Menopause Quotes

If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment," Murphy interrupted, "I will break your arm in eleven places.

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

I am not menopausal. I just wanted half an hour alone. Is that too much to ask? A crappy half hour!

God, you're so fucking stubborn. You're like a menopausal pissed-off mule!

I'm what is known as perimenopausal. "Peri", some of you may know, is a Latin prefix meaning 'SHUT YOUR FLIPPIN' PIE HOLE".

I personally have a cunt. Sometimes it's 'flaps' or 'twat', but most of the time, it's my cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word. I like that my fire escape also doubles up as the most potent swearword in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say 'cunt'. It's like I have a nuclear bomb in my pants, or a tiger, or a gun. Compared to this the most powerful swearword men have got out of their privates is 'dick', which is frankly vanilla, and I believe you're allowed to use on, like, Blue Peter if something goes wrong. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing, and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer simple act of calling someone 'a girl' - I love that 'cunt' stands, on its own, as the supreme unvanquishable word. It has almost mystic resonance. It is a cunt - we all know it's a cunt - but we can't call it a cunt. We can't say the actual word. It's too powerful. Like Jews can never utter the Tetragrammaton - an must make do with 'Jehovah', instead.

At her first bleeding a woman meets her power. During her bleeding years she practices it. At menopause she becomes it. Traditional Native American saying

The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It's either that or your weight. In any case, if you don't do something, you could be dead by August. God, middle age is an unending insult.

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.

The menopause of Sarah became her menostart; this is feminine beauty! The death plot against Mordecai became his life spring; this is masculine beauty! A kind of life lived in God's word is a life of miraculous beauty!

I call the Change of Life "Orchids" because menopause is such an ugly word. It's got men in it for goddsakes.

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.

When Alani started to speak, Jackson held up a finger. In the past five minutes, he'd had more mood swings than a menopausal woman. First turned-on, then territorial, bored, aggressive and now on alert.

Again, women who experienced childhood trauma are 80 percent more likely to experience painful endometriosis.[4] They’re much more likely to develop premenstrual dysphoric disorder. More likely to develop fibroids.[5] It may affect fertility.[6] They’re at greater risk for postpartum depression[7] and depression in menopause.[8]

The truth was, Librium and Valium were marketed using such a variety of gendered mid-century tropes—the neurotic singleton, the frazzled housewife, the joyless career woman, the menopausal shrew—that what Roche’s tranquilizers really seemed to offer was a quick fix for the problem of “being female.

Hello, my sister, Libby, also your daughter, is snogging a potato in my bed. What are you going to do about it?' Dad started yelling uncontrollably. I wonder if he is having the male menopause? If he starts growing breasts, I will definitely be running away with the circus.

Age shame is also a problem primarily for women. As women approach and go through menopause, naturally gaining weight as fat-to-muscle ratios shift, they exhibit many of the same anxieties and symptoms that teenage girls do. The process of growing older makes women's 'flaws' more visible and acute, thus, aging, a natural process, becomes frightening, disorienting, and difficult for many women.

I was inspired to write (Life Continues) to tell people dealing with MS or any other illness that if opening your eyes, or getting out of bed, or holding a spoon, or combing your hair is the daunting Mount Everest you climb today, that is okay.

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy? Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question. O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre. P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre. O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction. P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that. (Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

Hurt of this magnitude is like menopause,” Phyllis tells me. I’ve just wiped my nose with one of the hats. She takes it from me and hands me a tissue. “Comes in hot flashes. Just when you feel like you can’t take it anymore, it passes for a bit. But it comes back, boy does it.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown.

The Rose has always been the premiere symbol of female sexuality. In primitive goddess cults, the five petals represented the five stations of female life - birth, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, and death. And in modern times, the flowering rose's ties to womanhood are considered more visual.

