Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993 TAG: 9305070421
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA HOLT SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO LENGTH: Medium
And when Ruth Westheimer sat down for a quick breather in the midst of camera cables, advisers and flight schedules (she flew to Los Angeles the next day to tape "Arsenio"), the 64-year-old psychosexual therapist was her usual ebullient self.
She is, of course, best known as "Dr. Ruth," the internationally respected psychologist whose delightful candor makes the most embarrassing sexual matters human and fun. "You know, in the Talmud, it says a lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained," she mused. "That's very important when we talk about issues of sexuality."
Now, just when we thought Dr. Ruth couldn't tell us anything new about sex, she brings out a book of erotica that is both both instructive and entertaining, referring to it in her marbly German accent as "The Art of Awowsal."
Here are 120 beautifully reproduced works of art, organized loosely into a chronology of love-making from the first look exchanged between future lovers to flirtations, "kisses and other foreplay," embraces between all kinds of sexes and numbers of people, and finally the "blissful exhaustion" that ends the sexual act.
"I could not have found the pictures by myself," she says. "Art historians gave me hundreds of photographs, and I pulled out the ones where I could really say something. My only requirement was that the people in these works must have a relationship and must be having a good time. I did not want any of the terrible rape scenes you see so much of throughout art history."
The result is both a unique guide to erotic art and an oddly refreshing indictment of art criticism. While many art reviewers tend to deflect their gaze from sexual images to focus on the muscularity of an arm or the attitude of a stare, Dr. Ruth is delighted whenever "large genitals face us squarely," as she is about Michelangelo's "David."
Similarly, while she believes that throughout art history, "strong erotic content . . . has been varnished over by generations of asexual interpretation," Dr. Ruth is in a field of her own when she points out the "erect nipples" of Caravaggio's "Young Bacchus," the homosexuality of artists ranging from the Greeks to David Hockney and Jean Cocteau, the fact that everyone in the many foursomes depicted on India's Kandariya-Mahadeva Temple is being "pleasured" and a running "obsession" with phallus size that often results in humorous depictions, such as the Japanese man who bears his penis on a wheelbarrow in Jichosai's "Phallic Contest" (c. 1785).
For Dr. Ruth, the fact that "art excites an erotic impulse" is art. "It's an opening not just of the eyes but of the mind," she says.
"Here I have the chance to interpret art my way, to say look at the man peering up the dress of the woman in [Jean-Honore] Fragonard's `The Swing'; look at the lesbians by Toulouse-Lautrec - how they seem to love each other! Look at the cross-dressing, now there I give people this message: Do it at home from time to time, nothing wrong with it in a relationship."
Dr. Ruth doesn't mind if you burst out laughing at the sexual cheerleading that seems to be part of her nature.
Some readers may tire of Dr. Ruth's relentless mixing of art appreciation and sexual advice, but others will find it refreshing. If it's true, as she says, that sexual taboos "remain in full force today," who could better open the gates to a newly liberated world than our trusted friend and sexual mentor, Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
by CNB