education programs should include mention of masturbation. Critics tried to ban her from their universities and even states (including an attempt to make a citizen’s arrest during a lecture at Oklahoma State University in 1985), but she was undeterred. She taught that there was nothing dirty or wrong about sex and refused to pander to anyone who found her advice shocking.

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Dr. Ruth also debunked the notion that sex was less important to women than men. “Women need sex,” she explained in 2019. She urged women not to fake an orgasm unless they had to, a “little white lie” to protect a man’s feelings – although she recommended women break off relationships with men who couldn’t handle a little critical feedback about their performance in bed. With her German accent and petite frame (at her peak she was 4 feet 7 inches tall), Dr. Ruth was at once a grandmotherly advice giver and a sexual health expert.

As many states continue to debate the appropriateness of books on LGBTQ issues and ban discussions of queer sex from high school curriculums, Westheimer’s nonjudgmental approach to sexual pleasure remains important and controversial for many Americans. Conservative proposals to ban not only abortion but many of the most reliable forms of contraception threaten to send women in the United States back to a time when they had to fear unwanted pregnancies from otherwise desirable sex.

For Westheimer, sexual pleasure was not superficial in the slightest. Experiencing pleasure was an act of defiance for her. “I didn’t know that my ultimate contribution to the world would be to talk about orgasms and erections,” she told the Harvard Business Review in 2016, “but I knew I had to do something for others to justify my life.”

Rebecca L. Davis teaches history at the University of Delaware. She recently wrote Desires: A New History of Sex, Sexuality and America and writes the newsletter Carnal Knowledge.

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