I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror as we glided p. I looked as eroded as the groaning lift. What had happened to the fresh-faced belle from Boston, Mass.? The woman who stared back at me was at the dreaded age between forty-five and fifty, that no-man's land of sag, oncoming wrinkle, and stealthy approach of menopause. "I hate this elevator, too," I said grimly. Zoe grinned and pinched my cheek. "Mom, even Gwyneth Paltrow would look like hell in that mirror." I had to smile. That was such a Zoe-like remark.

If hitting an unexpected speed bump with your car equates to the best sex you've had lately, you know your hormones are sending you a signal.

On a planet where for thousands of years, even today, a woman's worth has been judged exclusively by the productivity of her womb, what the hell is the point of a barren woman?

Evelyn stared into the empty ice cream carton and wondered where the smiling girl in the school pictures had gone.

The uncle and cousin seem nice, but the aunt is a bit of a shock. Whith her hair dyed bright red, she looks like Ronald McDonald's post-menopausal sister. Who has let herself go.

The astounding energy of post-menopausal women (promised by Margaret Mead) is here, but the optimism to fuel it is not. The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees. As an image, I'm definitely getting blurry.

[Hot flashes] are the prime cause of sleep disruption in women over age fifty, Suzanne Woodward of Wayne State University School of Medicine reports. Her studies show that hot flashes in sleep occur about once an hour. Most prompt an arousal of three minutes or longer. Independently of their hot flashes, women who have them still awaken briefly every eight minutes on average. The sleep process dramatically blunts memory for awakenings, Woodward said, and in the morning women seldom realize how poorly they slept. Instead, they often focus on the daytime consequences of poor sleep, which include fatigue, lethargy, mood swings, depression, and irritability. Many women and their doctors, Woodward said, dismiss such symptoms as "just menopause." This is a mistake, she suggested, because treatment can reduce or eliminate hot flashes, aid sleep, relieve other symptoms, and improve a woman's quality of life. Treatment also helps keep frequent awakenings from becoming a bad habit that continues after hot flashes subside.

Menopause: it had to be the gods’ ironic warning to (or just plain nasty trick on) humanity for having artificially extended the life span,

Perimenopausal women don't make eye contact, don't want to be touched, they slouch, they scuff, and avoid any social interaction if possible.

When you get Richard Dawkins yapping menopausally at some poor hamstrung old archbishop, while we dismantle our environment due to the materialistic, pessimistic principles that the atheistic tyranny of the day is tacitly sponsoring, it is time to look for a new story.

When I was suddenly thrust into what everyone calls menopause (Orchids) earlier than my body planned, I decided someone needed to take charge on so many levels. It was time to not only change the vernacular, but to speak up and say "Hey! This isn't an old lady's disease! We aren't old! We are strong and dammit, we are beautiful and sexy too!

Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.

Estrogen deficient woman are nothing but the walking dead.

Most of us don’t notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights—way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause—and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else.

What you believe can change your experience.

Two thousand and seven was the year we officially entered our late twenties - the starting line of the death march to menopause.

You’re going through your menopause and you thought you were in love.

and menopause is no more a disease than being a man is a disease.

The testosterone spewing off of him kicks me in the babymaker…and I’m suddenly warm all over. I’m pretty certain the man could reverse menopause. Gotta

Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that thing is different.

Humans couldn’t have evolved to this point without the strength of women in menopause.

what the patriarchy thinks of menopause is irrelevant. Men do not get to define the value of women at any age.

Men have this climacteric, you know, like women. Doctors deny it, but I have met some very menopausal persons in their profession.

I’d closed my ears to my friends’ horror stories about married life. “Ha! Now you get to argue about who should change the diapers.” Or “What kind of food makes a woman stop giving blow jobs? Wedding cake!” Or “Oh boy, wait until she hits menopause.” I paid no attention to any of that. “Just let me stumble into it,” I told them. “I don’t want to be forewarned.

Our mothers were largely silent about what happened to them as they passed through this midlife change. But a new generation of women has already started to break the wall of silence.

