The Vagina Bible: Debunking Myths and Misinformation Around The Female Body Ft. Dr. Jen Gunter

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

Jen Hatmaker

Relationships, Society & Culture

4.6 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you ever feel like you don’t have all the answers and information you need around your very own body? Are there beliefs or “facts” you might have learned that maybe aren’t actually centered around truth or science? Perhaps you’ve entered various seasons of your life as a female (menstruation, fertility, childbirth, hormone fluctuation, perimenopause, menopause) where you’ve felt like your concerns were dismissed or you weren’t given the tools, knowledge or treatment to help you navigate these season as well as you’d like. Whether you avidly seek knowledge about your body, or you’re bumping up against walls in what has been, historically, a lopsided research culture where male health has been more highly prioritized, we’ve got a guest today who is determined to correct that inequity with scienfitic and experiential information, research and active destigmatization. Dr. Jen Gunter is an obsetritican gynecologist and a bestselling author (The Vagina Bible, The Menopause Manifesto) who has made it her goal in life to “fix the internet” regarding information about women’s bodies and correcting the misinformation that runs rampant there; long held myths that cause fear, stress and even shame around our female phsyiology. Dr. Gunter debunks common misconceptions around our periods, our hymens (fyi, it’s not a “freshness” seal), synthetic hormones, menopause symptoms and more. Bottom line: you deserve to know about your body, and this conversation opens the door to finding true and accurate information that will help dismiss the fears you may have around all the seasons of your female health experience. * * * Thought-Provoking Quotes: “I think the average high schooler probably graduates knowing more about frog biology than human biology. No shade to animal physiology. It's super important. However, high school should also be teaching you more practical information as well as things to advance you academically.” - Dr. Jen Gunter “People deserve to know how their body works.” - Dr. Jen Gunter “If you don't have that foundation of the menstrual cycle and you don’t know how it all works, it's harder to understand what's going on with menopause” - Dr. Jen Gunter “Basically, menopause is puberty in reverse." - Dr. Jen Gunter “If you could only do one intervention for a healthy menopause, it would not be estrogen. It would be exercise. Exercise touches every domain of every single thing that's going to be on your bothersome list. Exercise improves sleep, exercise reduces dementia. Exercise reduces heart disease. The only thing that it doesn't help is hot flashes.” - Dr. Jen Gunter “Every single hormone that you get, whether it's a pharmaceutical estrogen or it's something from a compounding pharmacy, comes from the exact same plant. It’s all from the same source.” - Dr. Jen Gunter “You're more than your menstrual cycle. You're awesome whether you have estrogen or not. It has nothing to do with your awesomeness. It really doesn't.” - Dr. Jen Gunter Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Guardian Article about Dr. Jen Gunter The Vagina Bible by Dr. Jen Gunter Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter Jensplaining - Dr. Jen Gunter’s Amazon Prime Series 2020 NAMS Media Award from the North American Menopause Society Recipients “Why can’t we talk about periods” - Dr. Jen Gunters 2020 Ted Talk Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation by Dr. Jen Gunter The Vajenda - Dr. Jen Gunter’s Substack Newsletter The Preemie Primer: A Complete Guide for Parents of Premature Babies--from Birth through the Toddler Years and Beyond by Dr. Jen Gunter Ensure Meal Replacement Guest’s Links: Dr. Gunter’s Website Dr. Gunter’s Twitter Dr. Gunter’s Facebook Dr. Gunter’s Instagram Connect with Jen! Jen’s website Jen’s Instagram Jen’s Twitter Jen’s Facebook Jen’s YouTube The For the Love Podcast is a production of Four Eyes Media, presented by Audacy. Four Eyes Media: https://www.iiiimedia.com/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, Jen Hatmaker here, your host of the For the Love Podcast.
0:09.0	Whoof!
0:10.8	Welcome to the show.
0:12.3	I just finished this interview, so that was what that was about.
0:16.0	Because right now we're in a series called For the Love of Facing Your Fears.
0:22.0	Felt like an important conversation to host
0:24.7	across a handful of channels, particularly this one today.
0:29.4	There's something that most women face, frankly,
0:31.8	that's created fear and shame as far back as any of us really
0:36.6	can remember and it involves our own bodies.
0:39.8	So like for example, our periods, let's start start there maybe you had a very like
0:45.2	normal healthy talk with your parents about what to expect and what this meant and
0:50.1	what's going on internally but so many of us did not get a lot of information about it.
0:56.0	And that's probably because the generation before us had even less.
1:00.0	So that change in our lives as a teen or pre-teen for a lot of us was accompanied by surprise or fear or even shame.
1:10.0	And then, you know, for women, there's still so much mystery shrouded in our reproductive systems and what we can
1:18.5	rightly and normally expect to encounter throughout the different decades of our lives,
1:23.3	you know, through childbearing years,
1:24.8	all the way the menopause and beyond,
1:26.8	and then you compound it with stigma that is layered on,
1:31.3	sometimes by religious structures, sometimes just by cultural conversation, sometimes by
1:36.1	patriarchy. And I mean you have a recipe for pretty severe cognitive dissonance around our own bodies which is
	...

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