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. 

Debates in the world of anthropology

This has been hanging around in my news feed for a while now with the intention of posting it here. Over at Scientific American Kate Clancy (who I have mentioned before, so she must be good) blogs at 'Context and Variation' about "human behaviour, evolutionary medicine ... and ladybusiness." In this article "Lady anthropologist throws up her hands, concedes men are the reason for everything interesting in human evolution" she picks apart of piece of research that looks at the reasons for women having a lifespan that extends beyond their ability to reproduce. Some of it is a bit 'science speak' for me, and you probably need to be a serious student to understand all the references without looking them up, but you can get the gist of the argument:

"Despite citing the overwhelming literature on the topic, these authors situate human menopause as an “evolutionary puzzle.” They then point out that a model that recognizes male mating preferences for younger women, with a splash of infertility-causing mutations, produces the evolution of menopause. What this suggests is that if men choose to mate with younger women, female-specific, infertility-causing mutations that affect later reproduction could build up, since those women aren’t reproducing. Ergo, the uselessness and undesirability of older women – we all know how that is – leads to their becoming infertile and menopausal."

"I used to think that part of the reason humans are menopausal may not be because menopause serves a particular purpose, but because we have extended lifespans. We may have extended lifespans not because longevity is selected for, but because longer periods of childhood and social learning were selected for."

"Before my revelation that the men are all who matter, I would have also favored the grandmother hypothesis. This hypothesis isn’t mutually exclusive with the others. Originally the grandmother hypothesis contended that post-reproductive life evolved because grandmothers are important to the reproductive success of their offspring (Hawkes 2003; Hawkes et al. 1998; Hawkes et al. 1997)."

She uses her argument to also pick fault with the sexism and cultural bias that exists within this academic sphere and concludes:
"So really, even if men had little to do with menopause, they get… well, they get pretty much everything else, so long as you whiz by several decades of egalitarian anthropology research. Which is fun, like roller skating!"

The comments section is just as interesting as the article, where several male commenters miss the point altogether. It is interesting to know that there are so many people out there concerned with the whys and wherefores of menopause. I'll just go back to quietly menopausing now.

Menopause is wisdom

Via a recommendation on Facebook I arrived yesterday evening at this article entitled 'The Bitch is Back' by Sandra Tsing Loh that argues wonderfully that menopause is in fact a return to a more normal emotional/psychological/hormonal state and not some kind of aberration. She begins by lambasting the vast majority of menopause literature that plugs away at the 'problem' but then she arrives at 'The Wisdom of Menopause' by Christiane Northrup and has an epiphany.

I'll quote for you here what she refers to as the juicy core of the argument:
"A woman once told me that when her mother was approaching the age of menopause, her father sat the whole family down and said, “Kids, your mother may be going through some changes now, and I want you to be prepared. Your Uncle Ralph told me that when your Aunt Carol went through the change, she threw a leg of lamb right out the window!” Although this story fits beautifully into the stereotype of the “crazy” menopausal woman, it should not be overlooked that throwing the leg of lamb out the window may have been Aunt Carol’s outward expression of the process going on within her soul: the reclaiming of self. Perhaps it was her way of saying how tired she was of waiting on her family, of signaling to them that she was past the cook/chauffeur/dishwasher stage of life. For many women, if not most, part of this reclamation process includes getting in touch with anger and, perhaps, blowing up at loved ones for the first time."

She describes the fertile phase of a woman's life as having been under a hormonal cloud of nurturing and the explanation for the supposed crazy behaviour is:
"And now that Aunt Carol’s hormonal cloud is finally wearing off, it’s not a tragedy, or an abnormality, or her going crazy—it just means she can rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same selfish, non-nurturing, non-bonding type of person everyone else is."

It was interesting because I had observed this myself; not only in the lack of broodiness that had plagued my adult life since the age of about 18 but also a sense of release from responsibility for taking care of people. It has coincided with my children reaching adulthood so I had not interpreted it that way but on reflection it seems to fit. Yes, I feel suddenly more selfish, occasionally feeling a bit like I am being self-indulgent to spend my time attending to my own interests rather than those of other people, but quite enjoying it nonetheless.