At menopause, a time of extremely high power and shapeshifting, we are told to behave as though nothing is happening. To continue the “game” of life as if we are still girls. We are not girls. And to continue to act as though we are robs the world and the coming generations of our insights.

Oh no, honey. Lots of women go through it early. Why, there was this woman over in Georgia who was only thirty-six-years-old and one day she got in her car and drove right up the stairs to the county courthouse, rolled down her window, and tossed her mother's head that she had just chopped off in her kitchen at a State policeman and hollered, "Here! This is what you wanted," and drove right back down the courthouse stairs. Now that's what an early menopause will do for you if you're not careful.

My mother, of course, had a different opinion. 'They're driving me crazy!' she said, swatting at them with her beige Coach handbag. 'How can you tell?' my dad asked. 'Between your menopause craziness and your turning fifty craziness and everything else?' 'Forty-eight!' my mom cried. Dad groaned. 'Have you forgotten who you're lying to?

I am not going to give you disclaimers about what you can expect to find in my story. I went through menopause recently and find I don't much care about anyone's sensibilities anymore. I am called BadSquirrel for a reason. Considering how incredibly rude and grouchy I have become, I expect all of you to be extremely grateful to the QMBG (Queen Mother Bitch Goddess for those of you who haven't kept up) for all of the good warm fuzzy bits of my story. If you like it, it's because she went through it and took out all the really disturbing parts and made me behave.

He, too, admires himself, for his qualities—his beauty, cleverness, talents—and for his success and achievements. Beware if one of these fails him, for then the catastrophe of a severe depression is imminent. It is usually considered normal when sick or aged people who have suffered the loss of much of their health and vitality or women who are experiencing menopause become depressive. There are, however, many people who can tolerate the loss of beauty, health, youth, or loved ones and, although they grieve, do so without depression. In contrast, there are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who do suffer from severe depression. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.

But when mother died, Caroline was twelve, and in that queer time between childhood and nubile girlhood, when some girls seem to be wise without experience, and perhaps more clear-headed then they will be again until after their menopause.

It's time to stop grouping up and complaining about all our estrogen deficient symptoms and demand real answers and plenty of estrogen.

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.

I'm an adult and this is my house. I can grow what I like in my garden. Wear what I choose. What difference does it make what you or anyone else thinks of as normal? Why the f should I care if you approve?

Believing isn’t the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.

What are the chances of a female president being elected? The men-only corporate reaction is: What about the tampons?Will she bleed everywhere? What if she gets pregnant? What if she is going through menopause? What if she’s been through menopause and is therefore old and used up? It’s the same old caveman shit, a power thing.

Here’s the thing about menopause, though, that I don’t entirely understand. We’ll exchange a few words like this? A seemingly slight disagreement? Only then rage fizzes up inside my rib cage. It burns and unspools, as berserk and sulfuric as those black-snake fireworks from childhood: one tiny pellet, with seemingly infinite potential to create dark matter—dark matter that’s kind of like a magic serpent and kind of like a giant ash turd. “Why do I have to be in charge of every single thing?” I hiss.

As women, most interactions from around age eight on teach us to keep things cool so no one is inspired to, God forbid, call us the U or F words: “ugly” or “fat.” I’m not the first to point out how women are taught that our value comes from how we look, and that it takes a lifetime (or at least until menopause) for most women to undo this awful lie. As

Through pain and fear go on.

Sometimes it can seem as if your body is a car with a new and completely different warning light that appears each day. An unwelcome exercise in, “Oh what now?

Estrogen deficient women are the walking dead.

Citing the WHI for Hormone Replacement Therapy standards equates with attending the Flat Earth Society Conference and listening to people try to prove the earth is flat.

Stop exhuming the women's health initiative for which doctors prescribe hormones. The WHI for HRT standards is a dead and irrelevant paradigm to modern HRT that needs to be buried.

If I hear of one more article sourcing the WHI as the standard by which hormone replacement therapy advice should be generated, I think I'm going to puke.

