Dr. Ruth Westheimer
“It’s wonderful to be Dr. Ruth”
By David Gibbons
It’s hard not to love Dr. Ruth. And Ruth K. Westheimer, Ed.D., ain’t such a bad lady either. Guess what? They’re one and the same, and, surprisingly, perhaps incongruously, it is this sweet little 79-year-old grandmother who has done more than anybody over the past quarter-century to improve the sex lives of millions of Americans. Recently she submitted to an interview for Thrive at her cozy, pleasantly cluttered office — fit for an absent-minded professor, which she is decidedly not — in a modest medical-practice building on the Upper East Side.
Dr. Ruth’s formidable character is wrapped in a famously tiny, dynamic package. She wields her razor-sharp mind and rapier wit in the guise of a babushka masquerading as a university professor. The walls of her office are mostly lined with books, the few empty spaces filled with diplomas, family and celebrity photos, and the odd testimonial, among them an article headlined TOP SEX THERAPIST DR. RUTH AN EXPERT ON OPTIMISM, TOO. Her sparkling personality features uncommon portions of generosity, compassion, insight, cleverness, and, perhaps most important of all, humor. Discretion is nearly as important a part of the formula: If someone is uncomfortable talking about their specific sexual concerns — it’s natural; people are modest — Dr. Ruth knows just how to handle it. Her teaching is done either confidentially — one-on-one in the context of private therapy sessions — or in large public venues such as college lectures or mass-media appearances.
Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, the busy professional, meshes with the media persona of “Dr. Ruth” seamlessly. She is so cute and so smart and so darned nice, you just want to hug her, take her home, and make her into your grandmother. But a paying client awaits, and she has a little under an hour to answer your questions. She punctuates the discussion by loading your arms with several of her latest books, out of the more than 30 she’s written, and pressing “Sex for Dummies” key chains into your hands, exhorting you to give them out to taxi drivers, pedestrians, anybody you meet. You want to believe — no, you do believe — this is no wanton act of self-promotion, but rather a genuine, and generous, gesture of proselytism. (Along with Pierre Lehu, to whom she fondly refers as her “Minister of Communications,” she’s just published the third edition of the sex volume they wrote for the bestselling For Dummies series.) It’s all part of Dr. Ruth’s professional life mission of spreading what she calls “sexual literacy,” pursued fervently, with infectious enthusiasm and seemingly infinite energy.
Since the early eighties, this long-time New Yorker and pint-sized dynamo has plied the airwaves — mostly radio but also TV — in her quest to educate the masses about sex, a role she never imagined when she began graduate studies in sociology at the New School for Social Research after immigrating to the U.S. in 1956. Her curriculum vitae outlines a long, gradual climb to superstardom. She was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1928, and grew up in a loving, Orthodox Jewish family. In 1939 she was sent to a Jewish orphanage in Switzerland, and never saw her family again. At 17 she was a Haganah freedom fighter in Palestine, trained as a sniper, wounded in both legs on her 20th birthday, and witness to the birth of Israel. In Paris she studied at the Sorbonne and taught kindergarten. In New York she worked at Planned Parenthood, earned her doctorate from Columbia University, and began studying sexuality under Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center.
Behind the media colossus, a role she graciously relishes, there exists, without conflict or contradiction, a serious psychosexual therapist who works in both the clinical and academic arenas. She sees patients three days a week about their sex lives; other problems — depression, substance abuse, and so forth — are referred to specialist colleagues. She teaches undergraduate courses two days a week, one at Yale and the other at Princeton. Among the few perks she claims of fame and fortune is a car service to ferry her to and from New Haven or central New Jersey — even Cambridge, Mass., on the occasions she’s lectured at Harvard. “I schlep things,” she says, “for example this old book bag with textbooks in it. Feel it; it’s heavy!” Another indulgence is skiing, her favorite sport and hobby, which she credits as a key to longevity and joie de vivre. (So keep an eye out for Dr. Ruth, her children and grandchildren, bombing down the slopes of Vail, Deer Valley, or some other ski area out west.)
