Jennifer Gunter > Quotes

“It’s a vagina, not a piña colada.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Does your doctor get money from Big Pharma? You can look them up on Dollars for Docs, a service from ProPublica”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Vaginal cleaning will damage the good bacteria and mucus, increasing a woman’s chance of odor, bacterial vaginosis, and sexually transmitted infections.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“I call these types of interventions, like wearing cotton underwear or emptying your bladder after sex, the burden of “well, it can’t hurt”. But they truly are a burden. Every time we make a woman jump through a useless hoop to get better, we add a burden, be it financial, or emotional, or the exasperation of doing so many things and yet realizing that you are running very hard but not getting anywhere.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina—Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Women are gaslit into believing that their bodies - the very thing that allows them to hack the big brain-small pelvis equation - are problematic and that consequently they themselves are problematic. We're dirty, silly, fat, gross, weak, or we're simply complainers. We are forced to make do with a medical system largely designed around the needs of men and we have our medical concerns dismissed as "not that bad" or we are told they are fabricated.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“We don’t shake hands, eat, or cut raw chicken with our vulvas.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Of all genital injuries in the emergency department, 3 percent are due to pubic hair removal.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Humans couldn’t have evolved to this point without the strength of women in menopause.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“Sometimes it can seem as if your body is a car with a new and completely different warning light that appears each day. An unwelcome exercise in, “Oh what now?”
― Jen Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“Another group of researchers compared women ages forty-five to fifty-five with men of the same age and found that women performed better than men with memory tasks before menopause, but during the menopause transition and afterward that advantage became less apparent. This point feels important enough to emphasize. Yes, there is a temporary change, but even with that change women still out-performed men.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“The first depiction of female pubic hair in Western art wasn’t until Goya’s The Naked Maja in the late 19th century, and this was apparently outrageous even though just a few wisps are barely visible.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“That, and the patriarchy is a relentless foe.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Don’t choose Goop’s infamous jade egg, touted as a secret sexual practice of ancient Chinese empresses and concubines. There is no evidence they were anything of the sort, and the idea that these jade eggs are somehow known to a for-profit business in California yet unknown to scholars is, shall we say, somewhat suspect.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“The clitoris, when it was considered by ancient physicians at all, was believed to be the female version of the penis. But lesser. (I’m sorry, but the organ, capable of multiple orgasms, that only exists for pleasure is not lesser. It is the gold standard”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“and menopause is no more a disease than being a man is a disease.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“Instead of intimate wipes, they should be called irritant wipes.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“There is a culture of silence about aging vulvas and vaginas.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“what the patriarchy thinks of menopause is irrelevant. Men do not get to define the value of women at any age.”
― Jen Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“Stress is bad for every medical condition—many of the chemical changes in the nervous system with stress can lower the threshold for pain conditions.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“melanin absorbs and reflects ultraviolet light and provides protection from the sun, melanocytes also respond to biological, physical, and chemical stimuli and are part of the immune system.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“(I’ve spent many hours down the rabbit hole that is “vagina Etsy”).”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“By 1844, the anatomist Georg Ludwig Kobelt published such detailed work that his anatomic descriptions of the clitoris rival those we have today. However, his work was essentially ignored (as was almost everything that had led up to it), likely due to a combination of the expansion of Victorian beliefs (essentially the dangers of female sexuality) and Freud popularizing the false belief that the clitoris produced an “immature” orgasm.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Whether it is changing laundry detergent, wearing cotton underwear, or giving up bubble baths, the frustration of the unscientific “well, it won’t hurt!” recommendations given to women about their bodies add up.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“If you don’t have incontinence, save your money and your vulva and don’t buy wipes.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“I proclaim that we must stop viewing menopause as a disease, because that means being a woman is a disease and I reject that shoddily constructed hypothesis. I also declare that what the patriarchy thinks of menopause is irrelevant. Men do not get to define the value of women at any age.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“This idea that there was a window of safety for starting MHT—meaning starting hormones closer to the final menstrual period is different risk-wise from starting later—was born and is now supported by an increasing amount of data.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“Condoms are the clear winner in the contraception as vagina-defender category.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“When a woman starts skipping two menstrual periods in a row there is a 95 percent chance her final menstrual period will be within the next four years.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“It’s important to remember that nothing is experienced until your brain tells you it’s experienced.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“penis-centric view of female sexuality, and the belief propagated by Freud’s work that the clitoris was unimportant are a lot of obstacles to overcome. The clitoris, being largely internal, is practically also harder to study than the penis. Eventually, anatomic studies using female cadavers to dissect the clitoris were allowed, but it is important to note the limitations of the work. Most cadaveric studies involve a few bodies; seven is considered a”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine