Now that I’m menopausal, I’m embarrassed by the sexist, ageist menopause jokes I made when I was younger.
When I was in my 20s, I worked as a reporter at Rolling Stone, fulfilling a dream of interviewing the most legendary women in music — icons like Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin, and Cher.
Yet when I look back, I cringe at how I was instructed to ask older female music stars how they “felt” about aging — and how I blithely complied.
“It sucks,” I remembered Dolly replying; it’s entirely possible that what she meant was that it “sucked” to have to answer this obnoxious question — one that I never once asked an older male star in the dozen years I worked at that magazine.
When I think about how I viewed older women when I was in my 20s, I am mortified. I constantly made jokes that I thought at the time were benign — snickering with my friends about my mom’s fuzzy inability to finish a sentence (which I now know was menopausal brain fog).
I wish I could say that I stopped making these reflexive comments and jokes when I hit midlife, but I didn’t.
If the subject of menopause came up, I made sure to slip in a reference to the Golden Girls. That was my glib shorthand for “older lady.” My associations were inaccurate: perimenopause, the years in which menopause symptoms first show up, occurs most often in your 40s).
But what is worse is that I had internalized what is known as “gendered ageism,” the toxic blend of ageism and sexism. This became painfully clear when I began researching my book on menopause and became dismayed by the casually dismissive, or even cruel references, to menopausal women that I came across. At the time, I was in my early 50s and reaching menopause myself.
Then I realized that I was still doing it, too. After I wrote the book, I met a few friends for lunch, and we all started crowd-sourcing ideas for the book’s cover. The visuals that we came up with were the usual tired ageist tropes: those square wraparound sunglasses favored by your grandma. A visor hat. A fan. Orthopedic clogs.
“How about a plum that’s looking in the mirror and sees a prune?” my friend Shawn suggested. That’s how her perimenopausal skin felt, she explained. Shriveled, in other words.
Yes, the jokes were made with affection, but, if I’m honest with myself, also a frisson of condescension. It was clear that we were very, very uncomfortable with the idea of menopause. These kinds of jokes serve as a way to separate yourself from that perception — to declare to yourself and the world that even as you’re aging, “I’m not old-old!”
Our squeamishness about age isn’t just about vanity, of course. Women in midlife often fear that if they look “old,” they’ll be judged in the workplace as less proficient. When some women allowed their hair to go gray during the pandemic, researchers found that women perceived this cosmetic change as a “risk” — one they took on in order to feel authentic, but a risk nonetheless. In order to reassure their coworkers they were not “old” or “incompetent,” the women in the study felt obliged to mitigate the gray hair with bold makeup, nonsurgical procedures, and “careful choice of clothes.” Do men worry half as much about any of this? You can probably guess the answer. In a 2020 study on the “triple standard” of aging, middle-aged and older men were found to experience, the researchers wrote, “significantly less stress about age affecting their appearance than women.”
As the financier Bernard Baruch once said, “To me, old age is 15 years older than I am.” I’m not sure any woman has the luxury of feeling that way.
When I was growing up in the 80s, menopause was rarely mentioned at all in society. Certainly, I never talked about it with my mother. When we had our first-ever conversation about menopause — which took place just a few years ago, when I started writing the aforementioned book on the subject — she told me that she’d had severe hot flashes for nearly a decade. At the time, she kept that information to herself.
“That’s just what you did then,” she told me. “No one talked about it. You told your doctor, maybe, and that was it.”
Mom told me that during business meetings in which she was the lone woman, she would sweat so much that it would drip onto the conference table, and she would hurriedly wipe it away.
When I hear her stories, now, I am filled with sympathy (and, as I have weathered hot flashes myself for years, empathy).
Biases against older women are not only toxic for society as a whole, but they’re also bad for all of us as individuals. If you build up a pessimistic attitude toward menopause and those who are in it, research shows this may actually manifest as worse symptoms. In other words: nobody wins. Think of all the more interesting questions I could have asked Cher.
When I entered menopause — and you don’t “go through” menopause, you enter it and stay there — I made two vows. One was to normalize this life transition by talking about it openly, casually, and often. We need to break down the needless stigma and shame around this natural life transition, one that will be experienced by an estimated one billion people by 2025.
No more cracks about the Golden Girls, either — because my other vow is to support and uplift my menopausal sisters. Language matters, and my careless “jokes” needlessly devalue them.
No: needlessly devalue us.
Jancee Dunn is a New York Times bestselling author, veteran health journalist, current New York Times columnist, and author of the new book Hot and Bothered: What No One Tells You About Menopause and How To Feel Like Yourself Again.
