Dr. Ruth Westheimer, America's diminutive sex therapist, dead at 96

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive sex therapist who became a pop icon, media star and best-selling author through her frank talk about once-taboo bedroom topics, has died. She was 96.

Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family, according to publicist and friend Pierre Lehu.

Westheimer never advocated risky sexual behaviour. Instead, she encouraged an open dialogue on previously closeted issues that affected her audience of millions. Her one recurring theme was there was nothing to be ashamed of.

"I still hold old-fashioned values and I'm a bit of a square," she told students at Michigan City High School in 2002. "Sex is a private art and a private matter. But still, it is a subject we must talk about."

But it was her extensive knowledge and training, coupled with her humorous, nonjudgmental manner, that catapulted her local radio program, Sexually Speaking,into the national spotlight in the early 1980s. She had a nonjudgmental approach to what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their home.

"Tell him you're not going to initiate," she told a concerned caller in June 1982. "Tell him that Dr. Westheimer said that you're not going to die if he doesn't have sex for one week."

Author of more than 40 books

Her radio success opened new doors, and in 1983 she wrote the first of more than 40 books: Dr. Ruth's Guide to Good Sex,demystifying sex with both rationality and humour. There was even a board game, Dr. Ruth's Game of Good Sex.

She soon became a regular on the late-night television talk-show circuit, which ultimately led to her own show,bringing her personality to the national stage. Her rise coincided with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when frank sexual talk became a necessity.

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"If we could bring about talking about sexual activity the way we talk about diet the way we talk about food without it having this kind of connotation that there's something not right about it, then we would be a step further. But we have to do it with good taste," she told Johnny Carson in 1982.

She normalized the use of words like "penis" and "vagina" on radio and TV, aided by her Jewish grandmotherly accent, which The Wall Street Journal once said was "a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse." People magazine included her in their list of "The Most Intriguing People of the Century." She even made it into a Shania Twain song: "No, I don't need proof to show me the truth/Not even Dr. Ruth is gonna tell me how I feel."

Westheimer defended abortion rights, suggested older people have sex after a good night's sleep and was an outspoken advocate of condom use. She believed in monogamy.

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In the 1980s, she stood up for gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic and spoke out loudly for the LGBTQ community. She said she defended people deemed by some far-right Christians to be "subhuman" because of her own past.

Orphaned by the Holocaust

Born Karola Ruth Siegel in 1928, Westheimer was 10 when the Nazis came to her home in Frankfurt, Germanyand took away her father. Six weeks later her mother sent her to an orphanage in Switzerland.

In 1941, Westheimer stopped receiving letters from her parents and she later learned they had been murdered in the Holocaust.

At 16, she emigrated to what was then British Palestineandtrained as a sniper as part of a Jewish paramilitary organization, but said she nevertested her sniping skills against an enemy.

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She latermarried an Israeli soldier and they moved to Paris and went to college. They later divorced, and she headed to New York with a boyfriend, married him, had a daughter and continued her education. After another divorce, she wed Manfred Westheimer, an engineer she met in 1961. That marriage produced a son and lasted until Manfred's death in 1997.

After earning a doctorate in education, Westheimer went to work for Planned Parenthood and caught the attention of a New York radio station executive when she lectured broadcast officials on contraception.

That led to a weekly 15-minute midnight radio program in 1980 called Sexually Speaking, where shetook questions from listeners and quickly won a following.

She said it was a combination of her experience, training, and her quirky voice and accent that gave her credibility with listeners. They also liked the way she would cheerily wish them "good sex!"