By Bill Trott
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the chirpy, diminutive therapist who became a pop culture figure as she encouraged Americans to have sex safely, frequently and creatively, has died at the age of 96, the Washington Post reported.
Westheimer died on Friday at her home in Manhattan, the newspaper reported citing her publicist.
Westheimer, who fled Nazi Germany as a child, said she first learned about sex when she was 10 years old and took her parents’ “marriage manual” out of a locked cabinet. What she saw on those pages would lead to a career that included international fame, books, instructional videos, lectures, teaching jobs, a radio show, countless television appearances, a syndicated column and even a “Good Sex” board game.
Known universally as “Dr. Ruth,” the 4-ft-7 inch (140-cm) tall lady with a distinctive German accent and perpetual cheerfulness preached the joys of good sex, great sex and, especially, safe sex.
The woman who would become one of the world’s best known sex gurus lost her virginity at 17 on a starry night in a hayloft on a kibbutz. “We spent many nights in that barn … but I remember that first time most vividly of all because it shows that when two people are in love, the first experience can be very enjoyable,” she wrote in her 2001 autobiography, “All in a Lifetime.”
Westheimer, a great proponent of contraception, chided herself in the book for not being concerned with birth control in those first encounters. She also declined to say who her partner was because she remained friends with the man, as well as his wife.
Westheimer herself was the product of an unplanned, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Her mother was working as a housekeeper for the family of Westheimer’s father in Frankfurt, Germany, when she became pregnant. The young couple eventually married and Karola Ruth Siegel was born on June 4, 1928.