Bits of the article I found irritating in the way I often do because of the assumptions it makes about 'middle class' women's lives and the route they follow. I have not had a career and had my children young (all born by the time I was thirty). I am not experiencing the "clanging chime of her 10-year-old voice, note by note, draining your will to live" because now I can just try and relate to my children as adults. And this whole description of the life of a 50 something woman has absolutely nothing that I relate to:

"A third, related, survival tip is to have no shame. The middle-aged women I know, clawing their way one day at a time through this passage, have no rules—they glue themselves together with absolutely anything they can get their hands on. They do estrogen cream, progesterone biocompounds, vaginal salves, coffee in the morning, big sandwiches at lunch. They drink water all day, they work out twice a week, hard, with personal trainers. They take Xanax to get over the dread of seeing their personal trainers, they take Valium to settle themselves before the first Chardonnay of happy hour. They may do with just a half a line of coke before a very small martini, while knitting and doing some crosswords. If there are cigarettes and skin dryness, there are also collagen and Botox, and the exhilaration of flaming an ex on Facebook. And finally, as another woman friend of mine counseled with perfect sincerity and cheer: “Just gain the 25 pounds. I really think I would not have survived menopause—AND the death of my mother—without having gained these 25 pounds.” "

but all in all I found the article enlightening and very amusing, I was annoying Dunk by giggling and not explaining myself as I always demand he does when he finds something amusing on the interweb. So hop on over and feel a bit better about the process, and maybe try and relish the return to normality instead.

(Image credit Ellen Weinstein from The Atlantic)

There will be blood

I sat over my breakfast today and listened to this very interesting interview entitled "There will be blood: Evolution and function of menstruation" over on Skeptically Speaking (it's an hour long but worth sitting through). The woman talking is Dr Kate Clancy who is a researcher into all things menstruational and who also writes an interesting blog over at Scientific American. The talk was partly about the evolution and physiology of periods but also some more cultural aspects and the impact on women. Particularly interesting was the prevalent urban myths around the whole subject. The idea of 'synchronisation' of cycles amongst women who live closely together is debunked and I just loved the fact that someone had bothered to research whether it was safe to go camping while on your period ... apparently there is no evidence the scent of blood will make you more vulnerable to attack by a bear:-)

(I borrowed the image here from The Period Blog)

Having had another extended break between cycles I then had a period that lasted ten days. On the plus side there were no cramps, which have got gradually worse over the years. No particular other symptoms that I might be able to attribute to my hormones.

Getting wise

So one minute I'm kept in lengthy anticipation and the next it tries to catch me unawares, but I am wise to that now. Even the old 'I'm finished ... oh no I'm back' trick can't catch me out. It gives a whole new meaning to the trusty Scout motto of 'Be Prepared'. But mainly I've been trying not to worry too much about it all.

In contemplating a new role at work I was forced to consider that I have experienced a significant decline in my energy levels over the last six months or so, it's one of those very vague symptoms often attributed to the menopause and yet could have so many other explanations, mainly just plain old getting-on-a-bit maybe?

I did find a nice side to the story however on a link from The F Word (a feminist blog site), to an article about the improvement in your sex life that comes with age and experience. Also via The F word I found this brilliant site called Adventures in Menstruating, I never knew there were such aspects to the women's movement, it has opened up a whole new arena of activism. Their 'raison d'être' is defined thusly:

"We think menstruation is funny. This is why we write about it, talk about it and make up smutty jokes about it. Then we laugh. A lot. Why is menstruation funny? Um...for the same reasons a lot of other stuff is funny. It's a taboo subject - the shock of it all always gets a giggle right away and, immature or not, the gross-out factor is still fun. It's the new fart joke. You wait and see. Laughter is therapeutic - sometimes periods are a pain in the uterus. Observational humour ain't all bad, and that moment of recognition feels good. We like that shared experience thing. Comedy as subversion is addictive - once you start undermining those stereotypes and analysing the euphemisms, you just can't stop. Menstruation has historically, socially and culturally been cloaked in fear and shame. Deconstructing these beliefs, with brute force when necessary, is empowering. Oh yeah - all our stuff is for menstruators and non-menstruators."