Yoni steaming? Jade eggs? DR JEN GUNTER is on a mission to debunk dangerous misinformation about women’s health from online ‘experts’, says Julia Llewellyn Smith.
Badass’, ‘cool’ and ‘controversial’ are words usually applied to rock stars, rarely to women, and never before to a 57-year-old Canadian gynaecologist who specialises in the unglamorous-sounding field of vulvovaginal disorders and female pelvic pain.
But Dr Jen Gunter is all of the above: an experienced medic who advocates for women’s health, taking on the £4.4 trillion ‘wellness’ industry and its high priestess Gwyneth Paltrow, whose lifestyle brand Goop Gunter calls ‘90 per cent quackatorium’. It’s a battle that’s led to one of Paltrow’s acolytes describing her as the ‘vaginal Antichrist’.
In the process, Gunter has amassed 359,000 followers on X/Twitter and 232,000 on Instagram. She has a hugely popular (and hilarious) blog ‘The Vajenda’, two columns in The New York Times and has written two bestsellers: The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto. Her latest is Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation.
The single mother of 20-year-old twins first hit the headlines in 2017 when she wrote an open letter to Goop, castigating the brand for its outlandish pronouncements regarding female genitalia. First it had advocated steam-cleaning ‘the yoni’ with a herbal mix (someone who tried ended up with second-degree burns) to remove impurities. Next it touted vaginal jade eggs to regulate menstrual cycles, a claim Gunter rubbished, adding that jade is porous and could harbour potentially lethal bacteria. A civil lawsuit was launched by the California Food, Drug and Medical Device Task Force for making claims not backed by scientific evidence. Goop paid £114,000 in settlement and refunded women who’d bought the eggs. But it also lashed out at Gunter, describing her stance as ‘strangely confident’.
‘I replied, “I am not strangely confident; I am appropriately confident because I am the expert.” I’ve been doing this for 37 years,’ Gunter says. ‘I don’t like talking about Gwyneth too much; it feels like punching down,’ she adds with a chuckle. ‘I just consider her ridiculous. She is always promoting grifters who are not science-based. She told women that underwired bras cause breast cancer [the site featured a Los Angeles-based practitioner who made the claim]. She spreads disinformation to scare women. She did a video clip about her favourite IV vitamins; I’m like, “Hang on, you have recipes on your website! Is your food so bad you need IV vitamins?” I don’t because I eat a balanced diet, but you can’t sell a balanced diet as something new and exciting.’
Ouch! We’re sitting in a hotel bar by London’s King’s Cross station. Two hours earlier, Gunter landed after an 11-hour-flight from San Francisco, and following our meeting she’s catching a train to Newcastle, hometown of her parents (both now deceased), to visit her adored Geordie cousins. Anyone else would be shattered but she’s chattering a thousand to the dozen over a celebratory glass of cider.
Dr Jen Gunter challenges advice found on sites such as Gwyneth’s Goop
Gunter’s bugbear isn’t just Paltrow, it’s the thousands of people with no medical background using the internet, especially TikTok, to propagate dodgy and often downright dangerous misinformation, usually to line their pockets by selling lucrative ‘cures’.
Much of the ‘advice’ she sees is centred on periods – hence Blood. For millennia, men have used women’s monthly bleeding as evidence that they’re unclean and dangerous: some cultures still demand women avoid food preparation when menstruating and bar them from religious buildings. ‘A letter published in [leading medical journal] The Lancet in 1974 hypothesised menstrual blood might be toxic. 1974! That’s in my lifetime,’ Gunter says. ‘Goop telling you to steam your vagina for impurities is passing on the same patriarchal message: women are polluted.’
Issues that Gunter is forever having to debunk include TikTok ‘hacks’ about using make-up sponges internally to absorb blood. Equally concerning are warnings from Goop that tampons could be dangerous.
In 2022 a TikTok campaign went viral claiming some brands had ‘dangerous’ titanium dioxide. ‘There’s this fear that putting a tampon inside you could kill you. It’s scientific illiteracy; they simply don’t understand the ingredients and go, “Ooh, titanium dioxide – that sounds bad” without doing a modicum of research.’ Gunter explains that titanium dioxide is a naturally occurring mineral found in lots of products, including sunscreen and toothpaste, for its whitening properties and is used to make tampon strings white.
