The Irony of Dr. Ruth

We were there to talk about a book she had written about sex and Jewish spirituality, but she turned it into a two-way conversation, quizzing me about my studies, my new job, my love life. Unsatisfied with what she had heard, she began trying to fix things. She mused about job interviews she might set up for me, and where I could find suitable young men (she recommended joining B’nai Jeshurun, the famous, progressive synagogue on the Upper West Side). She was personal, concerned, connected, and she encouraged me to connect more with others. Fostering connection was one of her special talents.

Dr. Ruth’s office testified to her own engaged and connected life. The many photographs lining the walls and crowding the tabletops showed her posing with family members as well as with numerous celebrities and dignitaries. Several photos showed her smiling through goggles on various international mountaintops. Dr. Ruth, it turned out, was an avid and accomplished skier, a fact that should not have surprised me but did. She just didn’t seem the type. And that was always the point.

Ruth Westheimer posed a perpetual contradiction: Her form never seemed to match her content. A tiny woman with an old-fashioned “beauty parlor” bouffant, high-pitched voice (with distinctive Old World accent) and grandmotherly demeanor, she was the last person you’d expect to hear talking about orgasms (or slaloming down an Alp). But “sexual literacy” was her field, and she dispensed learned, serious advice to the general public for over 40 years — in dozens of books, articles, her wildly popular radio and TV shows. She was even the subject of a one-woman Off Broadway show.

Being a sex educator, though, would never have sufficed to create all this fame. Dr. Ruth owed her celebrity precisely to the incongruity she embodied, which disarmed audiences, distracting them from the discomfort and embarrassment that sex talk can provoke — especially in America.

The slight amusement of hearing a middle-aged, then elderly lady cheerfully discuss “masturbation” (can’t you just hear her now, pronouncing that word?) provided the ideal deflection from the topic’s awkwardness, allowing listeners to relax and pay attention. Dr. Ruth understood this perfectly and cultivated that warmth and humor to great effect.

That trademark good cheer, though, was something of a miracle, given the trauma of Dr. Westheimer’s early life. Karola Ruth Siegel was 10 in 1939 when her mother put her on a train headed for an orphanage in Switzerland. Karola Ruth was part of the Kindertransport — the rescue effort that rescued some 10,000 children, mostly Jewish, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia before World War II. Although most of the children went to England, a few hundred were sent to Switzerland. Accompanying her, she told me, was her favorite doll, which she clutched, and her best friend at that time, a little girl named Matilda. Karola Ruth’s mother waved goodbye from the station platform, the last time the girl would see any member of her family.

That Dr. Ruth devoted her career to helping others sustain love, passion and connection can be read as a refusal to give in to the tragedy of her childhood, as a lifetime expression — a monument, really — of resistance to the violence, hatred and racism that marked her youth, of resistance to fascism.

But there’s more to learn from Dr. Ruth, beginning with her trademark incongruity. In retrospect, it’s worth asking: What exactly was so funny about an older woman talking about sex with precision and frankness? Dr. Ruth was already over 50 when she became an iconic radio and TV personality, well past the age of pop-culture sexual viability for a woman at the time.

True, she was witty, but listeners were also laughing out of incredulity: People do not associate eros with diminutive aging matrons. And while she dispensed technical advice, Dr. Ruth was always especially interested in pleasure — including pleasure in midlife and beyond, and women’s pleasure, specifically.

Her more than 40 books include titles such as “Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50” (which includes two long chapters on managing the physical changes of age in both women and men), “Sexually Speaking: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Sexual Health,” “The Art of Arousal” and “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Erotic and Sensuous Pleasures.”

Speaking up for women’s and older people’s sexual pleasure is a quietly radical stance. How often, really, do we encounter depictions of mature sexuality — especially in women — in television or film? With rare exceptions (“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” and a recent episode of “Hacks” come to mind), this topic is reserved for punchlines. Sex is still treated as the exclusive province of the young and hot.

Yes, people laughed when Dr. Ruth spoke, but, as she knew well, the laughter was Step 1 in pushing through to a better understanding of a universally important subject. Yes, she was tiny and adorable, but, as she also knew, her persona granted her stealth entry into her audience’s minds and hearts, where she could then set about dismantling some dangerously limiting clichés about womanhood and aging.