The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Jen Gunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Women are so much more than just their ovaries, so it’s important to sit back and look at the whole picture for perspective.”
Menopause inexplicably seems like a firmly-kept secret. It will happen to most of that half of the population who were born with functioning ovaries, provided we live long enough, yet it’s mind-boggling how unprepared people are for it, how little do they know about it, how little the society itself knows about it — and how societally it’s often framed as the expiration time for those undergoing it. The “non-hot” undesirable time defined even in its title as resulting from the loss of reproductive capacity, the function to which we – throughout history and sadly, now as well, are dismissively reduced.
“The term menopause came to be before science knew hormones existed. It was never meant to signify a pause. It was invented by a man who felt women should cover their arms and not wear blush—whose book on the subject contributed nothing valuable to the body of knowledge except it left a term that ties women forever to menstruation.”
Women can spend more than half of their lives without any potential reproductive capability, yet while puberty is celebrated (there were debutante balls but no “I can’t ever again be expected to die in childbirth” balls) menopause is viewed mostly as a disease or a transitional state to dying, a time of irrelevance.
“In medicine, men get to age with gentle euphemisms and women get exiled to Not Hotsville.”
———
“When menopause is discussed in Western society, it’s often viewed negatively, as a cruel joke or even as a disease. This stems from the harmful belief that women lose value once they are no long able to reproduce and the false hypothesis that menopause is a biological flaw as there is no equivalent for men who can make sperm into their old age. But if we looked at that argument from another angle we might as well say that men are biologically flawed because they can’t get pregnant or because they develop heart disease earlier than women.”
Jen Gunter takes her trademark strongly feminist and non-nonsense approach to this period in life in the same style as her other books – The Vagina Bible and Blood – and goes through history (no, people who parrot that menopause was unknown to the “ancients” because people didn’t live that long — Ancient Greeks knew when it starts just fine), touching on how the end of direct reproductive capabilities benefitted society survival (the grandmother hypothesis), the changing attitudes to it (usually not good, still) and the history of treatments aimed at making it less symptomatic. She goes into the wide variety of physical and physiologic changes that can happen to many women (and points out over and over again that there is no standard of what it will be like for any individual), the health effects, the recommendations for health maintenance (exercise, bone health, etc as menopause goes way beyond those funny-sounding hot flushes), as well as managing expectations, plus information about hormonal methods coming from a doctor who was trained in the time when HRT was expected and then living through a time when it was demonized and feared and now when her younger colleagues have not always received unbiased training in it.
“If menopause were on Yelp it would have one star.”
She doesn’t view menopause as a disease and she does not take the opposite view to celebrate everything about it as she knows that just because it’s expected it doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be glorious.
Gunter maintains the same narrative style as her other books, so if it worked or didn’t work for you before would be a good indicator whether this one will be enjoyable as well. I’d recommend it as one of those books people should read to have a better fact-based idea of how or bodies work and, for those who will go through these life changes, what to expect in the world of unexpected symptoms.
4 stars.
books are life 