Menopause is real. We need to talk about it

It’s yet to stream into India, but Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is already top on my must-watch list. A 60-something-year-old played by 63-year-old Emma Thompson looking for sexual pleasure! A nude scene!! It’s Armageddon.

Or, depending on where you stand, high time someone spoke up. “Women and their bodies — period, menopause — we’re not talking about any of this yet,” Thompson told Glamour magazine.

While we’ve been chipping away at the traditional silence around menstruation — tennis player Qinwen Zheng blamed menstrual cramps for her defeat in Paris and closer home, we even have a mainstream film on pads and menstrual hygiene — its progression to menopause is still deemed too awful to talk about.

Yet, menopause is real; its consequences and symptoms experienced by half this world’s population.

A recent survey in the United Kingdom (UK) finds that one in 10 women has quit a job due to menopausal symptoms. The Indian Menopause Society estimates that 150 million women in India live with it, symptoms of which could include hot flushes and night sweats. With the average age of 46.2 (lower than the global 50), a woman who lives to full life can expect to spend a third of it living with menopause.

One third of our lives. But when was the last time you heard someone, anyone — in a movie, in a play, in a public speech, in a survey, in an ad — talk about it?

Netflix’s Bombay Begums has a scene where the 49-year-old female lead, Rani, abruptly walks out of a meeting to rush to the washroom where she splashes water on her face. That’s what a hot flush looks like. And it’s telling that even in fiction, Rani wants to hide it from her colleagues.

In real life, in her 2020 podcast, former US first lady Michelle Obama talks about dealing with a hot flush aboard the presidential helicopter. Women of a certain age, she added, lose their value in society “unlike men, who gain value the older they get. And those images are propagated on television where you see the frumpy, funny, old guy with the young, vivacious…or even if she’s our age, she’s perfect.”

Those perfect images surely miss the point. The challenge is not to look 25 at 50, but to normalise looking 50 at 50. Well into her late 60s, the late feminist Kamala Bhasin asked why people assumed it was a compliment to tell a woman she didn’t look her age. Certainly, all of us, women of a certain age, would relate to the patently false “compliment” of being told at every birthday: But you don’t look 40 (or 50, or 60, or whatever age we’re supposed to be ashamed of owning).

On June 7, ministers and civil servants in the UK signed a Menopause Workplace Pledge. Its message is simple: To recognise the impact of menopause and support women who are affected.

It’s a tiny beginning. But a good place to start.