The "new menopause" is the same old patriarchal BS
Hormone pushers and diet culture come together to make everyone feel like shit
Dr. Mary Claire Haver, an OBGYN with millions of online followers, got treated to a New York Times profile around the end of October. Dr. Haver, “with her shiny black hair, dark-rimmed glasses and lithe physique,” is contrasted with previous generations’ versions of menopause, epitomized by The Golden Girls.
Dr. Haver, like a lot of the other gurus of the new menopause, probably means well. But her “Belly Fat Blast” workouts, line of dubious sounding supplements, and group of fellow doctors who call themselves the “menoposse” all have one thing in common: they want women to feel better, but they want to do it by putting them on Ozempic and stuffing them with hormone supplements.
This will theoretically transform sleep-deprived, big-bellied, cranky women into thinner, better rested, kinder and more complacent versions of themselves. They will, in other words, be more attractive according to conventional beauty standards. Instead of being crones, they’ll be fuckable. According to the Times, Dr. Haver’s clinic charges $1500 for an hour appointment and doesn’t take insurance. She got a million dollar advance for her forthcoming book, and describes herself as a “physician influencer.”
Dr. Haver’s social media outreach is so huge that women with no menopausal symptoms at all are now demanding hormone therapy to stave off health problems they might not even get. Many women live perfectly healthy lives with low hormones, but HRT is now painted as a fountain of youth, so affluent women in particular (versus the middle and low income ones who are lucky to get a five minute appointment with an overstressed OGBYN at an HMO) are pumping themselves full of hormones with multiple side effects just so they can “get their lives back.”
The Fountain of Youth by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546
But the thing is that there is no going back after midlife. If you’re a woman or AFAB, your body is not designed to look like a swimsuit model’s when you go through menopause, and medically delaying menopause with hormones only means kicking the can of symptoms down the road. Your sex drive is designed to slow down as you age because your reproductive system isn’t meant to keep pushing out babies into your fifties and sixties. You’re born with a finite number of eggs for a reason. But our culture is terrified of age, so now we have to sex up menopause because men’s sex drives keep motoring along even as women’s naturally dwindle.
And it’s not just doctors who want to turn us back into horny, skinny teenage versions of ourselves. Several of this year’s most chatted about movies and novels and memoirs are about divorce, “hot moms” or women getting randy with strangers in midlife. I’m thinking of All Fours by Miranda July (woman in midlife leaves her husband, fucks other people), Leslie Jamison’s Splinters (woman in midlife leaves her husband, fucks other people), This America Wife by Lyz Lenz (woman in midlife leaves her husband, fucks other people) and More by Molly Roden Winter (woman in midlife tries polyamory — which sounds 99% like her husband manipulating her into it — and makes it sound miserable). And then there are all the films about hot moms fucking young guys. Nicole Kidman and Anne Hathaway (hardly in the AARP demographic) and Laura Dern all look great, but they have access to injectables and personal trainers and personal chefs on top of estrogen patches.
You don’t have to be a woke Marxist to notice that these books and films are also all about white, affluent women with fantastic careers and kids who look straight out of Instagram’s most irritating momfluencer accounts. The new midlife, as it turns out, is much more accessible if you’re rich. Where’s the memoir about an overweight woman struggling to make ends meet on top of hot flashes that have kept her up for years, whose sex drive is the equivalent of a tumbleweed? She doesn’t sell books. Yet somehow July’s book is a hit among women who claim is says things they don’t dare to talk about. Some of us have been talking about the perils and pleasures of midlife for years, but I guess that message is less interesting if you’re not being interviewed on a Peloton by the New York Times like Dr. Harver, or manic pixie-ing your way through midlife like Miranda July.
Look, this is all great if this is all what women really, truly want out of midlife, but I tried to read these books and just couldn’t do it, tried to get through the rom coms and was alarmed that the new boyfriends were the same age as the women’s adult kids and that was treated as no big deal. Were this reversed, we’d call it blatant sexism. But thanks to HRT and Ozempic, it’s “empowering” and “revenge,” and now millions of women will take very risky medications just to feel young again for a few years. I also understand some women really cannot tolerate life without HRT, and I hope they can find ways to use it safely, with doctors who are actually monitoring them rather than rubber stamping refills.
And then there’s breast cancer, which entered my own life just over a year ago, five years after a different hormone driven disease (endometriosis) lead to the removal of my uterus and one of my ovaries. Thanks to that surgery, in spite of making a pithy amount of estrogen compared to most women my age, I still managed to make enough to grow a tumor in my boob the size of a lime that was almost 100% estrogen sensitive. Like millions of other cancer patients, the same HRT drugs that can make women “feel like themselves again” and “get their lives back” would put me the grave.
Every morning I take a small pill that blocks my body from making estrogen, and while it does bring on some dark moods and anger snaps, it is actually keeping me alive (for now). Maybe it also makes me less sexy, less of an object of desire, but I lived in a body that did those things for many, many decades, and that body never really belonged to me. It belonged to men, who are right now positioned to once again decide what women’s bodies are for. That timing alone should make us wonder who these hormones and diets and self help books and memoirs and novels and Netflix movies supposedly designed to celebrate women in midlife are really all about.
Covens and monasteries were often refuges for women past midlife, who turned inward and sought wisdom and spiritual knowledge from one another. Today, instead, we get menopause influencers and 50-year-old J Lo pole-dancing at the Super Bowl. We get told, yet again, how our bodies are supposed to be according to social ideals crafted by advertisers, rather than learning to deal with what they are. And we have very few tools for resisting this, except for our own stubborn insistence on rejecting the same ideals that distorted our self perception even when we were young, sexy and fuckable. Estrogen can actually kill you dead, even while it makes you look and feel a lot younger. But only women have to decide if it’s worth the trade off.