We went 1,000 years, or maybe 10,000, without anyone ever mentioning menopause, and then we started mentioning it all the time – which wasn’t ideal either. There was a little bit of overcorrection, a little bit of generalisation. There was the Davina McCall type of menopause, where your car keys were in the fridge while your awesome body transformed, ungovernably, into something even more awesome. Then there was the Jenny Eclair alternative-comedy menopause, where your rage could lift a wardrobe clean off the floor. There was the radical loss of confidence event; or – for my money, the most poetic – the locked-in syndrome, where you lose interest in the world at exactly the same time as it loses interest in you, an alignment as perfect and painful as the needle going directly into the nerve. But for a long time there didn’t seem to be much room for the “no big deal, didn’t really notice” menopause, which is now inauthentic and unfashionable.
The flaws in the new narrative are pretty obvious. First, it hands down a template of feelings, which you either meet, and are a proper woman, or you don’t meet and have to pipe down until it passes (65?). Second, it creates a template for the social response to menopausal women: yes, treat them with infinite compassion, because of their hormones; but don’t worry too much about what they’re actually saying, because of their hormones.