Naturally, everyone wants to know Dr. Ruth’s secret for maintaining such a relentlessly positive outlook in the face of hardship, starting with the loss of her entire family when she was 10. In the introduction to her book Musically Speaking: A Life Through Song (2003) she says: “The answer I always gave was that the warmth and security of my early childhood socialization had a remarkable power and influence. This is certainly true. But now I have realized that there is another part to the answer. And that is music.” In the same book she also allows as how her particular culture dictates a certain stoicism: “I am a Jecke — a German Jew — and you must trust me that we tend to keep our emotions contained. A Jecke doesn’t cry.”
Like that of a handful of other brand-name media stars, Dr. Ruth’s success is attributable to a few key factors: She stays on message, she keeps it real and fundamental, and she’s able to project massive amounts of God-given charisma. She leaves the lasting impression of a little professor with an impish smile, a 200-watt twinkle in her eye, and plenty of concrete advice on such widespread afflictions as premature ejaculation (men) and lack of orgasm (women). Thus has Ruth K. Westheimer sustained, for more than 25 years, the phenomenon of Dr. Ruth, world-famous celebrity and much-beloved popular expert about the topic on everybody’s mind: Sex.
How did you find your vocation as a psychosexual therapist?
I would have never dreamt I would become a psychosexual therapist. I worked at the Columbia University School of Public Health, and I lost my job because the money ran out on a government research project. I needed a job and got a position at Planned Parenthood of New York City. I thought: “These people are crazy, what’s the matter with them? All they talk about is sex. They don’t talk about literature, they don’t talk about philosophy, they don’t even talk about the weather.” Forty-eight hours later, I said to myself: “Now that’s an interesting subject!” I worked there for three years and did research, following the contraceptive and abortive histories of 2,000 patients. It was 1967, before abortion was legalized. I was research director and had a whole staff, including statisticians. Actually, the results were published in the U.S. [government] health reports. I also used data I collected for my doctoral dissertation. At the end of the project, before I had finished writing my dissertation, I got worried there might be some data missing. I had a dream I was drowning in cross-tabulations. They don’t exist anymore today, but in the old days you had reams and reams of paper full of cross-tabulations. After my doctoral dissertation, I taught how to teach sex education at the City University, Lehmann College. I realized I didn’t know enough, so I applied, and was accepted, at the Cornell Medical School program led by the famous sex therapist Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan. I was there seven years, three years being trained and another five helping train others. That’s how I got going in this profession.
Did you ever face discrimination?
I personally didn’t ever encounter any — not because of being a woman or a foreigner, not because of my accent, and not even because I’m short. I started my radio show on NBC in 1981. It was syndicated, and eventually went all across the U.S. and Canada. I also did 450 television programs. But I became established early on in New York, and New Yorkers are very generous toward people with accents. The discrimination I did experience was in 1939, just before the war broke out, when, just because I was Jewish, I was sent to a children’s home in Switzerland that became an orphanage. The first 10 years of my life I lived in a very Jewish environment. I went to a Jewish school, I went to an Orthodox synagogue, I went to a Jewish summer camp. We did not encounter any anti-Semitism in Switzerland because we had very little contact with the people in the village. We had to keep kosher; so we couldn’t eat in their houses. We didn’t become friends with any of their children. So I didn’t directly experience any discrimination, but that doesn’t mean I’m not very concerned about what’s happening today. Every time I pick up a newspaper, there’s something about anti-Semitism in France or England or Iran, all around the world. I’m very much a Zionist. I feel very strongly that Jews need a country of their own. I speak Hebrew fluently and I go to Israel every year.
I see in your impressive biography that you fought from the age of 17 with the Jewish freedom fighters. Was it actual combat?
I was trained — for some reason, I had the talent — as a sniper in the Haganah, the underground, which was the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces. I was badly wounded in Jerusalem on my birthday, June 4, 1948, just after the State of Israel was declared. A cannonball hit the young girls’ home where I was living. and the shrapnel cut across both my legs. (That’s not why I’m short; I would have been anyway.) Luckily, I can ski, and I can dance the whole night if I find a good partner.
