September 22, 2026

Puberty: The original gaslight?

Know your body, learn your ways, trust your gut. 

We so often hear the phrases ‘trust your gut’, ‘gut instinct’ and the importance of this, especially as women. But should we be teaching that lesson sooner? When should we start to know ourselves and what are the consequences if we don’t?

There is a moment of confusion that arrives around the end of our first decade of existence; your body starts doing things that are not fully explained – Like so many life-changing moments, but this is the first in the female experience for so many. You bleed, you cramp, you sweat, body hair takes on a new life, new feelings emerge, and for many, a simple leaflet appears, or a link, instead of a conversation. You mention the pain and you are told it is "just part of being a woman." It feels like something is wrong and you are repeatedly made to feel as though you are sensitive, not used to it, exaggerating, that it will pass… Or, in many cases, to just get on with it.

For many of us, this is the first time we are taught - quietly, repeatedly, by well-meaning adults and systems alike - to doubt our lived experience of our own body. It feels like it is time ask plainly: is puberty our first brush with gaslighting?

Setting the stage

The term ‘gaslight’ itself comes from Gas Light, Patrick Hamilton's 1938 stage play, later adapted into two films - most famously the 1944 version starring Ingrid Bergman. The plot? A husband methodically convinces his wife that she is losing her mind, dimming the gas-powered lights in their home and then insisting, when she notices, that she's imagining it. The term has since come to describe any pattern of being told, persistently and with total confidence, that what you are perceiving is not real. What makes it so effective - on screen and off - is not a single dramatic lie. It is an accumulation of small, repeated denials, until the person starts distrusting their own judgement more than the person misleading them. It is an incredibly smart art of manipulation. And, it is worth considering, that a slow erosion of self-trust is exactly what is at stake when girls are taught, from puberty onward, to downplay what their bodies are telling them.

The word resurfaced in the cultural conversation again with the Starz 2022 miniseries Gaslit, in which Julia Roberts played Martha Mitchell - the wife of Richard Nixon's attorney general, who tried to warn the public about Watergate and was publicly dismissed as hysterical, unstable and unreliable for her trouble. It is a fitting echo: Mitchell was telling the truth the whole time, but the machinery around her worked hard to make everyone, including her, doubt it. Psychologists later coined "the Mitchell effect" to describe exactly this - dismissing someone's accurate account of reality as delusional due to its inconvenience. 

The trickle effect

None of this happens in a vacuum. Girls are taught, often long before puberty even begins, that certain reactions make them "difficult": too emotional, too sensitive, too much. Indeed, many boys are given the same narrative. For both, pain that would prompt immediate concern in someone else gets reframed as fussing. And for girls, a firm "no" becomes "moody." An accurate complaint becomes an overreaction. This is not usually malicious – it is inherited, passed down through generations of a culture that has long rewarded women for being agreeable and quiet, and penalised them for taking up space or insisting on being believed. But inherited or not, the effect is the same: girls learn early to pre-emptively shrink their own experience before anyone else even gets the chance to dismiss it.

That early training does not stay neatly filed under "puberty." It becomes the template carried into every relationship that follows. It is there in the workplace, when a woman's direct feedback is labelled "aggressive" while the same words from a man are called "decisive". 

It is there in families, when a daughter's boundaries are treated as a phase to be waited out rather than a preference to be respected. It's there in friendships, when someone's hurt feelings are met with "you're reading too much into it." And it's there, perhaps most intimately, in sexual relationships, when a woman's "not tonight" or "that doesn't work for me" gets quietly negotiated against, or when her account of what happened in an encounter is second-guessed before it's even fully spoken. Different rooms, same mechanism: a lifetime of practice in doubting yourself makes it easier for others to do the doubting for you.

Breaking that pattern isn't about assigning blame to any one relationship or any one person – it is about recognising the shape of it, so it can be interrupted wherever it shows up. That takes equality: relationships, workplaces and families where a woman's account of her own experience carries the same automatic weight as anyone else's. It takes real communication, the kind that treats "Here's what I'm feeling…" as information rather than a problem to be managed. 