At her first bleeding a woman meets her power. During her bleeding years she practices it. At menopause she becomes it. Traditional Native American saying

We did do well with him,” my father says in agreement. “We should have more kids.” “Menopause, honey. Remember when I hated you for an entire year?

The silvered glamour of the Woman of the Winter Moon may be woman in her greatest power, woman in her guise as Elemental, as Force of Nature. This is woman to be revered. She is a concentration of feminine wisdom gathered and concentrated over the years, blended with the astral knowledge of the soul-star, and blessed by the traditions of the Sacred Feminine that she has made herself, or resurrected from Time, and passed living and intact to her daughters.

The German psychologist Jutta Heckhausen, now in California, studied a group of childless middle-aged women who were still hoping to have a baby. As they approached menopause, their emotional distress became more and more intense. But after menopause those who gave up their hope for pregnancy lost their depression symptoms.81 The irony is deep: hope is often at the root of depression.

The women's health initiative standards for HRT is nothing but an embarrassment to all physicians, and I'm not sure why they have not retracted all the statements that came out of that joke of a study.

Another group of researchers compared women ages forty-five to fifty-five with men of the same age and found that women performed better than men with memory tasks before menopause, but during the menopause transition and afterward that advantage became less apparent. This point feels important enough to emphasize. Yes, there is a temporary change, but even with that change women still out-performed men.

I feel as if I have been piling things into my arms for the last twenty years, holding it all, managing it all, doing it all, being it all and suddenly I am looking at the pile, realizing how much of it doesn’t belong to me, and hungering to let it drop, to lay it all down, to walk away. I have learned that when people see you carrying a lot and not dropping anything, that they often think, “I guess she can hold this for me.” When they see you saying yes, they decide to also ask you for things. When they see you doing something, they think, “She can do something for me too.” And, eventually, the load becomes unbearable and you are driven into the ground by a weight that you have opened your arms to accept.

Gen Xers are in 'the prime of their lives' at a particularly dangerous and divisive moment,' Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me. 'They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They're squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they're exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.

In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism.12 But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after she confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and, after killing a coworker, Sandie Smith was put on probation—with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS.13 By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses. Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6-month-old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help.14 No feminist protested. In the 1970s, then, feminists

The default to studying men at times veered into absurdity: in the early sixties, observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their estrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women. (Although doctors began prescribing estrogens to postmenopausal women in droves - by the midseventies, a third would be taking them - it wasn't until 1991 that the first clinical study of hormone therapy was conducted in women.) An NIH-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn't enroll a single woman. While men can develop breast cancer - and a small number of them do each year - as Rep. Snowe noted drily at the congressional hearings, 'Somehow I find it hard to believe that the male-dominated medical community would tolerate a study of prostate cancer that used only women as research subjects.

I fucking love LA (dog birthday parties! spiritual healers on every corner! unironic oxygen bars!). You might not think so because I’m a misanthropic depressed person with menopause acne whose hips are too wide for every single restaurant chair in Silverlake, but you would be wrong. I’m a Fat Bitch from the Middle West and I love accidentally running into minor celebrities with my cart in the wheatgrass aisle at the Rock ’N Roll Ralph’s on Sunset.

A 2020 study of more than 300 women whose average age was 55, published in BMC Psychiatry, reported that 55 percent had mild to severe depression and nearly 84 percent had mild to severe anxiety. Poor body image was strongly connected to both.

