‘Vaginal antichrist’
Women’s health advocate has spent her life busting myths about the female body
You’ve heard of a cook-off or a bake-off, but what about a vagina-off? Yeah, neither has Dr. Jen Gunter — and she’s an OB/GYN. Nevertheless, one day as she was scrolling her social media feed, a woman challenged her to a vagina-off to see whose netherparts were physically stronger.
“This woman practises what she calls vaginal kung fu, which apparently means lifting heavy objects with her vagina. Just because you can do something biomechanically, doesn’t mean you should. You don’t have to crack a walnut with your vagina,” Gunter says, adding that most women will do just fine with run-of-the-mill Kegel exercises.
“This is my life — I wake up to being tagged in posts like this on Instagram or Twitter.”
As a women’s health advocate born and raised in Winnipeg, Gunter has dedicated her career to busting myths about the female body. She hosts the web series Jensplaining on CBC Gem, her new book The Vagina Bible is now out and her no-holds-barred writing appears in The New York Times, USA Today and Self.
Add to that what she describes as male-dominated thinking about women’s health, and you can see why trolls call her things like “the vaginal antichrist.” (That actually happened, and Gunter says it’s her favourite insult ever.)
But, she maintains, knowledge is power — especially for women.
“If from the beginning of time you’ve been excluded from schools and education, and historically medicine hasn’t been able to study your body because it was inappropriate for men to dissect female cadavers, then you have this misinformation because nobody knows about your body parts,” she says.
“If you can’t teach people how to protect themselves from STDS, if you’re keeping people from knowing how their body works and knowing how to protect themselves, you are effectively harming a large segment of the population.”
Her message seems like a beacon in a time when women’s bodies have become especially politicized. In May, several U.S. states placed severe restrictions on abortion and Canadian MPP Sam Oosterhoff vowed to make the procedure “unthinkable” in our lifetime. For Gunter, it’s a blatant attempt to keep women under heel.
“If you want to keep a large group of people from voting, keeping them in poverty is a way to do that,” she says. “And a way to keep people in poverty is to not allow them control over their reproductive lives. It’s a very powerful weapon of control.”
Also in Ontario this summer, Conservative Premier Doug Ford reverted to the province’s 1998 elementary sex-ed curriculum after repealing the 2015 version, which had significant updates to the sections on sexual development and diversity, and new material on sexting, bullying and consent. (He recently decided to keep many major parts of the 2015 curriculum after all.)
“Denying sex education uniquely affects everyone except cisgender men,” Gunter says. “People who are more likely to suffer the consequences of STIS are women and the LGTBQ+ community. If you wipe out how a large percentage of the population that’s sexually active gets information about protection, you’re saying you hope that a certain percentage of the population suffers. That’s cruel.”
Gunter’s also hoping to bust the stigma and silence surrounding menstrual periods — the first episode of her web series is devoted to them.
It features historical practices around women’s periods, an analysis of menstrual products, and experts playing a menstruation-themed board game, complete with tokens shaped like granny panties, tampons and a pad with wings.
“If you look at almost every culture, there’s this history of telling women that they’re dirty during their period. They blame it on crop failures or whatever. Women are sent out to literal menstrual huts in some places. They’re not allowed at religious services. They’re sold scammy products or told scammy things to cleanse the uterus,” she says.
“I get a lot of messages from women who have been told that their vaginas are dirty or gross from male partners — always a male partner. And I know that happens because I listen to women crying in my office about that.”
Gunter has 24 years of clinical experience to back her up. She graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Medicine in 1990 and finished her OB/GYN training at the University of Western Ontario in 1995 before moving to the U.S. for a fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Kansas.
As such, she’s also taken aim at pseudo-science claiming to be fact in the name of wellness.
That woman from before, who challenged Gunter to a vagina-off ? She also has 100,000 Twitter followers and has been featured in prominent publications. Plus, she claims that cervical cancer screening is unnecessary because people can trust their own bodies to protect them.
“I mean, if we could trust our own bodies, nobody would ever die of anything. Ever. We’d all be living until we’re 120 and then drop dead,” Gunter says. “That’s not how it works.”