It takes care, offered without the quiet expectation that it be earned by staying agreeable. And underneath all of it, it takes self-love - the ongoing, unglamorous work of treating your own perception as trustworthy, even when the people or systems around you suggest otherwise.

A sense of self

Knowing your body is not a nicety, it is a foundation for your future self.

When you are taught from the outset that period pain is normal to the point of being unquestionable, that discharge and cycles and hormonal shifts are subjects to be managed quietly rather than understood properly, you don't just lose out on comfort. You lose the baseline literacy you need to notice when something is actually wrong.

That gap doesn't stay contained to adolescence. It follows women into adulthood, into GP appointments where symptoms are minimised, into years of being told pain is "normal" when, in many, many instances, it is not, and should not be. We all have our personal experiences with this, the examples are depressingly plentiful, and can be catastrophic.

Endometriosis UK's 2026 "State of Endometriosis Care" report puts the UK’s average time to diagnose endometriosis - a condition affecting roughly one in ten women from puberty to menopause - at 9 years and 4 months from first GP visit to diagnosis, up from 8 years in 2020. For women from ethnically diverse communities, that wait stretches to an average of eleven years. Close to four in ten people need ten or more GP visits before endometriosis is even suspected, and over half of those who end up in A&E with their symptoms are sent home without treatment. Hertility Health created a brilliant piece about this in July, well worth a read. And you might appreciate further reading on this from The Reading Room in: ‘The Impact of Endometriosis’.

There is a genuine, but very much prospective, shift in the US that gives us reason for cautious hope. In February 2026, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (ACOG) issued new clinical guidance recommending diagnosis by symptoms and physical exam, rather than waiting for laparoscopic surgery to confirm it - a change explicitly designed to shorten the path to diagnosis going forward. 

The future could be so bright for the generations to follow. But none of this is a failure of individual willpower or self-advocacy. It is the long tail of a culture that trains girls, from puberty onward, not to trust what their bodies are telling them. If the first lesson is "don't make a fuss," the louder lesson, years later, is "don't trust yourself when something feels wrong." Knowing your body isn't an optional extra to a well-lived life – it is vital infrastructure.

The Shift for Gen A-Z

There are areas that are genuinely, tangibly improving in the most exciting ways. Cervical screening - long a source of dread, discomfort and avoidance for many women - is being transformed by self-testing. NHS England has begun rolling out at-home HPV self-sampling kits, sending them directly to women who are overdue for screening. Early data from London's rollout found that 98% of women who tried self-swabbing rated the experience as good or excellent, with results comparable to samples taken by a clinician. 

Combined with the HPV vaccination programme, this shift sits inside a genuinely ambitious goal: England's Cervical Cancer Elimination Plan aims to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health issue by 2040. That's not a modest aspiration – it is a generational one. A girl starting puberty today is likely to grow up in a world where a disease that has quietly ended so many women's lives simply isn't the threat it once was. Cervical cancer is set to be a thing of the past. Talk about reason to celebrate…

The Femtech evolution

Alongside clinical progress, there is a quieter cultural shift happening - in the apps on our phones, in the products on our shelves, in the language we now have for things many would not dream of naming out loud. The UK's femtech sector has grown from a handful of companies a decade ago to well over a hundred active businesses today, spanning menstrual and ovulation tracking, fertility diagnostics, menopause platforms, hormone testing and sexual wellness. Brands like Elvie and Hertility have shown that women's health technology can be beautifully designed, clinically effective and commercially successful, while a new wave of menopause platforms is moving beyond simple symptom tracking into genuine clinical support, built in response to the same delays and dismissals that show up across women's health more broadly.

What all of this really represents is momentum in the conversation itself. Every period-tracking app, every menopause platform, every pelvic-floor trainer (Our Muse by Coco de Mer Pleasure Balls happen to be brilliant for this) normalise what used to be whispered about - at work, in friendship groups, at family dinner tables. The more ordinary these conversations become, the harder it is for any one woman to be told her experience doesn't count, or matter.

The business case for prioritising women's health and sexual wellness is proving itself on a daily basis. 

Estimates for the global market in 2025/2026 range from $21.57 billion to over $83.6 billion, depending on the inclusion of broader sextech and pharmaceutical segments. 

