Myths of Love by Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Jerome Singerman

Yes, "Dr. Ruth," the ebullient little sex therapist who had best sellers and was a talk show favorite years ago...is back. At 86, and with no Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin to amuse, she's not been booked on high profile talk shows, and her new tome isn't from a major book company. The benefit is she can do as she pleases, which might explain this very silly excuse for a book.

It was sold to an indie company, and they are attempting to sell it to you, as something that "analyzes ancient myth and its relevance to 21st century relationships." Maybe. Maybe not. The main problem is that the book doesn't seem co-written by Westheimer. The tone is very academic, reflecting the lecture style of Harvard's Jerome E. Singerman. Having met them both, I can't quite understand the problem except that Dr. Ruth, who is as peppy as ever in person, apparently didn't have many juicy case histories to balance what reads like lecture transcripts.

The chapter on Narcissus is typically dry: "The dictionary defines a narcissist as someone exhibiting excessive vanity or self-admiration..." This could've led to some recollection of a comically pathological egomaniac, but instead, the chapter ends with a cut-and-paste joke: "Woody Allen once said that the nice thing about masturbation is that it's sex with someone you love. This is apparently not a thought that would ever occur to a character in Greek or Roman mythology..."

This is supposed to be a book, not a collection of easy-going lectures on mythology, but the formula for each chapter is the same. There's a reminder of who Iphis and Ianthe were, or Pasiphae, or Pygmalion...and nothing from Dr. Ruth to explain how these dimly colorful figures relate to people today, or the problems related to sex on the Internet, STD's, rampant porn, lifelike rubber sex dolls or anything else that might get in the way of, or enhance, sexual gratification in the 21st Century.

Leda and the Swan? Well, one doesn't expect that Dr. Ruth ever had a patient who had sex in an aviary. So why bother?

That would be a question for co-author Singerman, perhaps, as the un-Ruthian prose strays from the myth itself to a rumination on how this myth was depicted in art:

"The artists of the Italian Renaissance seem to have loved the story of Leda nad the swan. Correggio places the couple at the middle of a jolly forest scene. Here, Leda is sitting in the shade of a tree by the edge of a pool or a stream, facing forward. The swan stands between her open legs, his neck curving upward between her naked breasts, his bill reaching just far enough to chuck her under the chin. She looks down rather sweetly at him..." A photo of the painting would've sufficed instead of all the padding. Perhaps Dr. Ruth did add the final paragraph, recalling "...some very curious medical illustrations of the following centgury that depict the elongated but obviously non-erect human penis oddly but gracefully curving — like the neck of a swan perhaps? In one example I have in mind, the artist has even omitted any representation of the testicles, but has drawn a setion of the legs flanking the organ so that they look very much like the outspread wings of the bird. I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but if all this is not quite as anatomically impossible as a woman who lays eggs, I nevertheless suspect that the two are very closely related."

I don't want "to put too fine a point on it" either, but the reason Dr. Ruth was so popular on TV and in her early books, was that she didn't sound like some guy from Harvard recalling old paintings and what he remembers from Mythology 101. Why even include this Leda business, and with no photos? Rather than ask Singerman, the question is put to Westheimer. It turns out the "Leda" legend is one of her favorite myths because... "I love swans. Every year when I go to Zurich, I say hi to the swans on Lake Zurich. It reminds me of the years I was a child in an orphanage in Switzerland...and now I am coming back to visit as Dr. Ruth." Oh. Ok.

The Westheimer name will probably help dispose of copies to libraries, and should be one of the more successful titles from the indie press involved. It's also nice to see that she hasn't been soured on publishing after offering what she remembers as one of her better manuscripts to the infamous S.P.I. book company circa 1988. They slipped into bankruptcy, intentionally leaving printers, authors and even its defense lawyers stiffed, and were, far more than Westheimer, experts in the art of screwing.