꩜ Please join us for Movement is Our Mothertongue & the Fourth Body, coming Fall 2024. It is a workshop collaboration that explores the Fourth Body, the Huntress. This is the body we have after our acute mothering has begun to reduce to a simmer, or even a trickle, even for those who did not exercise their fertility— the fourth body is a new phase, a new chapter, and with that has come a new body that already bears the seeds of an open future where something other than the reiteration of our sedimented past is possible.
Below is an essay I wrote a few years ago, as I started to traverse the ingathering of my mind in my fourth body.
I am suddenly at midlife... no, I'm clearly past the middle point of my life. l am soon to be 54. And for the last four years, I have recently realized, I have been on the hunt.
It started right before my 50th birthday and I typed in ‘turning 50’ in the search bar.
Sitting in my bed with my laptop, the pages and pages of information about the physical symptoms of menopause gushed out like a firehose. It’s like the Google algorithms were just waiting for the next newly-minted-50 menopause plebe to come knocking on their fat-phobic, cis, hyper-consumer, goopy, heteronormative door. It’s amazing how many things depend completely on estrogen, according to the internet. I just had to doubt it. After all, I didn’t have enough estrogen to begin with to breastfeed without a plethora of herbs, nipple extensions, and other drama. Also, we were fine before, I mean, during that first body we had, but we'll talk about that later.
Oh but no, it’s all about the estrogen.
If you stopped there, you’d think that menopause was a medical mistake or a disease that needed a medical cure. It was just as Simone de Beauvoir had written almost a century ago, “women has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones.” (p.3, The Second Sex). Yes, a cure for menopause, a cure for aging, a cure for woman-ing is what you’d think you’d need if you go online to find out what the hell is going on in your body and mind in midlife.
Yes, a cure for menopause, a cure for aging, a cure for woman is what you’d think you’d need if you go online to find out what the hell is going on in your body and mind in midlife.
When I mentioned my confusion on Facebook my friends reflected my same confusion. They were finding the same lack of certain types of information and an abundance of other types. “I can’t find any consistent information online about menopause, other than how depressing and awful it is,” said my one friend who worked in the former Obama administration. “Everywhere I look, I’m being told to ask my doctor about hormone replacement therapy to relieve my symptoms, even though I don’t really have any, and aren’t they natural anyway?” said another friend who has a PhD and is doing cutting-edge research on genetics. Even Michelle Obama on her podcast argued for how great it is to be fifty, how empowered and powerful she feels, but then admitted that she is taking HRT because it was recommended to her by her doctor.
My point is that the only thing universal about menopause is the confusion around it. If we (women entering midlife) were being led at all, it was to the same place: menopause is brutal; lean into that, but being fifty-something is powerful; lean into that, but for good measure, take hormones to make your youth last as long as possible. Grow up, but don’t grow old. No one is ushering us through this rite of passage into this next phase of life in any way that addresses its deeper meaning and potential.
So I have been on the hunt for someone, or something.
I picked up a used copy of The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause by Germain Greer, which was first published in 1991. Though it’s dated in its cis-gendered, heteronormative orientation, it arguably remains a relevant and comprehensive history of the plight to end menopause and keep women perpetually youthful. Greer points out that nearly half of a woman’s life lies beyond the transition from her fertile years, yet nothing in her education or her conditioning has prepared her for this new role. Greer writes of the medicalization of menopause:
“Menopause is a dream specialty for the mediocre medic. Dealing with it requires no surgical or diagnostic skill. It is not itself a life-threatening condition, so a patient’s death is always somebody else’s fault. There is no scope for malpractice suits. Patients must return again and again for a battery of tests and check-ups, all of which earn money for the medic, whether from public or private funds.”
With regard to the numbing or obscuring of menopause through hormone replacement therapy (HRT), if you can wade through the pages and pages of people selling it, like I did, there is plenty of open source, evidence-based research that suggests it is safe for a short period of time in younger women and may help with pretty much only vasomotor experiences (hot flashes). Other claims such as bringing hair luster back are anecdotal. But heads up, less than a third of women even experience hot flashes, to begin with. This is not to be insensitive or to dismiss the women who do experience debilitating effects of the change in hormones, please do seek help if your life is being disrupted. But to say that intensely painful or life-interrupting menopause changes are universal is misleading, reductionist, and perpetuates the decline, dependent, and decrepit narrative about women that fuels the 21.8 billion dollar global hormone replacement market.
The one that is forecasted to grow 7.7% by 2027.
There has to be more, I thought.
My eyes continued to glaze over all the hot mess references, and dry vagina articles of my search about turning 50 years old, until they fell on Helen Thayer: To celebrate turning 50 became the first woman and oldest person to trek solo to the magnetic north pole. Now we’re talking, I thought. as I clicked on the link.
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