Why millions trusted Dr. Ruth for the most intimate advice

And so she did, as Dr. Ruth, first with a call-in show on FM radio called “Sexually Speaking,” then a show on cable television, and then across multiple platforms over several decades. At the height of her popularity, she had an audience of millions – and, it must be said, one that embarrassed her – because there was no topic of human sexuality that she didn’t tackle. Masturbation, premature ejaculation, cunnilingus, the various vaginal sensations produced by penises and vibrators: anything went. She even answered the silly questions of her prank callers at face value, because the goal remained, as she herself said, for people to “get something” and the end goal was nothing less than America’s sexual liberation.

She wasn’t the first doctor to take on the cross, but she may have been the first to make it sound like she was having fun. Gone were the white lab coats and sullen faces of Kinsey, Masters, and Johnson. In their place was a well-coiffed, four-foot-tall fairy with cheerful eyes and extravagantly rolled r’s (German was her first language, English her fourth) and a girlish, screeching laugh. This impressively educated woman—Sorbonne, Columbia, Cornell—had an equally impressive sparkle that suggested to viewers that she was getting something out of it herself, and that there was something somehow funny about sex in general, because it reminded us that we are still animals.

If Dr. Ruth started a call-in show today, she would probably cover other topics – gender identity disorders, the asexual spectrum – and she herself would come across as a well-meaning square compared to Dan Savage or Susie Bright. In fact, reading her advice today, it is striking that it is unassailably sensible: Have a good time. Make sure your partner has a good time too. Indulge in your fantasies. Try different things. Use condoms.

What made her studio audience fidget and giggle back then was her blunt use of anatomical detail. “She talks about the penis like it’s a cooking show,” said Robin Williams, and there was indeed a culinary genius in her description of the blending of part into part. “Imagine it’s an ice cream cone,” she said to the woman who balked at oral sex, and I bet you can read the word “clitoris” in a mainstream publication today because Dr. Ruth made it sound as commonplace and innocuous as “turnip.”

It is difficult today to explain their cultural ubiquity to someone who was not there in the 1980s. could be everywhere. On every talk show, on every TV station, on every magazine cover, on every billboard. On the lips of every comedian, politician and pundit. Everywhere you looked, Dr. Ruth was waiting for you. We had never asked for her, but without knowing it, we needed her, because our country’s sexual revolution had unleashed a counterwave of punitive religiosity that, among other things, unleashed a terrible viral epidemic as God’s punishment for homosexuals.

And so, for many young gay men of this generation, Dr. Ruth was the thoughtful, nonjudgmental voice of authority we never expected to hear, even from the people who were supposed to love us. “There is no such thing as normal,” she kept saying, and that had the strange effect of making us feel normal, or at least part of the vast spectrum of human difference.

Dr. Ruth’s zeitgeist pretty much ended with the ’80s, but until the end of her days she taught, wrote, spoke and showed up wherever there were eyes to see and ears to hear. Her compulsive need to fill her calendar, as expressed in the 2019 documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth,” had something in common with show business survivors like Joan Rivers, and behind it, I believe, was the same fear of being forgotten.

Perhaps she needed us as much as we needed her, or perhaps she understood how much we needed each other. The orphaned refugee, whose parents perished in the Holocaust, remembered decades later “how important it is to be touched and loved” and, in her final years, sounded the alarm about human loneliness. In her view, sex was not just fun and games, but death’s most fearsome enemy. It was Eros who challenged Thanatos to a draw.