In brief, I am in a splendid moment of my destiny. This is good news for women in general: Life gets easier once we get through menopause and are done with raising kids, but only if we minimize our expectations, give up resentment, and relax in the knowledge that no one, except those closest to us, gives a damn about who we are or what we do. Stop pretending, faking it, lamenting, and flagellating ourselves about silly stuff. We have to love ourselves a lot and love others without calculating

Some days I hated my life. Turning forty, pre-menopausal migraines, single, gaining ten pounds in six months, not to mention having three, sometimes overbearing mothers, and an editor with no compassion. On the other hand, I had Kline, sort of, and there was my career, or what was left of it. I had a dog that idolized me, even if no one else did, and a house of my own. Those pluses should sustain me through my crises. So now, I would go home and write. It's what I do. -- Lilly Millenovanovich

I hate when a man feels I’m obligated to disclose my marital status to somebody I don’t even know. Even this bullshit about status itself as if married and spinster are the only two choices for defining myself. Or because I’m a woman I’m supposed to have a status at all. Hey big boy, here’s my status. Hi, before I tell you my name here’s my status. Maybe I should just say I’m a lesbian and throw the problem back in their faces for them to define it. Xanax for anxiety. Valium for sleep. Prozac for depression. Phenergan for nausea. Tylenol for headaches. Mylanta for bloating. Midol for cramps. I mean, Jesus Christ, menopause come already. Isn’t there some fast-track for a hot flash? It’s not like I’m ever going to breed, so why keep the damn store door open?

You can do this (this thing, where your body will cease to produce hormones and your skin, hair, muscles and bones... basically every part of you will notice, go into withdrawals, and stage a coup). Be prepared for this mentally, and you'll own this "thing.

Once I had read in an Edmund Wilson essay of his dislike of women past menopause. He said they were like dried fruits, withered on the vine. The juice was gone. I understood what he meant. Although the words stabbed my heart even then, before I was forty. What about your juice? I had written in the margins of the book. But I knew that crones were female and old men were kings, stallions, and producers of heirs. Saul Bellow had a baby at the age of eighty-three. He didn't live long enough after that for her to play Cordelia to his Lear.

1922 was a bad year for Elizabeth. She was disappointed by some of the reviews of The Enchanted April although it was to prove the most popular — excepting the first — of all her novels. She suffered from depressions that she couldn’t throw off. Her doctor diagnosed menopausal symptoms.

I proclaim that we must stop viewing menopause as a disease, because that means being a woman is a disease and I reject that shoddily constructed hypothesis. I also declare that what the patriarchy thinks of menopause is irrelevant. Men do not get to define the value of women at any age.

While each of these may be convenient at the time (and easier choices, culturally, than choosing menstrual retreat, natural birth, breastfeeding, mother-baby dependency, and unmedicated menopause), there is a downside. Each time we deny our female functions, each time we deviate from our bodies’ natural path, we move farther away from our feminine roots. This can create distress within our bodies and can set the scene for further problems, physically and emotionally, for ourselves and our families. - this quote is from the Foreword to Wild Feminine; the foreword is by Sarah J. Buckley, MD

Women are gaslit into believing that their bodies - the very thing that allows them to hack the big brain-small pelvis equation - are problematic and that consequently they themselves are problematic. We're dirty, silly, fat, gross, weak, or we're simply complainers. We are forced to make do with a medical system largely designed around the needs of men and we have our medical concerns dismissed as "not that bad" or we are told they are fabricated.

Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion.

What was Martha Croker, née Martha Starling, from Richmond, Virginia, from the very best part of Richmond, Cary Street Road, daughter of the former president of the Commonwealth Club—what was she doing here in an exercise hive in Buckhead in Atlanta, listening to a lot of mindless, obscene, totally vulgar “Negro music,” as her father had always called it, letting herself be jostled, jabbed, and belittled by a bunch of vain, brainless, narcissistic, body-snobbish girls, dutifully obeying a bald-headed martinet from Turkey named Mustafa Gunt who liked to send her running up a set of fire stairs to within a c.c. or so of her cardiac capacity? She was past menopause.

Happiness is a consolation for those who cannot orgasm yet … or anymore.

Often, women's symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favorite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women's normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom. Sometimes, other aspects of their identity seem to take center stage: fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight; trans women find that all their symptoms are attributed to hormone therapy; black women are stereotyped as addicts looking for prescription drugs, their reports of pain doubted entirely. Whatever the particular attribution, there is often the same current of distrust: the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.

