54 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
MIXED MEDIAinside a serene natural grocery store in
Mill Valley, California, Dr. Jen Gunter
is scowling at the women’s health
aisle. “What’s wrong with the way the
vagina smells?” she scoffs, looking over
the topical wipes, creams, and washes
promising to resolve undesired aromas.
“There are no products here to make
balls smell better.”
Gunter whips out a pair of tortoise-
shell glasses to read the fine print on
a tube labeled Good Clean Love pH
Balancing & Moisturizing Vaginal Gel
($18.19), which promises to “naturally
eliminate feminine odors.” “You don’t
need any special wash,” she says. And
don’t waste your money on cleansing
wipes—“totally scammy.”
“All these things are
designed to tell you that
your crotch stinks,” she
says. “I hate it.”
As an ob-gyn with
nearly three decades
of experience, Gunter
knows from crotches.
And today she is angry
about how certain
products—“vaginal
offenders”—are pitched
at women. “Since the
beginning of time,
women have been told
that they are dirty,” she
says. “They want us to
be ‘pure,’ they want us to
be ‘clean.’ These words
have been weaponized.”
And shaky assertions made by natural
health products serve only to misdi-
rect women, Gunter argues in her new
book, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and
the Vagina—Separating the Myth From
the Medicine, a sassy manual of anatomy
and self-care tips. If a topical product
claims it can regulate pH, she writes, “I
always wonder: What other false claims
are they making?”
We wander toward the soap aisle. At
5 feet 10 inches—even if you don’t count
her 2.5-inch blue leather heels—Gunter
towers above me, her honey-blond curls
spilling out over the collar of a puffy
jacket. She eyes a bar made with activated
charcoal, a trendy ingredient she deems
pointless. “Why get upset about a useless
product?” Gunter says. “Because it makeseverybody stupider—facts matter.”
As the global wellness industry tops
$4.2 trillion, Gunter, 53, is on a mission to
arm women with science-based advice in
hopes of stanching the spread of health
misinformation. Increasingly, she’s been
sounding the alarm about how confu-
sion surrounding women’s bodies fuels
larger efforts to control them. In recent
months, conservative lawmakers in
states like Alabama and Missouri have
passed harsh restrictions on abortion
based on flawed understandings of the
female reproductive system. “I’ve been
swatting at pseudoscience for so many
years, I have the language to tackle it,”
Gunter says. “People are listening now,
so I have a duty to step up.”
Raised in Winnipeg, Gunter now
lives and practices medicine in the Bay
Area. You may recognize her name from
her eponymous blog (tagline: “Wielding
the lasso of truth”); her New York Times
column, The Cycle; or her extremely
active Twitter presence (pinned tweet:
“Come for the sex, stay for the science”).
She also has a new TV series, Jensplain-
ing, on the Canadian streaming service
Gem, devoted to demystifying misper-
ceptions around health trends. She’s
probably best known, though, as a
fierce critic of Gwyneth Paltrow’s $250
million wellness empire, Goop.
Back in 2015, a friend of Gunter sent
her an article published by a doctor on
Goop’s website that suggested women
who wear underwire bras should be
concerned about getting breast cancer,
in part because bras supposedly impede
lymphatic flow. “You’re a site that’s sup-
posed to empower women, and you’re
spreading this myth?” Gunter thought
at the time. She quickly posted a critique
on her own blog, pointing to the fact
(echoed by the American Cancer Society)
that no credible studies have ever estab-
lished such a link, “never mind that the
mechanism is biologically implausible.”
A few months later, Paltrow made na-
tional headlines after touting the ben-
efits of an LA spa’s “V Steam” in a Goop
review: “You sit on what is essentially a
mini-throne, and a combination of in-
frared and mugwort steam cleanses
your uterus, et al. It is an energetic re-
lease—not just a steam douche—that
balances female hormone levels.”Gunter spotted the story at 6 a.m. The
review was offensive to her on many
levels, including the way it played into
so many “patriarchal myths of women
being dirty.” She fired off a post in
response, pointing out the fact that the
vagina and uterus are “self-cleaning
ovens,” and that steam may actually do
more harm than good. The post took off.
(Goop’s review no longer makes mention
of the uterus or hormones.)
Soon Gunter’s Goop criticism
became a regular feature. Sometimes
the posts went viral, as with a scath-
ing takedown of Goop’s $66 jade “yoni”
eggs, said to increase “vaginal muscle
tone” and “hormonal balance.” The cri-
tiques gave Gunter a chance to poke
holes in a celebrity’s bubble of influ-
ence. Paltrow “mentions a trend, and
a lot of people might try it at home,”
she told Kara Swisher in an interview
on the podcast Recode Decode.in may 2017 , Gunter wrote a more
sweeping condemnation of Paltrow’s
site, calling it a “scare factory.” The
post seemed to hit a nerve. For the first
time, Goop’s editorial board responded
with a post of their own, alluding to
Gunter as one of the “third parties
who critique goop to...bring attention
to themselves.” The article goes on to
call Gunter “strangely confident,” and
then hands the microphone over to a
physician who defends his own clini-
cal expertise while also devoting a large
amount of real estate to Gunter’s use of
the “F-Bomb.”
Gunter responded, calling herself
“appropriately confident, because I
am the expert,” and several scientists
and doctors chimed in to defend her.
Goop’s diatribe “is the equivalent of the
Trump administration trying to point
fingers at the [leakers] in order to divert
attention from the information con-
tained in the leaks,” wrote Dr. Steven
Novella, author of The Skeptics’ Guide
to the Universe.
But sweeter revenge came in Sep-
tember 2018, when Goop was forced to
pay $145,000 in civil penalties to settle
a consumer protection lawsuit brought
by prosecutors in 10 California counties
over three of its products, including its
jade and rose quartz vaginal eggs.Gunter is
sounding the
alarm about
how confusion
surrounding
women’s
bodies fuels
larger efforts
to control
them.