Peri, every woman I socialise with is peri, all difficult!

[CreationNat1on]

Is the answer, we are ALL menopausal???

I m just wondering, is it a stage of life thing, combined with post pandemic and culture wars, all the women I know, just seem so cranky. Where are the light hearted laughs? Why is it all comparisons and blame and passive aggressive itchiness?

Dud anyone else find mid 40s a difficult time with "friends".

Sorry Pollyputthekettleon, you probably know all that already, I didn't, so I did a little reading, and that's what my Google research threw back.

Happy to hear any other theories.

But where are you getting that from? Presumably you're all quoting from a book or something, because as far as I know there is no consensus in evolutionary biology about menopause and the grandmother hypothesis is not proven. It's one hypothesis among others.

And it seems frankly bizarre to come up with a list of why a given species hasn't gone extinct. I mean, how about the fact the Earth hasn't yet been obliterated by a comet? Why isn't that a reason? And why shouldn't it make the top 3?

😆😆 That is a reason, the comet reason.

I think there is an average lifespan of a species and humans are waaay past it, but of course we could all be annihilated and day if hit by space boulders/asteroids. But the other risk factors have been reduced by the big brains and the availability of care.... Etc... I m no expert (clearly). My research is Google based. I see the NYT had an article on this in 2017 which is no longer available, maybe they took it down as it wasn't backed up sufficient scientific research and maybe its all just brain farts. I don't know, but the theories are interesting.

Ah ok you were just explaining it.

One of the problems with the grandmother hypothesis is that your daughters would need to have a lot of additional children surviving to adulthood as a result of your help to make up for the fact you're not having any more yourself. I don't believe the maths adds up although I'm open to persuasion. Similar logic applies to the mother hypothesis.

The whole thing may simply be an epiphenomenon, a side effect of other processes basically. I think post-Christian societies really want to believe that nature has things set up in our best interests, either individually or as a species. In other words we need Mother Nature to fill the hole left by the Christian god in our understanding of the world.

Ah yes, motherearth is now the mostly benevolent (but potentially angry and punishing) new God.

Maybe it's all rubbish. Some articles say it is only humans and whales that experience menopause, but others say certain insects to do. Maybe it's all random.

That deleted article may have been one about what I think is called the male choice hypothesis. This posits that men caused menopause by preferentially choosing younger women to breed with. It's a politically unacceptable hypothesis of course, so loud screaming ensues when it's mentioned, so we may never know what its merits really are.

Maybe. Although I confess I think Mother Nature is underblamed for the state of women's health. Women live longer than men, but endure worse health and more pain and suffering during those lives. Things like shorter urethras causing UTIs, the impact of cyclically shifting hormones on things like migraine etc. And I don't think they even know why we're 80% of autoimmune condition sufferers.

“But it isn’t a thing for most women”.

What’s your source for that statistic?

To add. The British Menopause Society (and other organisations suggest that 75% of women experience symptoms. I’d argue that 75% is most.

She'll claim that's a self-selected group. I don't know how that study was conducted and she probably hasn't bothered looking into that either. But research on this will be unreliable in the direction of massive undercounting, because the majority of women don't actually know what issues are symptoms of menopause and could have been helped by HRT. Large numbers of women will attribute their health issues simply to ageing, as will their doctors. And those who don't develop symptoms that are obviously attributable to menopause until later in life will often not be counted if you do a survey of, say, simply women in their forties and fifties and call that menopause, as many people do.

Recurrent UTIs, for example, are extremely common post menopause and become increasingly so as vaginal atrophy progresses. Most women will never make the connection. Same for most other symptoms including, say, osteoporosis. And no one is screening all 90 year old women to establish how many of us actually reach that age without vagina atrophy. It's just taken for granted that urinary incontinence will be extremely common, pregnancy and birth also contribute of course, so no one can say with certainty what contribution menopause made to it.

Have I missed the bit where posters tell us the glorious ways that peri/menopause will benefit me, individually?

The three clear advantages of the human species which has helped us survive against all odds are

• Family structure which means gay aunts/uncles and menopausal grandmothers are available to input into the nurture of the next generation, as human intelligence and education means that it is impossible for just the parents to be capable of nurturing, educating and providing resources for their offspring entirely alone.

• Strongest and most dexterous fingers in the animal kingdom, without which brain size would be of limited use.

• physical stamina, all ages are capable of running further than any other animal, so can run down prey or out run predators, ( with enough warning)

These are not modern, these are prehistoric, and have kept the human species alive for 99% of its time on earth

I have thought of one personal benefit to menopause, which is giving less of a fuck about things I used to worry about. It does not offset all the other, really hideous physical stuff, but is quite freeing mentally.

That's true. I do care less about people's expectations than I did. As a people pleaser, I'm not all the way there, but I do not try to fit everything in now where as before I would try to please everyone.

That is a good point