In his 1873 Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdened and that wombs and ovaries would atrophy.43 Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.” Yet

depression can occur because of biological factors such as genetic predispositions, hormonal changes (including menopause, childbirth or thyroid problems) and differences in biochemistry (an imbalance of naturally occurring substances called neurotransmitters in the brain and spinal cord). In other cases, depression is caused by psychological factors, severe life stressors, substance abuse and certain medical conditions that affect the way your brain regulates your moods.

The problem with the word "vagina" is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get "examined.".. No. Let's clear this up right now - I don't actually have a vagina. I never have. I, personally, have a cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word, and it doubles up as the most potent swear word in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say "cunt." Compared to this, the most powerful swear word men have got out of their privates is "dick," which is frankly vanilla. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer, simple act of calling someone "a girl" - I love that "cunt" stands on its own, as the supreme, unvanquishable word.

Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life’s ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking each major transition in the human life cycle: puberty, marriage, childbirth, menopause, death. Other rites–of–passage, less predictable but equally transformative, include times of sudden change and calamity such as illness and injury, the loss of one’s home, the death of a loved one, etc. These are the times when we wake, like Dante, to find ourselves in a deep, dark wood — an image that in Jungian psychology represents an inward journey. Rites–of–passage tales point to the hidden roads that lead out of the dark again — and remind us that at the end of the journey we’re not the same person as when we started. Ascending from the Netherworld (that grey landscape of illness, grief, depression, or despair), we are ‘twice–born’ in our return to life, carrying seeds — new wisdom, ideas, creativity and fecundity of spirit.

The object of facing up squarely to the fact of the climacteric is to acquire serenity and power. If women on the youthful side of the climacteric could glimpse what this state of peaceful potency might be, the difficulties of making the transition would be less. It is the nature of the case that life beyond the menopause is as invisible to the woman who has yet to struggle through the change as to the top of any mountain is invisible from the valley below. Calm and poise do not simply happen to the post menopausal woman, she has to fight for them.

Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people? Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.

As Rage Becomes Her author Soraya Chemaly said, One of the top three reasons women report getting angry is the lack of reciprocity in relationships. They feel taken for granted, uncared for, unloved, even as they’re providing care to parents, to children, to spouses, to friends, to coworkers to neighbors, whoever it may be. Being exhausted and fed up at the same time accumulates. I think a lot of the rage people feel is because for the entirety of their lives their needs were not being addressed or met fairly. But now, with the added stresses and exhaustion of this physical transition, that situation is not tenable. This—a lack of reciprocal care and attention—is not about hormones.

The authors’ other argument is for the supposed social-bonding role of sex but how many ancestral males would choose to ‘socially-bond’ with a middle-aged or post-menopausal female when there are younger alternatives screaming out for ‘social-bonding’ elsewhere – young females who, according to Ryan and Jethá, were not letting their minds get in the way of all that ‘social bonding’. Back in the real world, as we have seen, the extensive human social networks are enabled by pair bonds, and our extra-marital sex is mostly about females acquiring meat or other resources and occasionally about men bonding by ‘sharing’ women for their own interests with little if any concern for female choice or female well-being.

The anger and aggression that women feel, however, can always be abated by an infinite list of beauty products, some of which have the added benefit of eliminating the appearance of anger entirely. Even if a woman is angry, no one should know it by looking at her face – optimally lineless, expressionless, and, in some cases, actually paralyzed. In 2015, news outlets announced a plastic surgery that promised to fix women with 'resting angry face,' popularly known as Resting Bitch Face. Plastic surgery, facial exercises, and even 'facial yoga' hinge on the idea that showing strong, particularly angry, emotions is bad and makes women undesirable. Antidepressant advertising targeting menopausal women encourages them to be tranquil, sedate, and, essentially, nice to look at. Lotions, creams, and injections are 'soothing' and 'calming'. Good skin care, the way to overcome 'angry' rashes or textures, has become a matter of carefully managing not just the feel of the body but also the disciplining of emotions.