Ruth Westheimer spent a lot of time talking about sex. She did so with her own brand of frankness and good cheer on her pioneering radio show, “Sexually Speaking,” and on her daytime TV program, “The Dr. Ruth Show,” as well as in her column for Playgirl magazine, in her many books and in countless interviews and public appearances across more than four decades. It’s possible that Dr. Ruth, who died last week at 96, talked publicly about sex more than anyone else. Ever.
But since her specialty touched on so many other aspects of the human experience, she also gave plenty of general life advice. Some of those lessons were pulled from her own difficult experience as a German Jewish refugee who lost her parents during the Holocaust. Or from her unhappy early relationships, though she found lasting love with her third husband, Manfred Westheimer, an engineer, after two brief marriages.
In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, she spoke of the importance of turning a terrible experience into something positive. “I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis — because I survived — I had an obligation to make a dent in the world. What I didn’t know was that that dent would end up being me talking about sex from morning to night.”
To describe her sense of purpose, she often used the phrase tikkun olam — Hebrew for “repairing the world” or, as she put it in a speech, “making the world a better place.” “I knew I had to do something for tikkun olam,” she said in a 2014 interview with Hadassah Magazine. “You can take horrible experiences you will never forget, but you can use the experiences to live a productive life.”
In a 1984 interview with The New York Times, she noted the importance of humor in teaching. “If a professor leaves his students laughing,” she said, “they will walk away remembering what they have learned.”
Dr. Ruth made her first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1982, when “Sexually Speaking” was catching on. When the host, Johnny Carson, said that many people are bashful talking about sex, Dr. Ruth offered a lesson in how to approach delicate subjects: “If you do it in good taste — and if you do it properly, then it can be — everything can be talked about. Everything.”
Early in her career, she drew criticism from social conservatives who opposed her approval of homosexuality and abortion. During a lecture she gave at Oklahoma State University in 1985, Billy Joe Clegg, a local minister, tried (and failed) to make a citizen’s arrest of her.
But Dr. Ruth was a strong believer in long-term relationships and family life. When the comedian Richard Lewis appeared on her TV show in the 1980s, she told him that his anxieties about sexual performance would go away if he found “the right girl.” On another episode, she said that she had expected Jerry Seinfeld to be married. (“Stop hocking me!” Mr. Seinfeld said, using a Yiddish term for bother.)
Dr. Ruth made her stance perfectly clear in a 2015 interview with Philadelphia Magazine: “I believe that the best sexual relations have to be in a loving relationship — not like in Hollywood, or your first love or the first night of sex, but in an enduring relationship, and realize how grateful we are that we have someone who cares for us.”
While she was in favor of openness, more than once she allowed that romantic partners should keep certain things to themselves. “There are problems with this trend to sharing everything,” she told The Times in 1985. “I had a group seminar at a hospital where a doctor confessed that he was sometimes aroused by cows. When he went to his office, his secretary greeted him with a ‘mooooooo!’”
In a talk to Google employees in 2012, she spoke of a caller from Brazil who said that she had difficulties concentrating during sex. “I said, ‘Keep your mouth shut — but in your fantasy make believe that the entire Brazilian soccer people are in bed with you,’” Dr. Ruth said.
Active people tended to be good in bed, she said, singling out skiing in particular. “Skiers make the best lovers because they don’t sit in front of a television like couch potatoes,” Dr. Ruth, herself an accomplished skier, told Esquire in 2010. “They take a risk and they wiggle their behinds. They also meet new people on the ski lift.”
She often stressed that people should not live in fear, and she used her favorite animal — the turtle — as a metaphor.
“In order for the turtle to move, it has to stick its neck out,” Dr. Ruth said in her commencement speech at Trinity College in 2004. “There are going to be times in your life when you’re going to have to stick your neck out. There will be challenges. And instead of hiding in a shell, you have to go out and meet them.”
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