My friend sounded proud. Real proud, when she announced that the heterosexual couple, who had been trying for over two years to start a family, had finally succeeded.
“My son is pregnant!” she excitedly exclaimed to everyone in earshot at the local dog park. Neighbors reacted with excitement and glee, amplified by spontaneous shouts of “Congratulations!”
But not me.
I had never heard a pregnancy announced that way. Sure, “We are pregnant,” has sometimes accompanied such announcements, but even those had thrown me into chronic states of confusion, picturing a mother writhing in pain during delivery, while the father stands alongside her without breaking as much as a sweat.
But this, where the holder, the keeper, the nurturer — the only one who is risking her life where an average of 260,000 women die each year during childbirth and pregnancy worldwide, becomes invisible, obliterated, vaporized, even? Absolutely not! My mouth dropped open in response, but no words came out.
“You’re the only one who reacted that way,” the proud soon-to-be grandmother glared at me.
Exactly! And that, my friend, is the problem!
This was, in fact, in stark opposition to her humbling announcement two years earlier when she told me her “daughter-in-law had a miscarriage.” Then, her son’s wife was awarded total responsibility, every painful bit of it. My spontaneous response, back then, was one of compassion and empathy. We even hugged.
So today, in response to this latest announcement, I could have just quietly walked away, overlooked it, tossed it into the trash pile of inappropriate attributions. And I would have, if it had not been for a much larger, baseless, and underlying quandary.
Too often, when a woman has difficulties becoming pregnant, she is held entirely responsible. “Barren,” “Empty,” “Unwomanly,” are just a few of the derogatory labels lodged at her. Yet, when she quickly becomes pregnant, the man eagerly accepts full responsibility. “Desirable,” Potent,” “Virile,” he is hailed. Even health insurance companies encourage these “One-shot wonders” by providing coverage for the pill. The little blue one, that is. Viagra enables many men who would otherwise lay barren to spread their sperm widely and repeatedly. “No emptiness for me!” men proudly proclaim.
So how, exactly, did this dichotomy develop?
Let’s start at the very beginning. Menstruation. Without it, pregnancy would not exist. Nor would you, me, or the entire world’s population. And while I do not dare to challenge, in any way, the famously satirical essay, “If Men Could Menstruate,” written by Gloria Steinem in 1978 where she pollizes dominant, sexist attitudes toward menstruation, satire still has its place. And for me, this became most apparent in my college classroom.
Teaching the course, Psychology of Women, to a room full of over 40 undergraduate students at a US-based university, the required textbook included the topic of menstruation. So, I arrived prepared, as any woman would, with a sanitary napkin. Removing it from my briefcase, I instructed my students to pass it around. “Everyone has to touch it,” I directed. “But don’t worry,” I mused, “It’s unused.” That’s when the satire, or more aptly, the parody, began. One male student transformed it into a makeshift bookmark, another into a sweatband for his forehead, and a third into a paper airplane once realizing this particularly high-tech brand sported wings on both ends. But this new-fangled mobile device didn’t make it even halfway across the room, crashing down into the bottom of a bookshelf, where it remained. No one dared pick it up, not even the women, who were most experienced handling it. Sighing, snickering, and nervous jittering spontaneously followed, with most girls refusing to even make eye contact with the ill-fated craft.
And who could blame them? Sanitary products with brand names like Poise, Whisper, and Always Discreet line the ‘Feminine Hygiene’ shelves, pronouncing women’s unique ability to procreate as a humiliation, an indignity, a disgrace. And, even among our female friends, we are often too timid to mention it by its true name, instead choosing discreet euphemisms like “My Friend,” “Aunt Flow,” “Shark Week,” “On The Rag,” or “Riding the Cotton Pony” to describe its monthly arrival.
So, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that although menstruation is still sidelined, menopause, which marks the end of menstruation, is suddenly not. In fact, it is now a hot topic, and I’m not just referring to the paralyzing flashes of heat often accompanying it. In case you haven’t noticed, the menopause market has arrived as a relatively recent and building business case in the workplace. Catalyst, the global women’s research organization, recently published a report showing increasing organizational support for employees “going through this life transition” because it also benefits innovation, engagement, and job satisfaction. Essentially, and most importantly, recognizing the existence of menopause increases a company’s bottom line.
Who knew?
As if that wasn’t shocking enough, it is now being advertised in newspapers, subway cars, and even on a gigantic billboard in New York’s Times Square exclaiming “It’s Time To Talk About Menopause!” And don’t tell me you missed Menopause Month in October, or didn’t click onto any of the new certificate programs enabling anyone (men as well as women) to become a Menopause Coach, or earn a Menopause Care Professional Diploma (MCPD), or become a Menopause Mental Health Provider, or even a Perimenopause and Menopause Coach. American Sports & Fitness even offers a certification program where you “pay only if you pass.”
Of course, this movement has a bright spot, since it signifies that corporate America is finally acknowledging, accepting, and addressing this normal stage of a woman’s life, one that has impacted her emotional and physical health since first arriving on this planet Earth. Yet, one would think that due to this increasing public awareness and corporate support brands would follow suit by labeling their new menopause tracking apps with names that empower, rather than detract. This, however, is not the case. Tea Peppy app was launched by Santander, a menopause benefits provider that allows employees to access support from menopause experts via chat. In case there is any doubt, the word ‘Peppy,’ according to Merriam Webster, can be most aptly used in the following sentences: “At 75 years old, she is as peppy as ever” and “A group of peppy cheerleaders,” and “The song was a peppy little dance number.”And why stop here? There is also Balance, GetUBetter, PauseMeNotand Clu (the ‘e’ is dropped). And lest we not forget the ‘Madam Ovary wellness kit,’ produced by Goop, which makes me wonder why a product supporting women’s wellness would be named after Flaubert’s 1856 novel, Madame Bovarywhich paints the picture of a woman undergoing a painful suicide by arsenic poisoning to escape her hum drum, provincial, married life where not even her extramarital lovers can satisfy her.
I therefore turned, as I often do, to a woman who has always clarified my confusion, especially when it comes to understanding mainstream society’s view of women. Speaking with iconic feminist, author, and activist Gloria Steinem last month, she acknowledged that this new found support for menopause advertising was confusing to her as well, inquiring, “Why would menopause be more celebrated than menstruation since women are more valued in our youth?”
Why indeed?
Searching for reliable and valid research on this subject propelled me to turn to academia for some clues. That’s where I discovered the peer-reviewed journal article, “Me.No.Pause: Anxieties and fantasies of aging and femininity in contemporary menopause advertising” (Feminism & Psychology, 2025). The researchers found that advertisements about menopause persuade women to relate to it in three central ways: defy, disavow, and embrace. Examining 20 outdoor, print, television, and online advertisements, specifically, they found these messages “tap into wider contemporary anxieties around aging including women’s loss of power over their bodies by controlling and denying menopause, reinforcing the imperative to deny aging, resecuring patriarchal heteronormative notions of youthful femininity, desirability, and economic productivity, and placing responsibility of managing menopause solely on women.” Essentially, even as women are exhorted to embrace menopause, they are still asked to defy and deny it by drinking from the “fountain of youth,” supporting the patriarchal notion that femininity, desirability, and economic productivity are all tied to a woman’s youth. So not only does patriarchy continue to take credit for successful conceptions, it is also controlling the messaging around women’s inevitable inability to conceive due to aging.
In response, it’s seems only fitting to add an alternative definition to menopause, one designed by a famous, feminist author who wrote a dystopian novel about women being stripped of their rights and freedoms by a totalitarian theocracy:
“Menopause. A pause while you reconsider men.”
– Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale
AMEN!!
About the Author: Lori Sokol, PhD, is an award-winning writer and Executive Director of Women’s eNews.