What type of patients do you see and what types of problems do they bring to you?
I see couples who have relationship problems, and couples or individuals who have sexual problems. I am a psychosexual therapist and I do behavior therapy. It’s not a long-term type of treatment; I have a tremendous amount of turnover. I see people for six months, maybe a year, a few people maybe longer. If I see anybody who’s an alcoholic I send them to Alcoholics Anonymous, somebody who’s depressed I send them to a psychiatrist. If a man comes to me with premature ejaculation then I give him homework, tell him what to do at home. If a woman comes with difficulties having orgasms, I know what homework to give her. And if a couple comes because one or the other cheated, then what I have to do is relationship therapy, to find out if they really want to stay together. If they hate each other, I send them to an attorney. So I have a varied and interesting clientele — all short term.
What is your typical work week like? Also, what are the highlights of your current professional life?
I turn 79 on June 4 and right now I’m a very fortunate person. I certainly am working hard. But I like it. For the third year in a row, every Monday I’m at Yale teaching a course on intimacy in the American family, and every Thursday I’m at Princeton teaching one on the Jewish family. Occasionally I do lectures. For example, three weeks ago I gave one for a woman’s group at one of the houses at Harvard. The highlight, what works so well for me, is the combination of the academic and the clinical. I bring clinical experience — seeing all these patients — to the academic world, and I bring academic experience — books and articles — to my clinical work. I love what I do and it makes me feel very alive. So don’t tell Harvard and don’t tell Yale or Princeton, but I should actually pay them for letting me teach there, because every time I go, I learn something new, especially at Yale because I’m teaching with two other professors, a psychiatrist and an historian.
Everybody has their share of adversity, but some people seem to stay much more positive and buoyant in the face of it. How do you do it?
Part of it has to do with the early years of my childhood. The first 10 years I was an only child in a very loving Orthodox Jewish household and my grandmother lived with us. She was a very educated woman, a widow, my father’s mother, and had nothing else to do but take care of me. Also my grandparents on my mother’s side lived on a farm in the country, which is where I went in the summer. So I had a very good, basic, positive experience. I’m always interested in what happens in the early-childhood years that helps carry people through difficulty. I once did a study following children who lost their parents in the Holocaust, and it became very clear that early childhood was the important part, even with bad things happening after that. That’s also why I do these documentary films on how early childhood is handled in different cultures. Last summer I did one on the Druze [non-Jewish natives of Israel] and their family life. My next one, this summer, is going to be on the family life of the Bedouins.
Would you care to share the secrets of your amazing energy and vitality?
Well, it’s difficult to explain, and of course everybody asks me. I don’t take any vitamins. I do sleep eight hours a night. And I’m very fortunate that I can sleep in a car, I can sleep on a plane, wherever it is I can sleep an hour. I love what I’m doing and I think part of my energy stems from that. Also it’s wonderful to be Dr. Ruth. I don’t have to go shopping. I have a great lady from the Philippines who does that for me. She took very good care of my late husband, Fred, who died exactly ten years ago. If I happen to want lunch at home, there is food at home. She also leaves me food for the weekend, and she takes good care of me. So I can use the extra energy to talk to journalists like you.
Even after the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, isn’t it still just as difficult for people to talk openly about sex?
Look, all through the ages sex has been a taboo subject. The Victorian mother told her daughter, on her wedding night, to “Lie back and think of England. There’s nothing in it for you.” Don’t expect the earth to shake, don’t expect the stars to twinkle, don’t expect orgasms. Fortunately, we are in a different age now. One of the reasons is that what myself and others say — I’m not the only one who talks about sex — has an impact. There are fewer unintended pregnancies in this country — and I’m talking about both teenagers and married people. There is no question there are more women who have heard the message that a woman has to take the responsibility for her orgasms, for her sexual satisfaction. She has to teach him. Even the best lover, even a journalist — like you — whom I train, won’t bring a woman to orgasm if she doesn’t tell him what she needs. So there is certainly a change. There are fewer premature ejaculators, also because of education, but there are still many.
