Gwyneth & Goop

[GeneChing]

Put Away The Jade Eggs And Garlic: This Doctor's 'Vagina Bible' Separates Fact From Fiction
46:44
Play
August 29, 2019


In her new book, "The Vagina Bible," OB-GYN and New York Times columnist Dr. Jen Gunter separates myth from medicine about women’s bodies. (Courtesy Jason LeCras)

Editor's note: A gentle warning to listeners across the country, this hour will address mature subject matter.

OB-GYN and New York Times columnist Dr. Jen Gunter advises her patients — and her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers — to put away the jade eggs, the garlic, and to stop listening to Gwyneth Paltrow. In her funny, fact-based book, Gunter separates myth from medicine about women’s bodies.

Guest
Dr. Jen Gunter, obstetrician and gynecologist. Author of "The Vagina Bible" and columnist for The New York Times. (@DrJenGunter)

From The Reading List
Excerpt from "The Vagina Bible" by Jen Gunter

Introduction

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I HAVE A VAGENDA: for every woman to be empowered with accurate information about the vagina and vulva.

One of the core tenets of medicine is informed consent. We doctors provide information about risks and benefits and then, armed with that information, our patients make choices that work for their bodies. This only works when the information is accurate and unbiased. Finding this kind of data can be challenging, as we have quickly passed through the age of information and seem to be stalled in the age of misinformation.

Snake oil and the lure of a quick fix have been around for a long time, and so false, fantastical medical claims are nothing new. However, sorting myth from medicine is getting harder and harder.

In addition to social media feeds that constantly display medical mes saging of variable quality, there are the demands of a headline-driven news cycle that constantly requires new content-even when it doesn't exist. With women's bodies, there are even more forces of misdirection at work. Pseudoscience and those who peddle it are invested in misinformation, but so is the patriarchy.

Obsessions with reproductive tract purity and cleansing date back to a time when a woman's worth was measured by her virginity and how many children she might bear. A vagina and uterus were currency. Playing on these fears awakens something visceral. It's no wonder the words “pure,” "natural,” and “clean” are used so often to market products to women.

Members of the media and celebrity influencers tap into these fears with articles about and products to prevent vaginal mayhem, as if the vagina (which evolved to stretch and tear to deliver a baby long before suture material was invented) is somehow so fragile that it is constantly in a state of near catastrophe.

Why The Vagina Bible instead of The Vagina and Vulva Bible? Because that is how we collectively talk about the lower reproductive tract (the vagina and vulva). Medically, the vagina is only the inside, but language evolves and words take on new meaning. For example, "catfish" and "text" both have additional meanings that I could never have imagined when I was growing up. “Gut” is from the Old English for the intestinal tract, usu ally meaning the lower part (from the stomach on down) but not always. It's actually a very imprecise term; yet it has been embraced by the medical community and is even the name of a leading journal dedicated to the study of the alimentary (digestive) tract, the liver, biliary tree, and pancreas.

I have been in medicine for thirty-three years, and I've been a gynecologist for twenty-four of them. I've listened to a lot of women, and I know the questions they ask as well as the ones they want to ask but don't quite know how.

The Vagina Bible is everything I want women to know about their vulvas and vaginas. It is my answer to every woman who has listened to me pass on information in the office or online and then wondered, “How did I not know this?”

You can read the book in order from front to back or visit specific chapters or even sections as they speak to you. It's all good! I hope over the years many pages will become worn as you go back to double-check what a doctor told you in the office, to research a product that makes wild claims about improving vaginas and vulvas, or help a friend or sexual partner out with an anatomy lesson.

Misinforming women about their bodies serves no one. And I'm here to help end it.

From the book THE VAGINA BIBLE by Jen Gunter. Copyright © 2019 by Jen Gunter. Excerpted with permission by Kensington Publishing Corp.

New York Times: "Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not)" — "When I was in my 20s and already a doctor, I still let my sexual partners believe they were the experts in female anatomy, despite the fact that I was studying to be an OB/GYN. These men would tell me things that were untrue and I would count ceiling tiles while they fumbled around in the wrong ZIP code, if you know what I mean.

"Instead of correcting them, I just nodded and faked my share of orgasms because I prioritized men feeling comfortable over my own sexual pleasure.

"It’s enraging that faking orgasms to satisfy a man’s sexual script has not been confined to the trash heap of bad history. Studies tell us that up to 67 percent of women who have experienced penile-vaginal intercourse have faked orgasms. All for reasons painfully familiar to me: not wanting to hurt my male partner’s feelings, knowing I won’t be listened to, feeding his ego or simply wanting the sex to end.

"We rarely talk openly about what’s required for a woman to have a good sexual experience, and so many heterosexual women learn the mechanics of sex and female orgasms from movies (most of which are written, directed and produced by ... men). What I like to call the three-strokes-of-penetration-bite-your-lip-arch-the-back-and-moan routine."

Washington Post: "Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop touted the ‘benefits’ of putting a jade egg in your vagina. Now it must pay." — "We need to talk about Gwyneth Paltrow's vaginal eggs. Again.

"For the uninitiated, these are the egg-shaped jade or quartz stones sold through Goop, Paltrow's new-age wellness company and lifestyle brand. Per Goop, women are supposed to insert said eggs into their vaginas — and keep them there for varying periods of time, sometimes overnight — to 'get better connected to the power within.'

"For $66, one can buy a dark nephrite jade egg, which allegedly brings increased sexual energy and pleasure. Or, for $55, there is the 'heart-activating' rose quartz egg, for those who want more positive energy and love. Until recently, a page on Goop's website promised that the eggs would 'increase vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy in general.'

"Those claims were, well, a stretch, with no grounding in real science, according to a consumer protection lawsuit filed by state prosecutors representing 10 California counties. On Wednesday, state officials and Goop announced that they had settled the suit, with Paltrow's company agreeing to pay $145,000 in civil penalties.

"Specifically, the suit called out Goop's jade egg, its rose quartz egg and its 'Inner Judge Flower Essence Blend' as products 'whose advertised medical claims were not supported by competent and reliable science,' according to the Santa Clara County district attorney's office. For example, the flower essence blend had been marketed as a blend of essential oils that could ward off depression.

"And the jade eggs? They had developed a reputation — and a backlash — of their own."
Grace Tatter produced this hour for broadcast.

This program aired on August 29, 2019.

THREADS
Jade Egg
Gwyneth & Goop

[David Jamieson]

Gwyneth is a ridiculously good looking person.

[GeneChing]

Gwyneth Paltrow Is Not Going to Read This Story
BY MOLLY LANGMUIR
OCT 9, 2019


Jacket, $5,350, swimsuit, $1,550, bracelets,$1,900 each, all, Chanel. Her own rings.
ZOEY GROSSMAN

All of this started with Gwyneth Paltrow hearing from Brad Falchuk—the producer, writer, and director who is also, as of last fall, her husband—that she’d influenced a character in a Netflix series he was working on. “Then it went to, ‘I’ve written this part for you. Would you consider doing it?’” she says. Many actresses would have leaped at the chance. The show, The Politician, was created by Ryan Murphy, with whom Falchuk often collaborates (they cocreated Glee and American Horror Story), and is a dark comedy about class, privilege, and flawed, self-interested people who nonetheless try their best to do good. More specifically, it focuses on a young man, Payton (Ben Platt), driven by a strain of ambition so potent it could fuel a rocket ship; the first season follows his campaign to become high school president, which is part one of his plan to inhabit the White House. Paltrow was being asked to play his mother. “I said, ‘No,’” she says. “‘You know there’s no way I can do it.’”

In 1999, Paltrow won an Academy Award for her role in Shakespeare in Love, and soon after became one of the biggest movie stars in the world. But she began to pull back from Hollywood once she became a mother in 2004 (she now has two children—a daughter, Apple, and son, Moses—with Coldplay singer Chris Martin, from whom she famously “consciously uncoupled” in 2014). In recent years, she has focused most of her attention on her wellness company, Goop, which began in 2008 as a newsletter she sent from her kitchen and is now a vast enterprise. The company has faced controversy—a piece suggesting women could benefit from placing a jade egg in their vagina, for example, prompted disapproving statements from gynecologists (Goop now tags certain posts “Fascinating and Inexplicable”)—but it’s been a huge financial success. As of 2018, it was worth $250 million, and Paltrow suggests it’s subsequently expanded beyond that. “That’s an old number,” she says. Is it higher or lower? “Of course it’s higher,” she says. “Thank goodness. Oh my God.”


Bodysuit, G. Label. Necklace, Tiffany & Co.
ZOEY GROSSMAN

Since 2015, other than a brief cameo on a TV show, Paltrow has only appeared onscreen as Pepper Potts, the romantic foil to Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man in Marvel’s ever-expanding universe. Her difficulty keeping track of which Marvel movies she’s in has been a much-repeated joke on the internet, though Paltrow doesn’t seem to be aware of this. “I never read stuff,” she says. “But it is confusing because there are so many Marvel movies, and to be honest, I haven’t seen very many of them. It’s really stupid and I’m sorry, but I’m a 47-year-old mother.”

Regarding The Politician, though, Falchuk and Murphy were persistent—“Like a dog with a bone,” Paltrow says. The production agreed to work around her schedule, and it helped that Falchuk cut some of her lines.“She’d show me a giant chunk of her dialogue and be like, ‘I have a board meeting in two days. Please don’t make me do this,’” he says. (Platt describes the rapport between Paltrow and Falchuk, who met on the set of Glee back in 2010, as being like “Cinderella and Prince Charming.” Paltrow does say Falchuk bossed her around; when I mention this to him, he says, “Well, that’s my job. And I think she liked it.”) “She was like, ‘Of course, I got roped into it,’” says Paltrow’s friend Cameron Diaz, leaning hard into the r. “It’s very funny. But she can do 4 million things at once.” (On set, Paltrow often met with Goop staffers in her downtime.)


Suspender trousers, Giorgio Armani. Bracelets, rings, all Cartier
ZOEY GROSSMAN

Paltrow first appears about halfway through the first episode, wearing an emerald-green caftan and 10 million dollars’ worth of jewelry, and dropping tidbits of advice that could be straight out of a self-help book. In another scene, after Payton has been hospitalized, she places crystals by his head and brings in a healer. Her character can seem, in other words, like a satirical take on the public perception of Paltrow; that she’s viewed this way amuses and frustrates people close to her. “Anybody who thinks that someone as successful as Gwyneth has just been floating around in caftans all day is just being rude,” says her friend Kate Hudson, who adds, “I’m way more like that than Gwyneth—I really do throw crystals around.”

But Falchuk and Paltrow both insist that skewering these projections wasn’t their intention. “The way [my character is] as a mother is most closely based on me,” Paltrow says. “He was also borrowing from other aspects of my life.” One plot point, for example, involves wealthy parents paying for their children to get into the Ivy League (oddly enough, it was written before the college admissions scandal emerged this past March). “I’m familiar with that world,” she explains.

The Politician is concerned with ambition—what it means to be driven by it, how it can distort you. Paltrow says that as an actress, she never felt that ambitious, though this was as much for systemic reasons as it was for personal ones. “In the ’90s, when I was coming up, it was a very male-dominated field,” she says. “You used to hear, ‘That actress is so ambitious,’ like it was a dirty word.” (Paltrow was an early and essential source on Harvey Weinstein for the New York Times.) But now, with Goop, “my ambition has been unleashed,” she admits.

That Paltrow is more concerned with business these days than with acting would never be apparent from her turn in The Politician, though. “The reaction of most people in our lives who have seen the show is, ‘Screw you for not doing this more,’” Falchuk says. “Seeing her quiet elegance and how she can command a room was a reminder that she is a bona fide screen presence,” Platt says. “She exudes light.”


Dress by Ralph Lauren Collection. Earrings and bracelets by Tiffany & Co. Her own rings.
ZOEY GROSSMAN

Styled by Charles Varenne. Hair by Anh Co Tran at The Wall Group; makeup by Jillian Dempsey at SWA. Manicure by Ashlie Johnson at The Wall Group; produced by Michelle Hynek at Crawford & Co Productions.

This article appears in the November 2019 issue of ELLE, on newsstands October 22.



MOLLY LANGMUIR
Molly Langmuir is a staff writer for ELLE.

Gwyneth is a ridiculously good looking person.

This repost is for you David. Especially that third B&W pic. Always looking out for ya, old friend.