Is anyone else starting to feel kind of wary about the increasingly common narrative that "women's bodies are so different to men's that modern scientific recommendations do not apply to them"?
Like. There is a significant gap between 'a lot of studies do not take into account variations caused by things like female hormone cycles, which can limit how generalisable they are' and 'medical science does not apply to women', and the latter just seems to create a situation rife for bad faith actors and snake oil salesmen to reassure you that actually, THEY have the answers, because THEY listen to women, and if you simply pay them for their online subscription service-
And that's how grifters de-politicise what is a highly political problem (and not an isolated one: medical misogyny relates to medical racism relates to medical ableism relates to medical transphobia). By not acknowledging medicine's status quo as political and capable of being changed through sustained, collective action, they make being (or more truly, looking) healthy seem like just another aestheticised consumer choice. That's why so much wellness bullshit looks aspirational in advertising terms, with visible ageing and disability as sticks, and Eurocentric beauty standards and the easeful performance of apparent health as carrots. At the core of "wellness" as an industry is the idea that we can buy our way out of the health inequalities imposed on us by inequitable systems of medical research, education and practice. Wellness gurus don't want us sitting down and thinking about how our historic exclusion from studies has skewed the data, but we can get better data by pushing for more representative studies - as is already happening, e.g. the growth of scholarship (increasingly led or coproduced by people directly affected) on subjects like perimenopause, autistic health inequalities (and their often gendered nature), and Black maternal health inequalities.
Instead, they profit from naturalising the idea that medical science isn't for us, instead of challenging exclusionary systems. And it's scary to think how much of the groundwork for this "no political lens, only marketing" approach was laid down during the early part of the "wellness" boom. A generation has grown up hearing that kind of messaging normalised from all directions online.