What are the most effective tools in your lifelong mission to increase sexual literacy?
The most effective tool is that the professionals [the academics, educators, and therapists] have to be well-trained. Not so they just sit around the kitchen table, make up stories, and say this is sex research. They really have to base their research on Kinsey, on Masters and Johnson, on Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan. And after that, they can start to tell all kinds of interesting stories.
Another very important thing is sex education has to be done very carefully. In my classes and lectures, for example, I have very specific ways of dealing with it. I never ask personal questions. I say: “Write them on a piece of paper,” then I collect those questions so nobody knows who wrote them. I don’t believe in sensitivity training. I don’t believe you have to reveal something that you may regret afterwards. With masturbation, for example, the most difficult subject, you never ask. But you do make a show of burying the old myths; you tell them it won’t cause them to wear glasses, that their hair won’t fall out or they won’t grow hair on their palms. I use humor, but no jokes. I can’t tell jokes, I don’t retain them, but I can use humor. In the Talmud, in the Jewish tradition, it says: “A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained.” That’s the best way of teaching about sexuality. It doesn’t mean jokes, but in my classes and my lectures, people walk out and they’ve learned something. I say you have to take that taboo out, but also give the taboo its respect. Respect your religion, respect where you come from, but be aware we’re in the year 2007. Make sure you know the latest scientifically validated data about human sexual functioning. It’s very difficult to talk about sex. The message that you don’t have to talk about yourself, about your sex life, but you can still talk about it in general, is very effective in my way of teaching.
What do you think of the way we teach sex education in this country?
There are certain things we just don’t teach enough. Across the board — at medical schools, at social-work schools, in psychology departments — we don’t teach enough about sexuality. And the data is available. For example, regarding your particular interest in older people, we do not teach enough that women after menopause must use a lubricant or that a man at a certain age doesn’t have a psychogenic erection, which means an erection where he can just think about sex and wants to engage in it. We just don’t talk about older people having sex. We don’t talk about older people needing to be caressed. If I had my way, every older person by rights would be able to get a massage. I don’t care if the massage is from the same sex or the opposite. I just want people to know that they need to be touched. For many people — widows, widowers, single people — there’s just no touching. And it’s very important.
What percentages of the population do you think are sexually dissatisfied and dysfunctional?
I never guess about percentages. I did a textbook with a super professor [Human Sexuality: A Psychosocial Perspective, with Dr. Sandy Lopater]. The book is imbued with my humor and my philosophy; it’s out now in a new edition. In it [Dr. Lopater] cites statistics based on data. I can’t quote those statistics off the top of my head or say how many people are sexually dysfunctional. But I can say that much more education has to be done so that younger people will not suffer from premature ejaculation — in this country, many men do — and that older people have to learn to keep sexually active. Because people used to think, after 50 who needs it? They also have to know that the intensity of the orgasm or of the ejaculation after 50 is not the same as it was when he or she was 35. So the intensity is lessened, the firmness of the erection is lessened. Also the clitoris doesn’t get as erect as it did before. But I say keep active sexually until the age of 99 ... if you are sexually literate.
What are the main sexual complaints of the over-50 population and how can they be addressed?
I think the main complaints are really due to illiteracy. For example, a woman may complain that it hurts to have sex. That’s being sexually illiterate because nobody told her she needs to use a lubricant. After a certain age — I can’t give it an exact number, but eventually it happens — a man will say: “My erection’s not as firm.” Not knowing that, or what to do about it, is just being sexually illiterate.
So it’s a matter of educating people, of spreading the word.
Yes, and what you’re doing — journalism in a newspaper or in some type of publication that’s accessible to everybody — is also very important. Nobody’s going to go out and buy a textbook unless it’s for a college class.
