The menopause had a “MeToo moment” the year I turned 45. It was 2020 and women were finally speaking out about their hot flushes and sleepless nights. The roots of this revolution could be tracked back to a 2017 interview with Lorraine Kelly, after which other well-known women started sharing their stories. The message to women my age was: “You are not alone.”
As a beneficiary of this new-found openness, I do not wish to appear ungrateful. Even so, there’s something about it that unsettles me. When Lisa Snowdon calls her show Midweek Menopause Madness, or the writer Kate Muir describes her “deranged perimenopausal mood swings”, or the actress Martine McCutcheon compares the approach of menopause with “losing your damn mind”, I am desperate to empathise. But I worry about the renewed embrace of the language of craziness to describe being an older woman.
“Thinking about menopause,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Change, “is like thinking about the menstrual cycle: there are two schools of thought”: “One holds that nothing of any significance is taking place, and the other that the stress and strain of what is taking place are so acute that sensible behaviour is not to be expected. Both kinds of arguments conceal crude misogyny. The ‘nothing happening’ school reserves the right to despise women who are encountering difficulties, and the ‘Sturm und Drang’ school allows itself to treat femaleness as a pathological condition.”
In talking about menopause, it seems that we are still in thrall to these two extremes. I fear that in its desire to reject the “nothing happening” state of affairs, which makes women who struggle with menopause feel wimpish and inferior, today’s menopause activism risks going all-out for “Sturm und Drang”. But what about those of us who do not want to be co-opted into this narrative, either?
The legacy of medical misogyny means there is pressure on women to emphasise the severity of symptoms in order to be taken seriously; we have so often been told our pain is “all in our heads”. Yet there is a simultaneous, overlapping history of female emotions — things which are indeed “all in our heads” — being pathologised. Women’s feelings have long been stripped of any social and political context, and therefore treated as purely biological, which makes it easier to apply the label of madness.
Given the ways in which women’s expressions of anger and anxiety are so often used to discredit us, I question just how liberating some of today’s “menopause madness” rhetoric is. “Some of our negative feelings about menopause,” wrote Greer, “are definitely the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger.” For many of us, middle age is the first time we feel confident enough to acknowledge the validity of certain emotions. In her 2019 memoir Flash Count Diary, Darcy Steinke describes herself feeling “angry more often, a menopausal condition that doctors classify as hormonal irritability but that I’m starting to see as a gateway to authenticity”. If we see a woman’s expression of anger purely as an unpleasant biological symptom, rather than an acceptance of feelings that she might once have suppressed, we are in danger of undermining her. When I was younger, I was often told that my resistance to male authority was not “normal”, and I believed it. Is it pathological not to believe it anymore?
It is no small thing to tell the world that women your age are going insane, regardless of whether or not you blame this on hormonal depletion. As Elinor Cleghorn writes in Unwell Women, the discovery of oestrogen a century ago did not lead to a straightforward replacement of “old ideas about women being ‘naturally’ defective and deficient”: “Where female nature had, in the past, been blanketed as ‘hysterical’ and ‘neurotic’, now it was hormonal.” Personal accounts in a book produced by campaign group Menopause Mandate, entitled It’s Beyond a Joke, position the benefits of Hormone Replace Therapy as proof that women are not going “properly” mad, yet the distinction seems to me very fine. In the age of Karen, we have not evolved to a stage at which accounts of menopausal derangement can be treated as politically neutral. The shouty middle-aged woman is not taken seriously, regardless of whether she is categorised as mad, bad or simply medication deprived.
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