Take a pause... it’s not all gloom
DAVINA Mccall presented Sex, Mind and the Menopause on Channel 4 last week, just as a shortage of HRT (hormone replacement therapy) led to alarmist stories of desperate women scoring oestrogen fixes in car parks. I applaud Davina’s efforts to highlight what, for some women, is a difficult stage in their lives, what our grandmothers used to refer to in hushed tones as “the change”. But two things concern me.
Firstly, as an old-school ’70s feminist I’m disappointed we’re reverting to thinking women are the weaker sex who need special treatment and cuddles because they’re at the mercy of their hormones.
Secondly, I fear that younger women, in their 20s or 30s – like my daughter – will have watched this programme and been scared witless.
It was all about suffering, depression, a lack of libido, brain fog, crisis, suicide and Alzheimer’s.
All so very miserable. What about the upside of the menopause? Yes, you read that right.
If you’re interested then visit Rachel Lankester’s Magnificent Midlife podcast/blog (magnificentmidlife.com). She has also written a book with the same title. She believes, as do I, that life in your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond can be a wonderful time for a woman. “I want to unpick the negative narratives around midlife and ageing,” says Rachel.
Yes, your brain changes (much scaremongering about this in Davina’s show) but maybe, just maybe, for the better. Far from experiencing brain fog, some women report feeling less anxious to please, more direct, sharper.why don’t we hear about that?
“The patriarchy doesn’t like older, powerful women,” Rachel suggests drily.
IT’S not just cheerleading stuff on the blog and podcast either. She also demolishes the entirely spurious claim (widely quoted) that almost 900,000 women were forced to quit their jobs because of the menopause.
It’s based on a 2019 survey commissioned by Bupa of 1,000 women aged 18-70. It found four per cent (i.e. 40 of them) had left their jobs because of periods, fertility issues, pregnancy or menopause. So not only menopause.
Extrapolate that as a percentage of the UK population of women (22,305,778) and you get the shock-horror figure based on the vague experiences of just 40 women.
Rachel is in her 50s, took HRT herself for some years and is all in favour of it when it helps. But she resists the idea that the menopause is “a deficiency that needs to be fixed”. “And,” she asks, “who benefits from this narrative? The drug companies.”
They, of course, will be rubbing their hands with glee at the basic message in Davina’s documentary: that all women (with a brief caveat regarding cancer patients) should take HRT. Sadly the C4 film will only heighten the perception that the menopause, which all women experience, is an entirely negative experience. Such a wasted opportunity.
Meanwhile, here’s one of Rachel’s tips on how to achieve a magnificent midlife. Take the word Me-no-pause. Me: concentrate on yourself for once. No: you can be less obliging. Pause: take the time to assess who you really are... I like that.
YOU’VE got to have some front to wear Marilyn Monroe’s dress, the one she wore in 1962, designed by
Jean Louis, when she sang Happy Birthday to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in New York.
And I mean “front” in both senses of the word. Kim Kardashian borrowed the gossamer dress (valued at $10million) for the Met Gala. After posing in it she changed into a replica because you wouldn’t want to get soup down the real thing, would you?
Reportedly she had to lose more than a stone to wear the fragile gown with its thousands of hand-sewn beads.
Even so, textile and fashion curators are not happy, knowing a microscope would reveal thousands of little tears to the ageing, brittle fabric as a result of KK squeezing in that famous behind. And beyond that, it just feels wrong. Monroe represents something intangible. That dress has an incomparable history. Far from Kim Kardashian being brushed with
Marilyn’s star quality, this stunt just highlights her own lack of it. ■
“YOU may turn over your paper”.that familiar phrase at the start of a written exam could soon be a thing of the past, with GCSES and A-levels switching to online testing.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Our current reliance on a pen and paper exam system organised at an industrial scale, with Fort Knox-style security arrangements around transporting and storing papers, is hopelessly outdated and ripe for reform.”
That’s as may be. But one thing history has taught us is that our touching faith in everything online is sadly misplaced.
Pages disappear, sites crash, things fail to load.what’s more, the real issue here is, I think, that those in charge of our education system are ideologically opposed to testing and will chip away at the exam system until it is effectively dismantled.