Julie Burchill Article: 'Women are more than our hormones' (26 April 2024)

[UtopiaPlanitia]

I find myself agreeing with some of Julie’s statements in this article:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/26/women-are-more-than-our-hormones/

'Though hormones are a marker of adulthood, fussing about them has become yet another way to treat women like children. Just look at the endless chatter about menopausal ‘brain fog’ and the arrival of menopausal ‘crying rooms’ in the workplace.'

'But though some high-profile women have tried to present banging on about menstruation or the menopause as some sticky kind of feminism, I’m wary of campaigns that portray females as troublesome bundles of leakage and weakness. If I was a boss looking to hire, I probably wouldn’t choose the candidate who I was forewarned might burst into tears if I told her to pull her socks up.'

As a perimenopausal woman myself, who can’t take HRT for health reasons, I find the huge emphasis on the potential problems caused by menopause terrifying rather than helpful. I’m not one to stick my head in the sand and hope scary things will pass me by but with all the media discourse about menopause I find my anxiousness rising.

I wonder if this topic could be discussed publicly in a better way. I feel that modern Liberal Feminism tends to place women in victim narratives too often because that is the way modern activists position their causes these days. I’m also not keen on the strain of Feminism that is all about Gaia and Mother Nature as I feel it is too optimistic about women’s bodies always having the capacity of regulating themselves.

I feel there has got to be a useful way to approach a natural part of women’s lifecycle that can be hard to get through. I think some women will need reasonable adjustments to help them deal with (sometimes debilitating) symptoms, and they’ll definitely need improved healthcare and research into women’s health issues, but I worry that some of this menopause campaigning is playing into the sexist idea that women are weak and at the mercy of their hormones. I’m also not keen on the 'just get on with it' attitude to menopause because not every woman can manage to sail through it unaided.

Basically, I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing and reading Julie’s article really brought that home to me. I’d like society to take menopause seriously but not in a way that means middle-aged women suffer detriment because the public messaging makes us look incapable. Surely it’s possible to encompass a spirit of acceptance without disadvantaging women in how society treats menopause.

Does anyone else feel confused by public messaging like me?

Edited to add link to the article.

Yes I agree with much of what you say.
It seems like menopause is a fashionable topic these days and whilst there certainly needs to be better understanding and resources put into medical support etc for those who need it I don’t want women to be defined by periods, pregnancy and menopause.
I hope that things will move on after the current focus hopefully achieves the desired improvement.
Sadly there are still many other areas for work to be done to improve women's lives and bring equity to our society. I worry that the younger generation don’t see this and are content to let the improvements hard won through the fights of their mothers and grandmothers stand still or even slip backwards.

I'm with you, OP and JB- the menopause can be awful, but it can also be not that bad.
I asked my mother about her experience of it, and she was fairly neutral about it; I asked my grandmother and she said 'the what?', not an issue for her generation - or at least, they didn't name it, but she genuinely didn't seem to see anything much to name.
It's the same with PMT - it can be awful, but some women don't suffer from it to any great degree. In both cases, there's an expectation set up, and a narrative about 'troublesome bundles of leakage and weakness.'
I don't know what the middle ground is, but I don't think we're there yet.
THAT SAID, when I think of menstruation, and what girls and women go through, it highlights the invalidity of men identifying as women - they haven't a clue, have they?

There is no pragmatism, no straightforward acceptance. Instead we have to be either warrior Amazons, unfazed in any way by any sticky biology (ie model ourselves on masculine stereotypes), or else incapacitated victims of our hormonal changes (ie model ourselves on feminine stereotypes). Where is the middle ground? Where is the pragmatic view that some women struggle some of the time and, that if we do struggle, it is OK to need accommodations without being either victim or burden? And then we get up and go on with our lives.

Where is the view that there are positive aspects to menopause? I am not a victim of my menopause. Yes, parts of it were hideous. Yes, it has had effects that will last the rest of my life. But my life is not over because of it. I am still a productive member of society, with much to offer, with fun and joy in my life, with new ways of thinking about my life.

I think you’re correct Blackcats and Marie, the Menopause is having a moment in the way previous women’s issues have in recent years and not all the discourse is helpful or useful for women. The media likes the click bait headlines of horrible symptoms and experiences, and the current crop of activists (who seem to flit from cause to cause and topic to topic) seem to want to frame it in terms of victimhood.

What we need is proper funding for sex-based health research to determine what options would be maximally helpful for women as a class, rather than just bunging exogenous hormones at every woman and saying 'Oh dear, what a pity' to women who can’t take them or who don’t want to take them.

