My delight in the particular brazenness of Dr. Jen Gunter began in 2017, with her first essay, My Vagina is Terrific, Your Opinion About It Is Not. “It started with a post on my blog about why you shouldn’t put Vicks VapoRub in your vagina,” Gunter says. “I wrote about how I once was with someone who liked to shame my body. You know how it goes: If only my hair was straight, if only my legs were thinner, if only I dressed differently, I would be the perfect person for him.”
She felt like “a walking uterus.” So, she changed. Straightened her hair. Lost some weight. “Obviously it was emotionally abusive,” she says. “Then he made a comment about the smell of my vagina, and I was like, wait a minute, I’m the actual expert here. He could shame me about my body, but he couldn’t shame me about my professional knowledge.” She broke up with him, ultimately writing about her experience in the hopes of helping other women.
That’s when the trolls came for her. “Literally the dudes came out of the woodwork. The comments were like, ‘all the men had a meeting, and we all said you have a stinky vagina.’ Honest to god. Then I got mad,” she says.
Just like that, a revolution was born: a column in the New York Times, a Twitter following over 200,000 strong, a new show called Jensplaining out later this month, and her first book The Vagina Bible, which debuts today.
In a moment when American states are passing new laws to remove a woman’s right to have a say about her own body, thank goodness for Gunter, the ob-gyn who has emerged to lead a rational counter argument for women’s health. Her argument is simple (and apparently radical): A woman is the rightful master of her own domain. “Since the beginning of time, women’s bodies have been weaponized against us. Almost every culture, every society has this history—and some still do—of saying women’s bodies are dirty and toxic, and that menstrual blood is filthy. It’s an effective weapon,” she says. “There’s something really visceral about it—it makes you feel like there’s something wrong with you. This messaging has been around for so long and the fact is we’ve had, until very recently, few women in science pushing back.”
Gunter is pushing back—hard. The Vagina Bible is part vagina myth buster, part feminist rallying cry, and all Gunter. “My mission is informed choice. I truly want every woman to be empowered about her body and the decisions she makes about her body—you can’t be empowered with inaccurate information,” she says. Recently, someone sent her a link to an Instagram post on why you should steam your vagina, claiming the GOOP-approved trend could “tighten” it. “If you decide to steam your vagina based on that, then you’ve made an uninformed choice,” she says. “If however, you understand that its harmful, there is zero health benefit, that it’s actually a derivative of a patriarchal idea—people used to believe the uterus wandered the body, I’m not kidding you, and that if you put fragrant herbs between your legs, the stupid uterus would come down to the nice smell like a sheep—if you understand all of that and decide you still want to steam your body, well, then that’s your choice.”
We talked about why knowing your body leads to better sex, how normal is different for every woman, and why women are suddenly so obsessed with discharge.
