Skip to main content
Gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter is widely known for her no holds barred takedowns of vagina pseudoscience on Twitter.
At TechfestNW in April, Gunter gave a presentation titled "Pseudoscience and the Pussy: Profit, Politics, and Patriarchy."
In it, she talked about toppling Goop, the "natural health company" owned by Gwyneth Paltrow, and dispelling misinformation about female anatomy.
Related: Twitter's Gynecologist Wants to Fight Internet Misinformation About Vaginas
"It's amazing to me how someone like Gwyneth Paltrow can market a product like [the jade egg] that literally is supposed to be 'recharged by the energy of the moon' and somehow she's empowering women to look after their bodies," Gunter said. "And when someone scientific stands up and says, 'Wait a minute. That doesn't sound quite right.' We're the naysayers or we're inappropriately confident."
Companies like Goop, Gunter added, don't fill gaps in modern medicine—they capitalize on pseudoscience.
Gunter said that a current "culture of vaginal shame" is the product of years of medical misinformation and a historical precedent of "distilling a woman's worth to her hymen and her uterus."
"You had to be pure until you weren't and then as soon as your uterus was used then you were done," Gunter said.
A double standard in the way people talk about anatomy, Gunter said, leads to words being weaponized to breed shame around things like "vaginal odor."
"Why does nobody care about how a scrotum smells?" Gunter asked.