Menopause, a stigmatized stage of life

“There is a lot of resistance to talking about menopause, as about other issues that affect women’s bodies. women’s bodies, such as menstruation, although this is beginning to be normalized, or female sexual desire, which is hardly talked about. The idea of male desire and the role of women in satisfying it still prevails. It is necessary to normalize and deconstruct these absolute truths that have been transmitted to us by the patriarchal model, and for this it is essential to make this issue more visible, that it has more presence in the media and that it is talked about naturally, as what it is, a vital stage of women, and in this direction we work from Sogasex”, she asserts.

Against this imposed and self-imposed silence, famous women such as the Spanish Penelope Cruz, who recently spoke about the hormonal changes of perimenopause – the period that precedes menopause, which can last months or years and is usually accompanied by alterations in the cycle, although some women do not present previous irregularities and simply stop menstruating one day – in an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow at an event on healthy living in London, have been rising up in recent years. Other celebrities have also decided to break through the social stigma and talk openly about menopause, such as actress Cynthia Nixon (“Sex and the City”), who in 2017 stated in an interview that she was in menopause and that it was no drama. “The freedom of not being fertile is huge”, she said.

Precisely the end of a woman’s reproductive age lies behind the prejudices around menopause. “Many women do not dare to talk about menopause because. everything is focused on youth and the model of reproductive. So, you stop having reproductive capacity and your sexuality is no longer of interest because now it is pleasure-oriented, which is a transgression of that established social order centered on heterocentrism”, explains the Galician sexologist.

The problem with this silence surrounding the end of menstruation is that many women reach this phase of life, which will cover at least a third of their lives, knowing hardly anything because it is not a topic that comes up in conversations. Not at home and certainly not outside. “Many women, when they reach this stage, do not know what is going to happen to them because they lack information. and the biomedical model is also very negative because it somehow pathologizes menopause because the disease paradigm is the lack of something, in this case, of hormones (estrogens and progesterone), although it is something that can be corrected with treatments, which, on the other hand, are also often rejected by that same social model”, she comments.

The actress Kim CattrallNixon’s partner in “Sex and the City”, is another of the artists who claims to talk more about menopause to break the taboo. Like Gillian Anderson (“The X-Files”), with early menopause -when it appears before the age of 40-, who advocates losing shame on this subject.

Former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama also recounted her experience with hot flashes during her time in the White House, as did Emma Thompsonwho, in 2014, accepting an award on one of the coldest nights of the year, gave thanks to menopausal sweats to combat the cold. The latest to come to the fore has been Mexico’s Salma Hayek, who recently revealed that she had symptoms since she was 40 and that one of the changes she experienced was a breast enlargement.

According to Leal Docampo, the lack of information about this vital of women also generates fear about its symptoms and its effects. One of them is the lack of libido, something that, on the one hand, does not have to be a consequence of the lack of hormones, according to the sexologist, and on the other hand, can be remedied with products such as lubricants and various treatments. “Sex in general continues to be a taboo, but much more so if we are talking about older people because, again, the model is centered on youth and socially beautiful bodies. Anything outside of that canon is annoying to people,” she says.

In her opinion, a clear example of issues having to do with women’s bodies is the opposition to sick leave for “painful periods”. “Why does a sick leave for stress or anxiety have to be regulated and not for endometriosis? Is everyone going to take sick leave for menstrual pain and not for anxiety? This is because menstruation is still taboo, like menopause,” she says.

The drop in estrogen causes important changes which, like endometriosis, can have effects on a woman’s personal and professional life. A group of British female MPs, led by Rachel Maclean, brought to light in 2018 the impact of menopause at work and proposed the inclusion of a review of working conditions to defend those professionals who suffer the most acute symptoms. Following this line of work, this same year a report was presented in the British Parliament that concludes that. almost one million women in the United Kingdom would have left their jobs due to the effects of the menopause.