The global sex toy market was valued at $35.2 billion in 2023, projected to hit $62.7 billion by 2030. Women's health is thankfully gaining momentum, and the UK market is thriving, with a report by the NHS Confederation showing an additional £1 investment per woman could generate an estimated £320 million return to the economy. 

It might be a world of fun, but this is no laughing matter in commercial terms.

Your pleasure is our pleasure

You may have heard us say this before, but it is at the core of our being - we want to encourage and celebrate the importance of pleasure; not just pleasure for its own sake, but the deeper belief that understanding your body is inseparable from enjoying it, protecting it, and advocating for it. 

It is why we are steadfast in our support for the ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ campaign for lifelong sex education led by Samantha Niblett MP, alongside MakeLoveNotPorn founder Cindy Gallop. The brilliant campaign is pushing for sex education that is relevant and inclusive across every age and life stage - not a single lesson delivered once in secondary school with a banana and an uncomfortable teacher, and never mentioned again - but an ongoing conversation that grows with us. We were proud to co-host the campaign launch with our valued retail partner John Lewis (where you can find The Pleasure Collection and Intimate Play ranges) and we will keep showing up for this campaign and concept, because this subject belongs far beyond politics.

Cindy Gallop's own platform, MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), exists for much the same reason: to give people real, honest reference points for sex and pleasure in a landscape otherwise dominated by pornography, and to build a safer, more inclusive space for talking about real-world sex. It is a project built on the same conviction that runs through everything we do here at Coco de Mer - that pleasure, knowledge and safety are not separate categories. They reinforce one another.

This is also why we call ourselves the Home of Pleasure. Not a slogan, but a genuine commitment: a safe place for people to discover their own individual desires, built on the belief that self-exploration is not a luxury but a healthy and necessary part of life. Whether that is understanding your own arousal, your own cycle, or your own pain threshold, it all starts from the same place - paying attention to yourself, completely and unapologetically.

The allure of self 

There is a specific, practical and wonderful dimension to all of this that deserves its own mention: sex. Knowing your own body sexually - what you enjoy, what you don't, what actually gets you to a euphoric climax – should not be a small, or frivolous thing. It is one of the more direct ways this whole conversation shows up in our lives.

Women who have taken the time to understand their own arousal and pleasure tend to carry a particular kind of confidence into their sex lives and relationships. It is that incomparable confidence of not needing someone else to tell you what your body is doing, or whether what you're feeling is "normal," because you already know. That self-knowledge quietly eases the pressure to perform for someone else's benefit, or to seek validation for an experience only you can actually verify. You stop outsourcing the question "was that good?" to someone else, because you already have your own answer.

And this is far from a solitary benefit. A partner who knows their own body, and can communicate what works without embarrassment, makes sex better and more honest for everyone involved. Guesswork gives way to actual information. Performance anxiety gives way to genuine presence. And those dreaded fake orgasms – long gone. It is a small, intimate example of the same principle: the more clearly you know and trust your own experience, the less power anyone else has to define it for you - and the more room there is, for both people, for real contentment rather than a performance of it.

Trust yourself. Ask for help. 

Both things can - and should - be in alignment.

There needs to be dual permission here. Permission to trust your own gut - your instinct that something feels off, that a symptom isn't "normal” for you, that a level of pain or discomfort deserves investigation rather than dismissal. And permission, in the same breath, to ask for help. These are not contradictory. Self-trust does not mean going it alone; it means refusing to let anyone - a doctor, a partner, a well-meaning relative - talk you out of what you already know to be true, while still reaching out for the support and expertise you need.

Encourage this in the people around you, too. Ask your daughter what she might be noticing in her body, without flinching. Ask your friend how her cycle's really been, not just how she's "doing." Bring these conversations into ordinary life until they are no longer notable, or taboo.

Puberty may have been the moment many of us first learned to doubt ourselves. It doesn't have to be the moment that defines the rest of the story. 

Knowing your body - really knowing it, trusting it, and speaking about it plainly - is one of the most quietly radical things you can do for yourself, and so many others.

A few useful links to consider: