Caitlin Moran - a bit more interesting than usual today

Hm.

Could anyone recommend an evidence based book on menopause/hormones/ageing, for women?

If there isn't one, could someone write one?

TIA.

I feel quite lost on this thread. I thought feminists were generally in agreement that being 'nice' and enjoying home making weren't a result of female biology. It's not menopause that makes us stop being 'nice' (I'm nowhere near it myself) it's realising we don't give a fuck any more. I have never been more angry than when I was breastfeeding and on maternity leave. The unutterable shitness of being a woman was inescapable.

That point about women having to find a totally different third act while men can just repeat the first or second one was VG.

^^Moran has had a lifetime career of being paid to write unthreatening, feminist lite tosh. @DidoLamenting

Actually - this is correct. This was why I always disliked her. Its shocking how far this debate has gone that I immediately felt her account of the female experience was in any way radical.

I've been pleasantly surprise by meno - apart from the insomnia. It feels like climbing off the hormonal rollercoaster I've been on since age 15 and getting myself back. Caitlin is right, you definitely have less f*cks to give.

I enjoyed her column today too. I can't be bothered to run a house anymore either
Last weeks was even better though. Lots of using the word sex instead of gender. "I am the sex that..."
Have a read if you can...

I've just turned 45 and read her column in the bath today, it was brilliant, summed everything up for me as a SAHM. This is my favourite paragraph from the article

Sorry but the paragraph you quoted is just piffle. Moran has had a lifetime career of being paid to write unthreatening, feminist lite tosh. Comparing herself to someone who gave up a real career and then discovered it was too late to claw back time just shows what an empty headed narcissist she is.

Pregnancy and breastfeeding hormones definitely made me more agreeable. That's what oxytocin does, its the bonding hormone.

As I go through peri, that agreeableness has increasingly disappeared.

We are mammals; of course we have responses to our. biology, including our hormone levels.

Most notably for me was the link between estrogen and libido. That felt like an almost entirely hormonally mediated response to me.

The female body is complex.

HatMancock I picked out the same paragraph.

I am back at square one with work while people are starting to talk about retirement.

I read that too and made a crazy Caitlin-Moran-one-eyebrow-raised face. I mean she knows. So come the fuck on.

I would not have the nerve to keep writing from a feminist perspective and never once stick my head above the parapet on the biggest single issue that’s faced women in my lifetime. And I just know when she does broach it it will be annoyingly ‘let women be kind, after all that’s what we are here for’ and will bear no relation to what she’s written here.

HatMancock also a SAHM and loved that paragraph... If not slightly worried now!

This column has made me look forward to menopause I've told DH to read it... he looked petrified...

Aww crap so that's what's happening.

our conception of the menopause – something that happened in 1962 to Ena Sharples, which she referenced only by mouthing “troubles down below” to Minnie Caldwell

This made me chuckle

And I am definitely a huge ball of rage at the moment, lockdown with two young children isn't helping!

I think reaching perimenopause definitely made me lose my generic, conditioned "be kind" filter, of younger years.

And I was a kick ass feminist, in a male dominated profession, seen as a trailblazing woman during my entire working life.

Yet still, conditioned, apparently

Yes, of course I was still kind, but only when it was warrented.

And yes, it infuriates a lot of men.

Hence the hate aimed at so called "dried up old hags" etc, who no longer gaf. You only have to see some of the vitriol aimed at women of a certain age, on Twitter

But it could just be an age related thing, rather than hormonal?

After all, by around 45 - 55 ish, perhaps women have just had enough of the #bekind stuff?

I've just turned 45 and read her column in the bath today, it was brilliant, summed everything up for me as a SAHM. This is my favourite paragraph from the article.

@ErrolTheDragon

A couple of times in those meno years the GP asked about symptoms including iirc moodiness or some such word. To which I replied 'no', but thought... yeah, but the family is being more irritating nowadays.

I’ve long had an internal battle between nice me and not so nice me, perhaps because I eschewed all synthetic hormone contraceptives two decades ago and have learned to roll with my natural cycle (a few days before I’m due on is a GREAT time for knocking out partition walls or cutting down trees) but I have definitely felt the tip towards not giving a fuck more and more of the time as Perimenopause has gone on.

I do hope this is a sign of Moran giving less of a fuck about being nice too - I’ve said before that I love the mum character, Della, in Moran’s Raised By Wolves sitcom, there is absolutely no way that Della wouldn’t be a bit tervey.

I want to go drinking with her. I don’t drink but that’s fine, she can drink and I can listen. She’s just described my life. The life I couldn’t describe to my DH.
She smiled at me once. I went all unnecessary and liked away.

I never took drugs, but I still recognise what she describes.

In fact I really resent the implication that female hormones make women 'nicer', more tolerant and more optimistic.

Is it just me reading this and completely unable to relate?

No, me too. It's as piffling and as "me, me,me " as always including the obligatory " ooh I'm mad I am" in her tedious showing off that she once took illegal drugs.

Bloody hell, yes!

PMT for me was like in vino veritas. My feminine Be Nice filter would break down under the influence of PMT, and I would be bluntly, brutally honest.

Oh I recognised myself during peri and meno. Thank god for HRT. I get to keep the PMT clarity, without the PMT rage.

I love the not GAF of perimenopause. I completely relate to the stuff she says about not feeling the need to nice any more.

And this is interesting. Could there be a chink of light in the wokeness?
"These can be years of great upheaval in nuclear families: teenage children whispering, “Mum’s turned into a total bitch,” husbands distressed by their wives suddenly shouting about equality and feminism and “everything being different from now on”."