Menopause Is So Hot Right Now
In today’s newsletter, the shock of menopause—and why each generation thinks they’re the first to experience it. And then:
Rebecca Mead
Staff writer
The first time I heard a contemporary of mine mention menopause, I was sitting on a playground bench, watching my middle-schooler shoot hoops. “Menopause kicks your ass,” my friend, a yoga teacher, said as she fanned her face helplessly. The remark was memorable because it was so singular, but, within a year or two, just about every conversation with a woman my age would land—usually sooner rather than later—upon comparative symptomology: hot flashes, brain fog, exhaustion, and more. And upon the indignity of it all.
A sense of disorientation is a common theme in the three recently published menopause books that I review this week: it turns out that menopause comes as a shock, no matter how worldly a woman might be—and no matter the fact that every woman her senior has, one way or another, already confronted the challenge. Menopause is “having a moment,” a physician writes in an introduction to one of the books. But, as I discovered in my research for the piece, menopause—or at least its treatment—has had many moments before. (To give but one example, Gail Sheehy broke the silence on menopause with her best-seller “The Silent Passage,” all the way back in 1992.) To note that popular interest in menopause seems to come in surges is not to dismiss the power of those waves—or to dismiss the swamped sense of powerlessness that menopause often causes—but only to notice how hard it seems to be for the culture at large to take menopause as seriously as such a significant stage of life deserves.
For individual women, the onset of perimenopause is usually hard to pinpoint: as each author notes in her own way, it can be difficult to clock the possibility that an encroaching feeling of ill-being is caused by a hormonal imbalance, rather than by the considerable pressures that often attend working, child-raising, and relationship-nurturing. Nor, in recent decades, have women been offered much of a sense that symptoms of perimenopause could be alleviated. Today, however, more than two decades after a breast-cancer scare deterred many women—and their doctors—from trying hormone-replacement therapy, newer research indicates that it can be salutary in treating both familiar and unfamiliar symptoms. Perhaps this is, finally, the generation that will make menopause a welcome and enduring part of the conversation, well beyond the playground bench. Phew.
Read or listen to the story »
The Briefing Room
Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, speaks during the Canada-U.S. Economic Summit, in February, 2025.Photograph by Cole Burston / Bloomberg / Getty
More Top Stories
Daily Cartoon
Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein
More Fun & Games
P.S. When Sarah Manguso began to experience a strange, possibly perimenopausal symptom—anorgasmia, or the sudden disappearance of climax—doctors were unhelpful. She decided to figure it out herself.
Erin Neil contributed to this edition.
Source link
