Making a change for the better

JIT MUST have taken guts for Davina McCall to make two hard-hitting documentaries about the menopause. She’s done it so well that now it’s normal for everyone to talk about hot flushes, anxiety and depression caused by massive midlife hormonal chaos.

Don’t underrate what a huge achievement this is. Davina was warned making a programme about menopause risked career suicide, but she went ahead and did it anyway.

Brave woman – because I absolutely know how hard it was for a woman on TV to talk about “the change”. It’s not that there were rules forbidding it, more that a pall of shame shrouded the whole subject, because it represented the messy side of femininity, the messy side of sex that no one wanted to think about.

Childbirth was OK. That was untidy and bloody too, but childbirth meant you were young and fertile, profoundly feminine and ergo goddess-like.

Menopause meant the opposite; your body was drying up, you were old and sexless, a useless crone.

So media women of my generation left it alone, knowing male viewers didn’t want to know about the changes reducing their wives and mothers to “sexless hags”.

I’m not exaggerating – male TV reviewers in the Nineties and Noughties would regularly sneer about menopausal women on the box. It was a cruel, laddish joke. So when I went through a horrendous menopause, bleeding profusely throughout live morning shows, feeling anxious and depressed with no confidence in myself, I wouldn’t have dreamt of talking about it, or explaining why I was so unhappy and looked so unwell. A hysterectomy saved me, and I had HRT which helped.

It was so difficult to talk about though. In one of our phone-ins a woman about to undergo a hysterectomy was terrified of the effect on her sex life.

She meant – but was too embarrassed to say – that she thought she mightn’t be able to have an orgasm any more.

I knew she would, but such was the taboo that I simply couldn’t bring myself to get into the graphic detail on air. Thanks to Davina, that’s all over. She deserves a medal. A CBE for the HRT.