How was your Menopause Awareness Day 2025? Did you slip out of your meno pyjamas, sip your meno tea with a slice of homemade flaxseed-added bread and a side order of meno chocolate? Did you rush off to the gym to lift weights then to a pilates class to keep you healthy for ever? Did you remember your MHT (menopause hormone therapy – the now widely accepted term for HRT) pill, patch, gel, pessary, suppository or cream, trusting your GP or private clinic to be prescribing for you and only you, grateful that finally medication has made a difference for you? Or did you think: “How the hell do I know what is right for me?”
If you wondered who you can trust, you’re not alone. In an Australian study published earlier this month, more than 500 women aged 45-64 noted “significant scepticism” about the motives of the pharmaceutical industry, along with genuine concern about who to trust and who was after their money at a vulnerable time of life. Now researchers warn that women are being exploited in a “menopause gold rush”.
My own menopause was ghastly. If you think hot flushes are bad (they are), try 40 an hour in your 30s while having chemotherapy, then radiotherapy, then failing IVF, and all the while with none of your mates understanding what you’re going through. This was more than 20 years ago, when the menopause discussion was virtually nonexistent – and while we can all be glad things have changed in the past decade, the way menopause is now being sold should raise cause for concern for anyone approaching menopause.
Because here’s the thing: menopause is a transition. Just as puberty, pregnancy, parenthood and coming to terms with infertility are transitions, so too is menopause. Yes, it takes time – even now, at 62, I still get hot flushes very occasionally, usually if I’ve eaten too much sugar or am dealing with something very emotional, but I know it will pass. I know what is happening physiologically, and knowing what is going on internally makes all the difference. (I’m not convinced that menopause toast would, no matter how much flaxseed it contained.)
Having been postmenopausal for so long, I became interested in how the focus, and the marketing, is on the transition itself. I’ve spent the past five years researching postmenopause, usually around the later 50s and 60s, when the tougher physical and emotional parts of the transition are largely over for many of us and we move into our vital third act. What emerged from my diverse group of interviewees was a growing awareness of how meno marketing preys on the ageist, misogynist and pronatalist culture in which most of us are raised.
Our culture’s ageism tells us that old women are invisible, that staying attractive should be our priority and that we lose all value when we lose fertility. This triple whammy is especially painful – and lucrative for marketeers – because it plays to our internalised fears. After a lifetime of being trained to value the male gaze and to believe that being a “real” woman relies on our fertility – and that to maintain both of these things we must stay young and beautiful – well, of course it bites when we age. Unlike other signs of ageing, many elements of the menopause transition can’t be disguised by hair dye, makeup or a clever arrangement of clothes. A sweaty hot flush might be fine for Highland Mayan Guatemalan women, for whom menopause means a raise in social status and some of whom call hot flushes the rising of their animal spirit, but for many of us it can be very problematic. We hide our tampons in pretty flowery cases and wear pads to protect others from seeing leaky breast milk, but sweating in public can be both physically uncomfortable and – often more painfully given our societal preference for women to pretend we are men in the workplace – admits to the impossibility of fully controlling our bodies.
This fear and concern then feeds into menopause infighting where, instead of MHT and non-MHT camps working together to support us through the transition, they’re pitted against each other as if only MHT will help, or only herbal supplements and weight lifting are the correct way to go. Which creates a real struggle for each of us to find our somewhere-in-between.
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While menopause research is often contradictory, the one thing the massive global studies tell us is that there is no universal menopause and every individual experience is different, deeply dependent on lifestyle, familial, sociocultural factors and attitudes. In some studies, women report fewer negative physical symptoms of menopause when they live in a society that values older women.
Given the market’s passionate engagement with menopause, I’m particularly interested in what will happen when the companies trying to sell us things realise that most of us will be in postmenopause for about a third of our lives – or maybe the market will be too ageist, misogynist and pronatalist to come after our pennies then. We can but hope.
And just so you know: while everyone in my research talked about physiological and emotional difficulties in the transition, once they were out the other side – even while dealing with workplace discrimination and the caring demands of their loved ones – all of them also described postmenopause as time of thriving and growing. We’re not done yet.
