American TV sex therapist Dr Ruth dies aged 96

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.

Dr Westheimer died yesterday at her home in Manhattan, the Washington Post reported citing her publicist.

Dr 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,” 1.40m (4’7″) tall lady with a distinctive German accent and perpetual cheerfulness preached the joys of good sex, great sex and, especially, safe sex.

Dr Westheimer was 10 when the Nazis came to her Frankfurt home and took away her father. Six weeks later her mother sent her to an orphanage in Switzerland. In 1941, Dr 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 Palestine and joined Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organisation.

“I learned to assemble a rifle in the dark and was trained as a sniper so that I could hit the center of the target time after time,” she wrote in a 2010 New York Times opinion article that called for women to be allowed to serve in combat in the US military.

She never tested her sniping skills against an enemy but was injured in a bombing in Jerusalem.

She married 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 his 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 programme in1980 called “Sexually Speaking.”

It was an advice show that took questions from listeners and quickly won Dr Westheimer 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!”

She became a popular guest on TV talk shows, which ultimately led to her own show.

“I’m like a Jewish mother,” she was quoted as saying in People magazine. “A Jewish mother who talks explicitly.”

In addition to her autobiography, Dr Westheimer wrote nearly 40 books, including ‘Sex for Dummies’, ‘Dr Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex’ and ‘Dr Ruth’s Top Ten Secrets for Great Sex’.