The Secret That Dr. Ruth Knew

Once, I fell in love with Dr. Ruth. Whenever I tell this story, everybody thinks I’m kidding. More than a decade ago, she called me out of the blue. I had written a cover story for The Atlantic called “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” and she wanted to work together on a project comparing the new trend of mindfulness with the 1970s self-actualization movement EST. It seemed like a terrible idea, but I flew to New York anyway. Who wouldn’t want to have lunch with Dr. Ruth?

She met me in the foyer of Bergdorf Goodman, the shortest 4-foot-7 I ever saw, with hair the color of Dutch football uniforms, and suggested a diner nearby. On our way there, a couple of women with big suburban hair stopped her in the street, and it was more than a run-in with a celebrity. They were just so grateful, gushingly grateful, to this tiny old Jewish lady who had told them that it was okay to screw, that it was okay to want to screw.

Then at the diner she ordered a cheeseburger with fries. I was in my mid-30s then, well past the cheeseburger-with-fries-at-one-in-the-afternoon phase of life. She was in her mid-80s, and she wasn’t. I recorded our conversation, thinking I might use it for an article someday after she died, which, in my naivete, I imagined would be soonish. As it turned out, our meeting was so long ago that I was using a digital recorder, which I’ve since lost, but it doesn’t matter. She was the subject of multiple documentaries in the following decade.

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Ruth was the most fascinating woman I have met in my life. The whole of the 20th century sheltered under her wing. She told me how, as a child, she had been sent from Germany to a Swiss boarding school on a Kindertransport, and at the end of the war, at the age of 17, learned that her entire family had been wiped out in the Holocaust. The school didn’t know what to do with her, so it sent her to Israel, which was not yet Israel. At our lunch, because of some recent celebration of her life, she was carrying a picture of herself as a sniper in the Haganah. The gun was almost bigger than her. She told me she wasn’t a great sniper—she was better with grenades—and that she had lost her virginity in a barn in between combat missions.

Later, she came to New York looking for an uncle she heard had survived. It turned out to be somebody else’s uncle. But she stayed in the city because the émigré philosophers at the New School taught courses in German (this is the New York I visit in my dreams). She worked in important sex clinics during the 1960s and ’70s and then became an unlikely celebrity, posing with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Reagans and David Letterman and the like. At the time of our lunch, Ruth had just published a book, Myths of Love, with a small press, and she gave me a copy, asking me to share it with anyone who might be interested. The life of a writer: One day, you’re among the most famous people on the planet; a few decades later, you’re hustling a guy half your age for exposure. She seemed entirely unfazed. She knew the assignment. She recalled returning to the city of her birth, in the country that had murdered her entire family, in order to attend a book fair. I mean, history is the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake, but you gotta sell.

I had heard that one of her husbands had been asked what it was like to be married to the most famous sex expert in the world, and he had replied, “The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.” She confirmed the anecdote.

One story in particular stuck out. We were talking about the effects of smartphones on people’s sex life. She said that men had told her that their tracking functions worked like leashes: They could no longer stray on their wives without having their movements recorded. She found their predicament hilarious. That’s when I knew that we lived in different universes. To her, men having affairs was comedy, farce. To me, it was a violation, at least of a contract. She was a product of the sexual revolution. I was a product of its aftermath.

The sexual revolution operated on two basic premises: first, that sex was good and there should be more of it, and second, that sex wasn’t very important; it was just sex. Vidal Sassoon famously said that, in the ’60s, “having sex was the same as having dinner.” The pursuit of sex without responsibility or emotional involvement was an ideal. The sexual counterrevolution has now gone to the opposite extreme: Sex is not just to be feared but is also hugely important, the locus of life’s most defining traumas and a primary venue for justice. No wonder people are having less and less of it. “Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women,” Scientific American recently reported. The discourse around sex has become stricter, more stringent, less tolerant of any diversity of opinion, while the act itself has become more brutal—choking doesn’t even qualify as a kink anymore. The sex recession has coincided, almost exactly, with the rise of depression, which 29 percent of U.S. adults now report struggling with, as opposed to 19.6 percent in 2015.

Dr. Ruth understood the social power of sexuality perhaps better than any other figure. A society in which sex is not joyful is a failed society. If you can’t find joy in sex, where will you find it? She represents a moment in history that has passed, an approach to sexuality that has been replaced. But that doesn’t make her irrelevant. The opposite: She was right. The moment that has passed her by is wrong.

What underlay Dr. Ruth’s infectious joy was frankness. She knew what screwing was like, and she said so. Her job was to see and to explain the messy realities of human sexuality with neither fear nor shame. The radical sexual freethinking of the mid-century German intellectuals she followed based itself on taking human sexuality out of the shadowy realms of morality. Most of all, she listened. She was nonjudgmental. That’s why those New Jersey aunts were so grateful.

The current state of discourse around sexuality and gender is maximum judgment. Ours is a culture of intolerant tolerance: Be who you want to be. But don’t dare say the wrong thing. The urge to punish is the first instinct, drowning out not just compassion, but understanding.

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For 15 years, the left has been striving toward progress through the application of fear and shame in the name of moral clarity. (And when a man appears who promises to eat that fear and shame …) The discourse on gender no longer qualifies as a humanistic inquiry. It is uninterested in recognizing realities other than the ones it has already established. The utter lack of joy in contemporary sexuality and its discourse—its constant focus on human sexuality as a source of trauma, demanding the most minute policing—will eventually render it irrelevant. It is a pile of discarded ideologies, ever-newer terms, ever-newer stringencies, ever-newer threats, more urgent causes for shame.

For Dr. Ruth, sex was the fun part of life, the good bit. The bad bit was when they put your entire family in gas chambers and burned the bodies in industrial ovens. Dr. Ruth spent her last years working on the problem of loneliness. The governor of New York made her an official loneliness emissary. Ruth had, as usual, put her finger on the nub. A society incapable of joy in sex is a society incapable of connection.

To me, she was an aspiration, something of a hero even, the cheerful survivor of a grand dehumanization, eating her cheeseburger, with her anime flame hair, who insisted that people should enjoy one another. As different as her frame of reference was from mine, I knew that her spirit had to be right. I can’t help feeling that she has left us, or we have left her, exactly when we need her most.