Sex and Society: Ruth and consequences

One of America’s most celebrated ‘sexologists’ tells Harry Mount that there are some problems she will not advise on

New York

‘I tell them about pressure, foreplay ...I introduce them to a vibrator but I tell them never to get too used to it. The penis can never duplicate the vibrations of a vibrator.’

At 77, Dr Ruth Westheimer has still got the old magic. It remains as odd as ever to be taught orgasm lessons by a 4ft 6in grandmother who speaks with the seductive rolling ‘r’s and the guttural ‘achs’ of Marlene Dietrich. That this grandmother should have been orphaned by the Nazis, put on the last train out of Frankfurt to a Swiss orphanage in 1939, and wound up a crack sniper for the Haganah resistance against British rule in Palestine makes her incarnation as a sex therapist all the more grippingly weird, as well as curiously unsalacious.

‘When I first appeared on radio in 1981, no one objected, not even in the Midwest. It would have been different if I had been a 20-year-old with a short skirt and a décolletage.’

Dr Ruth no longer broadcasts, except for one-offs like a recent Valentine’s Day radio special, but she still lectures at Princeton, Yale and Cornell. Clearly, she likes the fame that grew out of the broadcasting. Her small surgery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is packed with sex-therapy books — The Joy of Gay Sex, I’m OK, You’re My Parents, Your Erroneous [sic] Zones, Guide to Getting It On and the complete Freud. On the wall are her doctorate from the US Board of Sexology and a presentation notice from the Friars Club, declaring her ‘The First Lady of Sexual Communication’. But the surgery is also lined with pictures of her tweaking Burt Reynolds’s moustache and being cuddled by Gérard Depardieu, Barbara Bush, Tom Selleck, Eddie Murphy and Danny DeVito.

Also dotted around the room are tortoises — small gold ones and big, fluffy green and orange ones. ‘I think of myself as a tortoise. I’ve had to carry my house on my back. The tortoise can stay still if it wants, hidden in its shell, but if it wants to move it’s got to stick its neck out. I’ve had to stick my neck out a few times.’

But it is her love of sorting out couples’ sexual problems rather than television fame that still brings her to this room several days a week from her apartment up in Washington Heights in the far north-west of Manhattan, where she has lived for 41 years. Over those years, she thinks that the Western attitude to sex has improved. ‘I’m optimistic. People are more tolerant about things like homosexuality. There are fewer unwanted pregnancies, there’s more education, there’s more contraception. And I don’t just mean single mothers. There are fewer unwanted pregnancies within marriage, too. I think the number of divorces will go down, too, as couples realise that the grass isn’t always greener.

‘There hasn’t been a moral disintegration. People look at Sex and the City and say that values are falling apart. There’s nothing wrong with those programmes. The only thing wrong is, anyone who thinks it’s reality is going to be disappointed. There aren’t 20 men in this city who will take girls to Paris, buy them jewellery and fancy clothes. The same goes for men who put off being married because of some Hollywood fantasy of endless sex. What happens is that they go to work, they come back from work, and that’s it. The great sexual adventures don’t happen.’

The sexual problems that Dr Ruth deals with have remained much the same through her career: men who have difficulties with erections and premature ejaculation; women who can’t have orgasms and suffer from pain during sex. She sees more gay couples than she used to because of more liberal attitudes these days. ‘But I see very few lesbians. Obviously they don’t have to produce erections or time ejaculation.’

There are some sexual habits that she cannot advise on. ‘I don’t mind where people do it. On the kitchen floor, in the bedroom — it’s fine. But I have to be able to visualise it. If a man comes in and says he’s a sadist, with a woman who says she’s a masochist, there’s nothing I can do. I tell a white lie. I look at my notebook and say, “I’m so booked up,” and give them the name of three other doctors. I just can’t visualise inflicting pain or receiving pain.

‘The same happens when I get men who say they can only get an erection when they walk past the schoolyard — boys or girls. I have to refer them.’

Dr Ruth might therefore be described as a sexual liberal and a moral conservative — let people do what they want with each other, as long as it doesn’t hurt them physically or mentally. ‘I’m really an old-fashioned square,’ she says.

For a woman who has written a book about having sex after 50 — Kick Boredom out of the Bedroom — she is coy when I ask her if she still has sex.

‘You tell me and I’ll tell you,’ she says.

‘Delighted to tell you,’ I lie.

‘No, I don’t think I can.’

She is less coy, but still conservative, when it comes to relationship — as opposed to sexual — advice. ‘On the Valentine’s Day phone-in, a woman was desperate because she’s been having an affair for three years with a married man who promised he was going to leave his wife. The night before, he’d told her that the wife was pregnant and that he was the father. I gave her the South Pacific advice — wash that man right out of your hair.

‘The same goes for men who don’t work and have 20 children by different mothers and then hand them over to a social worker to bring them up. It is wrong. And I’m very worried about the rise in New York sex clubs — homosexual and heterosexual. With Aids drugs, they think it’s OK. It isn’t.

‘Abortion, though, must remain legal. What’s happening in South Dakota [the state legislature is set to ban abortion] is worrying. Women with money will go to Mexico or Europe; women without it will go to the coat-hangers.’

Dr Ruth admits that she hasn’t led the ideal life when it comes to relationships. She has been married three times: first to an Israeli soldier ‘because he was the first one to ask me’; the second shortly afterwards, again in Israel, ‘because he was a very good-looking fellow’; and then, happily, a third time, after she moved to America in 1956, to Fred Westheimer, an engineer, who died eight years ago. She has a daughter and a son, one from each of the two later marriages.

‘I sometimes feel ashamed for leaving Israel. I am a Zionist. But I love this country. And I couldn’t live in Germany again. I wouldn’t buy a German car. I can forgive Germans my age but I just don’t want to deal with older ones — 85- and 90-year-olds who say they didn’t know what was going on.

‘I go back to Frankfurt once a year for the book fair but I don’t visit childhood haunts. It’s hard to go to the railway station when it’s the last place you saw your parents alive.’