I start my interview with Dr Jen Gunter - who is tuning in from the San Francisco Bay area ahead of her appearance in Sydney this August at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas - as a too eager student hoping to ace her vagina exam despite minimal study.
We’re here because poor quality sex ed combined with misinformation on social media is a noxious combination when it comes to helping young women understand their vaginas. Dr Gunter, a Canadian-American gynecologist, New York Times columnist, and TikTok fiend is here to set the record straight on dubious health and wellness claims.
In a role reversal, Dr Gunter fires off her first question: what do you think about tampons affecting your health?
At 31, I'm pretty cool with tampons, use them once a month, and think they’re supportive of my health. I’ve heard of toxic shock syndrome… and my understanding is that it’s important to change them regularly.
Not too bad, Dr Gunter says. I'm representing Australia well so far. In the United States, some people wrongly think tampons are “toxic death sticks”, thanks to a lack of education and purity culture shaping peoples’ perceptions of what should and shouldn’t go into the vagina. Toxic shock syndrome is a risk, she says, but suffering from it is about the same probability of being struck by lightning. Change your tampon every 6-8 hours, and you’re basically good.
Next question. What do you think about yoghurt for vaginal health?
Hmm. I’m not really seeing the link between yoghurt and vaginal health, but I’d say that yoghurt can be part of a balanced diet...?
This answer seems to satisfy Dr Gunter - who is pleased to hear that unlike some people on social media, I don’t think the probiotics in yoghurt can prevent vaginal infections, nor am I putting it inside my vagina to try and treat them.
Um. Come again?
“This wrong idea comes from never being taught about things, and the influence of the word ‘natural’. If it’s natural, it must be good for you. Foxglove is natural, but that’s how you get digitalis. Natural does not mean safe. But there’s this whole interplay with the benevolent God, benevolent nature,” she says.
“A lot harks back to medicine in the 1800s - they didn’t know much. You balanced the humours, you were trying to get closer to the natural form. Then when germ theory came along, the science started to peel off from medicine. But there’s still a whole lot of people who are stuck in the closer to nature, closer to God paradigm.”
Okay, final question. Why do you think women have menopause?
I'm stumbling. If I think about the arc of a woman’s life, there’s the maiden season and crone season, and I know that the menopausal season is a chapter that brings to a close the fertility window of a woman’s life.
You’re skirting close, she says.
“It turns out, women are valuable, even when they’re not breeding. The current hypothesis, which is based on a lot of good data, is called the ‘grandmother hypothesis’," Dr Gunter clarifies. "Women are valuable to society, and when you’re older, you could be most valuable to someone raising offspring if you’re not raising offspring yourself. It’s this idea that grandmothers can help with the collective burden of childrearing."
In today's media-saturated environment, Dr Jen Gunter spends time and energy countering misinformation on TikTok, where the algorithm can bad ideas into the ether via unstoppable viral loops.
“One of the biggest is that natural is better, but of course, natural can mean so many different things, and it also gets coopted to mean whatever. Like that’s ‘unnatural’, or that’s ‘synthetic’. And it’s like… do you know what synthetic means as you type this on your synthetic phone?” she says.
This myth ties into selling health and wellness supplements, hormone supplements, dietary recommendations.
“We’re now seeing a huge rise of this fear in the United States about oral contraception, which considering there’s a lot of states where abortion is basically illegal, is concerning. And a lot of this is funded by the right wing, so a lot of these groups that are spreading fears have very right wing agendas,” she says.
“When you have this extreme return to nature, you think, oh that’s like a hippie left-wing thing, but it’s not, when you go around, the left and the right hit together in this super organic natural lifestyle way. An Instagram page for someone who identifies as a nature-loving mamma and a Jesus-loving mamma, and their pages look identical.”
Outside a problematic "back to nature" view of vaginal health, Dr Gunter also takes on products she sees as redundant and predatory.
In one TikTok video, Dr Gunter takes umbrage with the so-called Dripstick - a product that has raised US$2.6 million in venture capital to help the Awkward Essentials CEO bring an alternative to the trusty towel for post-sex cleanup. That the company has a female founder is not enough for Dr Gunter - the evidence and clinical bar should be higher before we celebrate.
“Getting money means nothing - there are all kinds of awful ideas that get money. I would say - what problem are you actually trying to fix? Men’s discomfort with the fluids that he has created as well as part of the sexual encounter? That’s what you’re trying to fix. Why is that man not jumping up and running to the bathroom to bring you back a warm towel to clean you off with?” she says.
“The idea that you need to make a single-use product to throw away in the trash that’s probably not going to clean up everything… what if you just got exposed to HPV and you’re now swishing that around? These are all possibilities. The clinical trials that would be needed to say that this is a product that could be recommended are never going to happen. All they need to do is make a few social media videos."
On that fierce note, I leave my time with Dr Gunter feeling grateful that she's using her 24 years of clinical expertise to course correct vagina-owners everywhere towards greater empowerment.
For more vagina-related wisdom, check out Dr Jen Gunter on TikTok. For a real life dose, the internet's most fearless advocate for women's health is gracing the FODI stage in Sydney this August.