Voices: It’s World Menopause Day – and I, for one, am sick of hearing about it
Surely I’m not the only one sick of all the talk about the menopause?
Yes, I know it’s important that people going through this experience feel able to share it, and not feel isolated – but as a 46-year-old woman, I’ve simply heard enough.
Any “stigma” has surely been swept away, now. It feels like every celebrity and medical professional over 50 is beating a track to harp on about their story; often with a book, supplements or clinic appointments to hawk on the side.
Rod Steward’s wife Penny Lancaster is the latest to open up. She wants to see conversations about the menopause in the workplace. But is this really what the average woman wants?
I am slap bang in this target market, yet my stance is that maybe – just maybe – we don’t want it to invade every single area of our lives. Perhaps we just want to talk to our doctor, our pals or a partner; and have no interest in broadcasting the intimate details of our hot flushes or vaginal dryness to our colleagues in the canteen.
I don’t mean to sound facetious – it is, of course, important THAT women get the information they need, but lately it’s starting to feel like one big marketing swizz.
A couple of years ago, as the media coverage started to ramp up, products started trotting out onto shelves as marketers seemed to finally catch on that this “taboo” could be a gold mine. It’s obvious when you think about it: if anyone is going to blow £20 on supplements or £45 on a face cream it will be women established in their careers who may be feeling anxious about getting older.
Tell people it is “essential” they consume products tailored to this life stage and boom – this mix of disposable income and feelings of inadequacy can be worth loads of money.
Believe me, I don’t want to sound cynical and uncaring. It’s a terrific idea to offer menopause checks to women over 45, so that every woman gets a chance to chat with a medical professional about their symptoms, and so receive appropriate help. Bring this kind of universal approach on. It is much fairer than women having to pay for private check-ups.
But we should also bear in mind that our symptoms vary a lot – and not every woman has a profoundly negative experience. It seems to me that the celebrities and medical experts who run so-called “menopause hubs” never highlight these “quieter” experiences. And I worry that making it seem like something wholly awful might prompt additional fear and anxiety for some women.
For example: it feels to me that the message is pushed out that you need to take HRT or otherwise you will run into big issues; such as your sex life suffering irrevocably. Yet research shows only half of women report the menopause as affecting their sex life.
Of course, this is still a high proportion and the fact that over-the-counter HRT can counteract this is incredible. The fact it is even available over-the-counter is a hugely positive result of raising awareness – but when it comes to all the menopause books and pricey potions and lotions, I’ve simply heard enough.
Instead, I have a growing hunch that this constant focus on the negatives is cultivating an attitude that women of a certain age are unreliable and scatty; an image that is doing us no favours in the workplace.
Take an incident at my son’s school, last week: I cycled down to pick him up, but was on a work call at the same time (on my headphones); and so distractedly walked past my bike on the way out. Two days later, an email went out from our headmaster to say a possibly stolen bike had been left on the premises and the police would be called if someone did not reclaim it.
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When I confessed it was mine on the school WhatsApp group, I got a flood of private DMs expressing sympathy for my “brain fog” and how I must be hitting the peri-meno stage to have done this. One from a school dad – the cheek of him!
But anyone who knows me knows I was born with brain fog – forgetting my bike is the kind of stunt I would have pulled in my twenties and thirties. Ditto: laptops, kids, trench coats, shopping bags would be regularly left behind in various places. Nothing to do with the peri-menopause, either – a stage I have not reached yet anyway.
It felt condescending to me that everyone automatically assumed the peri-menopause was the culprit for my scattyness. Is this what employers are going to start assuming now?
October is menopause month, and yes, while it is important unbiased medical information gets out there, perhaps we need a pause on all the selling of stuff that is now surrounding this natural life stage? All this saturation might be making it even harder for women to break out of the stigma in the first place.
