Welcome to The Vajenda!

Imagine a Venn diagram with overlapping circles labeled: Medical Facts, Feminism, and Fire. You are at their intersection.

My personal vajenda is to empower every person with accurate medical information about their body, because you can’t be an empowered patient with inaccurate information.

While medical misinformation and lies are everywhere (the pervasiveness of anti-mask propaganda is a tragic example), women’s health has been uniquely targeted. There is the patriarchy, which has for thousands of years viewed a cisgender male body as the healthy, “normal” standard and labeled the vulva, vagina and uterus as inferior, toxic, and dirty. This messaging persists today — a testimony to the power of shame. Women and people with vaginas have their symptoms disbelieved, their pain dismissed, and their health concerns understudied, and these gaps have been exploited by both Pharma and the wellness industrial complex. Then of course there is the forced-birth movement and anti-contraception propaganda. This campaign of disinformation has spread beyond clinic protesters and is now informing legislation. 

It shouldn’t take an act of feminism to know how your body works, to sort the medical facts from the fiction, and to get the medical care you need, but the unfortunately truth is it often does.

I’ve been doing my best to correct this medical disconnect. I’ve written a book on the vagina and vulva, and I have one on menopause coming out May 25. I write for major news publications and regularly crush medical bullshittery on social media, but I started my campaign against medical misinformation and disinformation with blogging. I loved my blog. I could respond quickly to breaking medical news or legal shenanigans about abortion, and I could be as full of righteous indignation as I wanted. I wrote about medical topics that interested or annoyed me and that I thought might also interest or annoy you. I broke the story about Dr. Ben Carson and how he had published research using aborted fetuses. I called out the University of Utah for offering premarital exams. I told the world how vaginal steaming and jade eggs were a wellness scam and gave you the science to back up my claim. Just to name a few.

Last year I took a break from blogging, mostly because I was writing my latest book, but now I find myself overflowing with information I couldn’t fit into The Vagina Bible or The Menopause Manifesto. I keep reading articles I would love to share. I am still filled with righteous indignation about the misinformation passed off as medicine and I constantly get asked questions on social media, but there aren’t enough characters to do them justice.  

Enter The Vajenda!

The Vajenda will have at least one deep dive each week into a subject that I want you to know more about. There may also be the occasional shorter piece when I encounter a fascinating subject that I want to share, or when I am enraged and the first thing I think is, “Not on my watch!” I will also be writing a weekly advice column, Ask Dr. Jen, where I answer questions you leave here in the comments or send me privately via DM. If that weren’t already enough, Substack makes it possible for us to meet virtually for a weekly menopause chat I will host, called The Dodge.

Why Substack?

Substack allows me to do all of this without advertisements and without taking money for endorsements. This allows me to produce a product free from the influences of Big Pharma, Big Natural, and Big Feminine Hygiene. Substack also gives me additional control over the comments (more on that in a minute), and allows me to host a chat. They make it easy for a non-technical person like me to produce a professional product. 

What’s Up With Subscriptions?

Writing quality content takes time, and I believe people should be paid for their work. Subscriptions also allow me to pay for an editor — longtime readers of my original blog and those who follow me on the socials know I am a typo queen. Editors also provide vital feedback, and, ultimately, I want to give you the best product possible.  

The public content includes the weekly newsletter (the deep dive) and one Ask Dr. Jen column each month. A subscription gives you the weekly newsletter, full access to the advice column each week, any additional content and the ability to post your comments. My writing wheelhouse is vaginas, vulvas, the uterus and ovaries, abortion, menopause, and wellness — and those topics are troll magnets. Even one ad hominem attack in the comment section can polarize readers and cause them to question the evidence-based content they just read, and I don’t want that to happen here. My hope is that when comments are subscription-only, I will need to do less policing.

The decision to limit comments was hard. I love feedback, and the smart repartee from all the amazing people who were devotees of my blog and from those who follow me on Twitter and Instagram gives me joy. I have also received some of my best insults by way of comments — I mean, someone once called me the Vaginal Anti-Christ. Even I have to admit that is pretty good! But the point of The Vajenda is to continue my mission of quality health information and to accomplish that goal with today’s Internet, I need to restrict comments as people are less likely to pay to hate comment or to promote an unnecessary supplement. Everyone can still like posts, so please do that so I know what you have enjoyed!

Another benefit to subscriptions is The Dodge. Cool name! What IS that?

The Dodge is a community for women who are anywhere on their menopause continuum. 

I know women want quality information about menopause, which is why I wrote The Menopause Manifesto. However, I also hear that menopause is lonely and there is no community to share experiences or ask questions. I’ve been asked several times about hosting an evidence-focused support group because what is often found online is mythology or marketing. Women tell me they want a place where they can meet, share their stories, and not be inundated with misinformation about supplements for ovarian support or about balancing hormones with food. The Dodge will be that support group. I chose the name because it is a term from the 1700s (possibly older) that women in England used to describe what we now call the menopause transition (the years leading up to the final menstrual period). It was “the dodge” as women were dodging between irregular periods. The word “menopause” was invented later (in the 1800s) by a man who contributed nothing to the field except a word that doesn’t even work well, medically speaking, so it felt ill-suited for a community of women. I think The Dodge also honors the fact that with menopause women are also dodging misinformation. 

I will start each week’s meeting with a topic or question. We’ll start with Sundays at 9 am PST (beginning February 21), but I am flexible time-wise. As the community grows, if we need to alternate with different days and times every other week, that will be fine. But one has to start somewhere.

A subscription to The Vajenda is $5 a month or $50 for the year. All content will be free for the first few weeks (with the exception of The Dodge and commenting). If paying for the Vagenda isn’t within your budget, please know that reading, liking, and sharing the public content is greatly appreciated. 

The Vajenda is my way of empowering people about their reproductive health through evidence-based content with a heaping side of badassery. And to the agents of disinformation and the medical grifters: well, all I can say is buckle up!

Welcome to my little corner of the medical Internet. 

Welcome to The Vajenda.