Dr. Ruth on Hot Vax Summer

The Experiment

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4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic shattered social norms around physical closeness and intimacy. As the world reopens, how do we learn to touch other people again—even in normal, everyday ways? The Atlantic staff writer Emma Green seeks advice from the iconic sex therapist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth on how to find pleasure and purpose after life-changing loss.

Further reading: Dr. Ruth on Finding Love After the Pandemic

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This episode was produced by Julia Longoria and Katherine Wells, with help from Kevin Townsend. Fact-check by William Brennan. Sound design by Alexander Overington.

Music by Laundry (“Films,” “Phthalo Blue”), naran ratan (“Spring Nostril,” “Forevertime Journeys”), Ob (“Waif”), Keyboard (“Contractions,” “Shingles”), and water feature (“with flowers”); provided by Tasty Morsels. Additional audio from Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer, The Dr. Ruth Show, SME.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I wanted to know how
0:27.3	we should even begin to get used to the weirdness of touching other people.
0:34.3	I'm a green, isn't staff writer at the Atlantic, writes about the tough stuff, politics, religion,
0:41.3	and she recently went looking for an answer to a question.
0:45.3	You know, I've been thinking a lot about what it's going to take for us to collectively move out of pandemic mode.
0:54.3	And I don't necessarily even mean touching in the kind of capital T dirty magazine sense of the word.
1:01.3	I mean like after a year of being hermetically sealed off a year and a half for a lot of people,
1:07.3	some people didn't live like that but a lot of Americans did.
1:10.3	It's so weird to be in physical proximity to another human.
1:14.3	It's so weird to give hugs.
1:17.3	It's weird.
1:19.3	And I'm a thought.
1:22.3	And I'm a thought who would be the expert on this?
1:27.3	Hello, you are on there.
1:29.3	Dr. Ruth, what kind of couple who has been married for a long time do about sexual boredom?
1:35.3	Fabulous question.
1:38.3	Dr. Ruth is the master of this stuff.
1:42.3	So I do believe that a sex life has to be nourished like a fire.
1:47.3	It's something that is very different in the middle of the day.
1:52.3	Take a bubble bath, drink champagne.
1:54.3	This woman who in middle age and even in older age became a kind of coach.
2:02.3	Does he wake up in the action in the morning?
	...

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