‘No one was alarmed that the same ingredient is wiped on your gums. But scare stories like this all tie in to an idea of purity, that women need to keep unspoiled for men. These same influencers are then selling detoxes to get these ‘poisons’ out of your body at £29.99 a go, or £22 if you take out a monthly subscription.’
Some thank Gunter for this debunking, but many attack her furiously – ‘Usually women, saying “You’re wrong!” People get very upset.’ She shrugs. Clearly, as a middle-aged woman, she doesn’t care if she ruffles feathers.
Gunter was born in Winnipeg, Canada, the daughter (she has a brother) of two Brits who had emigrated in the 1950s. She was a ‘precocious’ child, the result, she says, laughing, of being made to play bridge with her parents’ friends. ‘When a 55-year-old man yells at you because you played the hand wrong, you’re like, “I’m only 12, what am I supposed to know?” So I was always outspoken and knew the difference between right and wrong.’
Around the same age, she had a kidney removed after a skateboarding accident led to the discovery she had kidney disease. She spent a lot of time in hospital. ‘I was fascinated by it all and decided I wanted to be a doctor.’
At the University of Manitoba School of Medicine, she was amazed at how few of her lecturers were women. ‘I was upset to be taking instruction in how a woman’s body works from a man. So I decided to go into obstetrics and gynaecology. You had to write an essay saying why you wanted to pursue this specialty. A lot of people wrote, “The miracle of birth!” I wrote,
“I just want to give women good healthcare and help them have abortions.” People said, “You can’t say that!” I said, “Why not?”
If I wrote that and they didn’t want me then they weren’t for me.”’
She relocated to the US, where she’s always campaigned vocally for a woman’s right to choose – a hot topic after the US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, determining every woman’s right to a termination, in 2022. Since then, 16 states have made abortion illegal in all but the most extenuating circumstances. ‘A few doctors were shot [for performing abortions] by a crazy American while I was training,’ she says.
After a first, youthful marriage ended in divorce, Gunter married again and at 36 became pregnant with triplets: ‘But my membranes ruptured at 22 weeks.’ She ended up giving birth to her first son Aidan alone in a hospital bathroom. He weighed 1lb and lived for just three minutes. ‘I was left as alone as a human can be,’ she wrote in her blog. ‘I managed to hold off delivering the other two babies for four more weeks. They were 1lb 11oz and 1lb 13oz.’ Both had chronic lung disease; one needed heart surgery: their chance of survival was put at 50 per cent. She nods to a nearby table where two hulking men are scanning their phones. ‘That’s them: Oliver and Victor,’ she says with pride. ‘That sums up why what I do is so important. They’re only sitting there because of research, science and dedicated evidence-based medicine rather than some quack putting them on unstudied probiotics.’
The boys’ early years were hugely challenging but they gave Gunter vital insight into why people fall for charlatans. ‘I understand their desperation. When your kids are ill, it’s really hard. I found myself falling into a few internet rabbit holes.
I couldn’t get solid food into one boy for three years. My paediatrician couldn’t tell me what to do because there was no answer. I ended up changing his formula to something soya based because someone online told me to do that. I wish I hadn’t.
‘It made me realise medicine does a bad job of recognising suffering – that what people want to hear from their doctor is simply, “What you have totally sucks, I wish we had a better way of treating it but right now we don’t.” I wrote my books so women could know they were getting the right information and not feel they were being dismissed.’
Gunter is such a force, I’m shaken to hear that in two years she plans to quit her job and move back to Canada. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, and don’t want to carry on seeing patients all day, every day. I’ll write more books, maybe teach one day a week and work in a resident clinic. That would make me happy. Hearing people say, “What you wrote helped me get better medical care and learn more about my body” is very fulfilling. I couldn’t ask for more.’
Blood by Jen Gunter will be published on 23 January by Little, Brown, £16.99. To preorder a copy for £14.44 until 4 February, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free delivery on orders over £25.
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue9OvqqGnp5e2u3vWoaZmoaNitbTAyKSisqyfoLi6ec6nZK2hm6m8rHs%3D