What are the biggest challenges of keeping one’s sex life active and satisfying at age 50 and beyond?
The first thing we have to do is educate the entire population, because when children, adult children, have the feeling that their parents are not sexually active anymore, it permeates the atmosphere. Children think, because they see three kids in the family, their parents did it three times. If a widow or a widower wants to have another relationship, very often the children are upset. They figure, she’s an old woman, he’s an old man, they’ve already done that. We have to change this situation because we are going to have more widowers and we’re certainly going to have many more widows. That’s why this [magazine] is important: to help make older people sexually literate, to remove the stigma, for example, that there’s something wrong with masturbation. Older people who don’t have a partner should use a vibrator (for women) and masturbation (for both of them). It’s very important to speak up about these things.
I realize you’re not a matchmaker and you don’t run a dating service, but do you have any suggestions for older people looking to find sex and romance?
I think matchmakers should be used more. I think the Internet can be very helpful, except that people have to be careful not to make a date with somebody from the Internet in a secluded place. That’s like going to a bar, picking up Mr. Goodbar, and taking him home. It’s a matter of safety — not giving out information about your identity and so forth. Otherwise I’m very much in favor of the Internet for people to find each other.
What is the relationship between sex and romance?
I do believe that romance has to be part of it. Romance is very important; it’s something that everybody thinks of differently and that’s okay. For some people, it’s candlelight, for some it’s skiing. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it has to be part of the relationship and of knowing what you like with each other.
What is your advice for people who are in long-term relationships where the sexual aspect has become stale or sour?
You have to make a conscious decision to not let your sex life die out. When it becomes boring, that’s the time to make sure, first of all — and I want you to write it down here — to have sex in the morning, not when you’re too tired, not after alcohol, not after a heavy meal. After a good rest. Wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, have a small breakfast, and go right back to bed together. It’s very important to keep your sex life alive, not to let it become boring. If it’s boring, it’s going to disappear. I always tell older people to stay active and find stimulating activities together. I also say, for example, skiers make the best lovers. (And I know because I’m a skier.) They take risks, they go outdoors and get in shape. They’re not couch potatoes who sit at home and watch all the bad news on television.
Aside from incest and abuse, are there any sexual taboos in your view?
I’m not going to talk about incest or abuse. If I see a patient who has suffered these, I send them to a psychiatrist or to an expert social worker. Otherwise, there are no sexual taboos in my view — as long as both people agree to it. It can be anal sex, it can be oral sex, it can be anything, if both of you agree to it. But you shouldn’t put pressure on each other.
One final question that a colleague of mine wanted me to ask you: Are there any natural products that can help enhance sexual pleasure?
An aphrodisiac works if you believe in it. If you believe in black olives, go out and get black olives. The most important aphrodisiac, though, is in the brain. It’s good to have some fantasies in your mind. But if you’re thinking about how you or your partner looked in a bathing suit 30 years ago, keep them to yourself. Use those images when you’re having sex, but don’t talk about them A good aphrodisiac is to go on vacation. Life’s struggles and problems are left at home. And when you come back, you have all those memories and images to help you get excited. I do have patients, however, who I send to their physicians for Viagra. I have nothing against it if your physician says you can take it. It’s very important — and I want you to write this down too — that if he gets Viagra, the wife has to be part of the decision. Not that he comes home with an erection from the floor to the ceiling and tells her: “Go to bed” after he hasn’t talked to her in three days because he was busy watching sports events on TV.
In the next issue of Thrive — the July-August Summer Double — you’ll find much more of Dr. Ruth’s fascinating, useful information and practical advice to rekindle and/or enhance your sex life in the form of an excerpt from her recent book Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50: Revving Up the Romance, Passion & Excitement! In the meantime you are strongly encouraged to visit her Website, drruth.com, which features regularly updated Q&A’s with readers as well as news about her publications and appearances.
David Gibbons is a senior editor of Thrive magazine whose lifelong ambition to interview Dr. Ruth Westheimer was recently fulfilled; he plans to put her advice into practice.