The modern world’s answer to two of the big bodily changes in a woman’s life (puberty and menopause) seems to be to try to cancel them out with exogenous hormones i.e. hormonal contraception or HRT; we need some alternatives that allow women to be more in tune with their bodies and we need society to stop expecting us to fit into a male-style lifecycle when we participate in public life and the workplace.

As you’ve pointed out, women and girls have our own needs that are currently being denied, ignored or not met en masse and it’s massively unfair.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

You’re so right, Jelly, it’s the lack of pragmatism that gets me irritated by a lot of modern activists. It feels like they’re running marketing campaigns to rebrand the 'yucky bits' of women’s lives, and bodies, to make them seem more acceptable in our male-dominated/male-orientated public life rather than carrying out useful, practical campaigning to improve women’s daily lives within a social system that wasn’t designed with our female lifecycle in mind.

Maybe I was just fortunate but I think I had the world's easiest menopause - I don't recall this brain fog thing, and I think I only ever had about three hot flashes. I never took HRT. My periods finally stopped when I was 55, and that was almost 20 years ago. I was glad to be done with periods and I can't say I've missed them.

Does your own experience incline you towards or against the current framing of media messaging about menopause? Would you have found it useful at all or would it have caused you anxiety in advance of the process? Do you think we need a wider range of experiences represented in the health messaging discussion.

From personal experience I think the education about menopause needs to start much earlier and factor in life style changes, healthy eating, exercise and especially weight training. It needs to be practical and holistic so women aren't at breaking point. Hrt has a place but actually I'm better without since I've got a lot stronger.

It needs to be normalised again but openly, rather than pretending it doesn't exist

There's also a lot of women missing from the conversation. Those who can't take hrt due to breast cancer treatments do have to rely on other things to help the side effects, which are induced menopause. And it's possible.

I'm VERY annoyed that Davina looked into "missing trans men" from the conversation before she started talking to women in hormonal treatments for breast cancer.

That’s good practical advice that I often feel is missing from the recent media messaging. Like the Julie Burchill article says, a lot of campaign groups seems to be about the horrors of women living with the messiness of hormones and about the necessity of obtaining hormone replacement to regulate that messiness, which I know is very important for a lot of women but which isn’t always helpful campaigning for women like myself who can’t use HRT.

And I also find this messaging about the potential horrors of the change in female hormones to be quite terrifying. I understand why some of the messaging tone is this way: women’s health needs are often under represented, under researched, and underfunded. But the campaigning emphasis on one-size-fits-all experiences and treatment makes me feel powerless about experiencing something that every woman goes through if she’s lucky to live long enough.

I want to have some more empowering messaging that’s practical for normal women and won’t assume that I can take umpteen herbal supplements and spend hours in the gym. I just really want to find a happy medium with some options that I can choose from to suit me and as so often is the case with anything to do with women’s health and women’s bodies that seems to be hard to find at the moment.

I found it rather surprising that all the coverage seems to be so negative, when that essentially wasn't my experience. For me, it was no more than a minor inconvenience at one point when my periods got very heavy and closer together, but a prescription (mefenamic acid) from my doctor sorted that out quickly.

I do think I can't be the only person whose experience has been of that kind, and I wish it could be presented as a possibility to people that it isn't necessarily an awful thing.

I'm not yet peri but it's round the corner. I have had other, occasionally debilitating, menstrual related health issues for a long time though. So whilst I kind of agree with the points made I also don't! Personally I'm relieved that there's more advice and potentially understanding out there for the next chapter of my life than there has been for the one past.

Some of the frustration around the newer way of talking about the menopause seems to be about how it makes women look compared to men. But we are different to men. Compelling workplaces to learn to accomodation difference is a positive, surely? For women at other life stages too, but also for people with chronic illnesses, people undergoing treatment, and people with SEN.

I agree that menopause awareness campaigns are double edged. As someone who has had to cope with moderate symptoms, it’s made me more aware of the messaging. I’m happy with communications that explain factually what menopause is. Preferably it should highlight to women and their bosses that debilitating menopause symptoms are as valid a reason to ask for minor adjustments or flexible working as any other medical need, and to try and reduce barriers to that request.

Like most workplace things, good employers will be handling it well. Employers who treat it like a tick box exercise for cause of the month, who communicate patronising guff, who have flexible working policies on paper but turn down every application from employees for flexible working - well they’re already rubbish to work for and this isn’t going to make any difference really.