Impregnable

When I was growing up in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s, menopause was a punchline, the grizzled grandma of “PMS,” the butt of chauvinistic jokes on t-shirts and mugs. Women entering menopause were not to be trusted, their hot flashes and mood swings the full demonic realization of a snarling harpy on her period—but even worse, because she would soon no longer be of reproductive use. All this was and is of a piece with the culture of women’s worthlessness, which values fetuses over the humans carrying them, that tells elderly women that they are less worthy of love or attention than young ones, that tells the fat liberation movement it can finally stand down because oh, oh, oh, Ozempic.  

All Fours, a novel by Miranda July about an artist’s journey through perimenopause, the saucy pregame of menopause, recently gave that unsettling condition a certain gloss of coolness. But menopause, which is the actual rager, remains a cultural mystery. I’ll repeat what feminists have been pointing out for decades: men have loads of medicine to ensure their dicks can get hard until they croak, and yet we barely know shit about the myriad health issues that affect half of the human population. (“Iron Woman,” a song about medical racism and sexism by the New York-based Motswana musician Lollise, has become my mantra on the subject.)

Anyway, I am getting older. 

Truthfully, I never thought about any of these things until I was forced to, in my early 40s, when a kind coworker at the feminist website I used to run told me that my suddenly strange menstrual patterns were likely perimenopause. I had never heard of perimenopause until that moment, despite decades of feminist reading and, as previously noted, running a feminist website. I read what is to me the definitive book on menopause, Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, and discovered that some scientists learn about menopause—“a big evolutionary puzzle”—by studying female orcas that have become “post-reproductive pod leaders.” They don’t lose their value, they assume a leadership position based on their experience. 

The symptoms of menopause are treatable, like the symptoms of pregnancy and erectile dysfunction, with medication if the condition becomes too much to bear. I suspect that I have now reached full-blown menopause—and aside from the hot flashes that feel like an uncontrollable radiator in a New York railroad apartment suddenly switching on inside my body, not too much has changed, though I’m still early in the process. Alongside hot flashes, aging has brought with it alopecia, something I’m still working through emotionally as I trawl the internet for remy wigs under $3,000 in between steroid shots to the dome. (Fun fact for my alopecia homies: if you have health insurance, some companies will pay for your “cranial prosthetic” with a doctor’s note.) The full gravity—the courage, the strength—of what Rep. Ayanna Pressley did when she took off her wig in public with my former colleague Jessica Moulite at the Root really hit me for the first time on a personal level. It’s hard, the loss of a physical characteristic that many associate with femininity, and you can medicate and Minoxidil till the cows come home but you have no real control over it.

Yet even the sorrow feels absurd, that somehow anyone might be considered less of who they are without certain hegemonic markers of gender—which is itself a bullshit construct, I think, as I watch my 53rd drag performer Insta Reel of the day. Sinead O’Connor rather famously shaved her head in order to throw off the yoke of music-industry men who liked her better wearing the gender markers of “femininity,” for which read conformity, for which read submission. 

“It was dangerous to be pretty,” she once said, “because I was raped and molested everywhere I went.” At the New School in 2014, I witnessed a famous conversation between the feminist scholar bell hooks and the actor and activist Laverne Cox, in which hooks questioned Cox’s specific gender presentation as a trans woman, which she termed as a “sense of a traditional femininity being called out and reveled in.” Cox calmly explained her choice to wear heels and Beyoncé wigs, and then examined the ways she played into the patriarchal gaze. “I don’t want to disappear,” she said, “and I think so often there is an erasure. And I’d like to add this is normative, hetero-normative imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, where there’s an erasure… of certain bodies and certain identities. And I have not ever been interested in being erased… So a lot of how I’m negotiating these systems of oppression… is perhaps buying into or playing into some of these ideas—of the patriarchal gaze, of the white supremacy.” In other words, Cox both loves her gowns and knows she’s playing the game in the service of larger truths—one of which is survival in a transphobic patriarchy. Playing the game and knowing it’s rigged is something a lot of us do. And when it ends by no choice of our own, it can feel as though there has been a death, even and maybe especially if we are well aware the game we’ve been playing is a lie. The whole thing is rather embarrassing, really; the veil lifts and we’re all just mounds of flesh.

Still. I have never wanted children, and am thrilled to dispense with tampons and the various methods of birth control I’ve been chained to since teenhood. (And not to be TMI, but becoming impregnable has made me even hornier, a fact I’m only telling you in direct contradiction of the notion that menopausal women are shriveled-up crones.) 

It’s the hair that’s really getting to me. I began googling “Mexicans with alopecia,” hoping to find someone—a TikToker, a feelings blogger, anyone—I could latch onto. I realized that, once my balding has progressed and with a proper combover and some gel, I could probably approximate an Edgar, were I so inclined. And then I naturally go to guilt, a Catholic rap on the wrist, guilt that I’m feeling sorry about myself, when so many people are suffering, when I have had the enormous luck and fortune to even make it to the age that I can experience menopause. But again, it’s all of a piece, the devaluation is pervasive and global, and it follows all women, every moment of our lives; guilt and shame turns to defiance.

“Hope is essential,” Steinke concludes, having first observed that “one of the clear gains” of menopause was “a resurgence of my fierce little-girl self. My passion, taken up for a while with the domestic, now lasers out into the wider world. My sense of injustice is sharper and I want to resist.”