I distinctly remember, when I was young, that there was this cliche about middle-aged women: they loved shoplifting. Not regular shoplifting, where you need a thing and can’t afford it, but menopause shoplifting, where you don’t need the thing at all and you take it anyway. It was a staple of radio comedy and layperson psychobabble, and academics undertook genuine inquiries about what could possibly be causing it. Was it general depression or something more specific? A philosophical response to the loss of fertility and how unjust that was, perhaps? I always found that explanation rather unconvincing, but what did I know? This stuff was years off.
Then in 2001, Winona Ryder ruined it for everyone by pulling off a heist so spectacular (aged only 30!) that she single-handedly broke the cliche, and it passed out of usage. Before I got a chance to see whether shoplifting was fun or not, the social imperative had disappeared and the urge never took me, although my friend did once steal a wedding card, and if you want to know how authentically menopausal that was, she didn’t even know anyone who was getting married.
