Hormonal hotspots in the Guardian

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Having discussed it recently with my sister I came across this article on the Guardian about HRT and whether it really is the cure-all that has been so often claimed. It makes me cringe that the arguments seem to centre on the idea that the menopause is a disease that can be cured (or at least treated), and it reminds me so much of the medicalisation of childbirth (and how pissed off that made me), the way that pregnancy is also treated as an illness rather than a natural process that the human body has been going through since the dawn of time. Doctors just seemed to jump on the bandwagon with the pharmaceutical companies and there seems to be a distinct lack of decent studies into the long term health effects of taking hormone replacements. It is not about being all 'natural' and not wanting chemicals in my body, because plainly they have relieved the symptoms of millions of women, it's just about women being able to make properly informed consent to the treatment.

The lives and concerns of women-of-a-certain-age seem to be quite a hot topic these days, with all these celebrities/film stars reaching their middle years and 'proving' that women over 50 can still be sexy and attractive. The briefest follow-up perusal of the Guardian's website gave me a handful of other articles that expanded on this most vital of issues. Mariella Frostrup complains about the invisibility of women in our age group, while pointing out that we are healthier and wealthier than other age groups and our predecessors; I did love her comment, "the demographic we share our closest links to aren’t retirees but teenagers. Our hormones are raging, we’re interested in pleasing ourselves and the rest of the world be damned." Old age isn't what it used to be, the problem is that employers attitudes to ageing have not changed leaving us potentially facing mid-life redundancy. She claims dishearteningly that women struggle alone through menopause, too embarrassed to complain or discuss it with friends; not strictly true in my experience, though I did agree with her final quip, "Having our worth totted up in childbearing and rearing for millennia has caused us to view the close of that chapter as a mini death."

Jeanette Winterson takes an entirely different tack and goes on the offensive against HRT, with a lengthy exposé about her search for a more natural response to her menopausal symptoms. Thanks to private health care her doctor looks in closer detail at the other things that are going on in a menopausal body and she goes down the route of bio-identical hormones. Don't take her advice and google 'Premarin' if you are currently taking HRT, though she gives you a brief run-down of the worst of the gory details of its production. Thought provoking quote of the article, "Hormone treatment is not a miracle cure for misogyny. Society does not value older women, and often, older women do not value themselves."

Helen Walmsley-Johnson's article was more annoying (she writes a blog for the Guardian called Invisible Woman, about 'clothing, body image and getting older'). She lost me pretty much completely with her opening paragraph: 
"At the end of the Women Starting Over conference in London recently, delegates were handed a little bag of treats containing two magazines (one of which was Countryfile), a card from a meditation coach, two lots of 50+ multivitamins, two sorts of anti-wrinkle moisturiser, a pack of artificial sweetener and two condoms (one male and one female), plus one anonymous envelope containing "natural intimate moisturiser". Not a bad insight into what women entering, or emerging from, the menopause are expected to be interested in."
Well, no. I would not be interested in any of those things. While I did like her annoyance on the idea that women still need to feel that they have to be given 'permission', be it to love their bodies, to eat what they like or to engage in middle age sex, she lost me again with the assertion that we all grew up with 'a good deal of baggage' around sex. Having said that I agree we could all do with a little mojo reclamation.