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

“But this is the patriarchy: facts are irrelevant; it's the world order that matters.”
― Jen Gunter, Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation

“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

“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

“They are not “feminine hygiene” products because: • Needing them is not a sign of being feminine; it’s a sign that you need something to catch blood. • They’re not hygiene products because menstruating is not unhygienic”
― Jen Gunter, Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“In addition, many things that women have been taught about their bodies and medical conditions that affect the vulva and vagina are incorrect.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“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

“It’s a penis, not a magic wand.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism

“advancements are memorialized in the names of the structures they accurately described—Gabriele Fallopio (fallopian tubes; also invented the first condom and studied it in a clinical trial!) and Caspar Bartholin (Bartholin’s glands).”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Fortunately I have the antidote. Facts.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and an ever-growing number of spas market practices like vaginal steaming, which are based on the idea that there are “toxins” or “impurities” to remove.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“However, a recent small study found probiotics after antibiotics actually delayed repopulation of good bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.”
― 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

“When it comes to painful periods, there is an epidemic of undertreatment. Women's pain is undertreated in general, as compared to men's, but painful periods have historically been seen as a "woman thing" and hence unimportant. Our patriarchal system has dismissed menstrual pain as both exaggerated and a sign of weakness, and at times, perversely, as something women deserve (punishment for "original sin," I suppose).”
― Jen Gunter, Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation

“There is a strong mind-body connection so depression and anxiety are important cofactors for pain. They don't cause it but they are accelerants. Think of whatever causes your pain as the match that started a fire. Depression and anxiety are fuel on that fire. It is hard to put out a fire when someone is dousing it with gasoline.”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina—Separating the Myth from the Medicine

“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

“She was now faced with a moral dilemma: should she tell the family they were eating vulva cookies or not?”
― Jennifer Gunter, The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine