The Cunts of Red October

Why ‘World Menopause Month’ makes my blood boil

October is apparently ‘World Menopause Month’.

How do I know this?

Because the BBC told me.

In an article, I should add, that for about three long paragraphs actively avoids using the words ‘women’ or ‘woman’.

What is it about those words that seems to leave a dirty taste in media mouth these days?

Well, I won’t be deterred from using them, by patriarchy masquerading as diversity. Just as I refuse to be told by some well-meaning Mary who doesn’t know her clitoris from her labia, preferring ‘vagina’ as an incorrect catch-all-term, that I can’t call a cunt a cunt.

This woman ain’t for pussyfooting.

My sex. My body. My choice of language.

Fear not ladies, if you’re not quite there yet - the menopause - for these days we also have the ‘peri menopause’, a sort of ‘menopause for beginners’, a Skipper to its more established best seller Barbie. It’s a term that always makes me think of ‘peri peri’ hot sauce.

What does ‘peri’ even mean? I was bored enough to Google one day. ‘Around’ or ‘Surrounding’, apparently.

Oh, glad we’ve cleared that up.

So essentially, absolutely fuck all then.

Actually, allow me to translate.

It means ‘more dosh to be made’.

That’s what.

Never before have we seen menopause medicalised the way it is now. Cashing in on the natural concerns women have around it. Grifters Ladies like Davina McCall, Penny Lancaster and the ‘Loose Women’ are wheeled out on daytime TV to ‘help’ us navigate this ‘burden’.

Anyway, this menopause stuff, at 50, feels like something I feel qualified to talk about.

As a female, you live by the rhythm of your menstrual cycle.  In youth, it is subtle, the slight backing track to your burgeoning song, in your thirties, it’s the (in)famous biological clock loudly ‘ticking’.

By the time you reach your forties, the force of hormones has become an inescapable drum n bass.

Life so often becomes geared around when you ovulate, menstruate. You start to live within a rigid timetable of moonspill, becoming so self aware, it’s freaky.

Then suddenly you get to around my age and it’s not about WHEN your ‘Uncle from Russia’ is arriving, but rather…..IF.

It’s an odd feeling not knowing IF it will happen again. Your period. Faithful as a bounding Red Setter and just as (bloody) annoying.

The rhythm that has for so long called the tune for everything…..sex drive, emotions, self image, diet, tiredness ……. starts playing hide and seek. You’re not sure if it’s left your building.

Your last period isn’t gonna yell

“Right…..see ya, I’m off! Was nice being part of your life for 38 years!”

It leaves the party like a stumbling drunk who keeps coming back to say

“Oh yeah…..and another thing….”

It’s the red bus that *may* or *may not* frequent your lane. And there you are, in the dark.

Fuck. What now?

Is that it?

Has the mothership left the mothership? Is there another ship?

No?

Like Bowie, I’m often left loving the alien.

As women (yeah WOMEN not people), we’re never sure whether to love or hate this cycle. One friend told me she liked getting her period because;

“You can’t just carry on going up and up, can you? Its a relief to come down”.

To her it was a welcome sigh. Release. I always tried to think about it differently after talking to her.

But whatever our relationship with it, I’m sure many women must have similar thoughts to mine around menopause. Namely, am I about to dehydrate quicker than a dodgy mushroom in an airing cupboard?

Am I becoming ‘a crone’?

I mean, I like crones. I do. When they pop up in fairytales, the ‘wise women’, they’re cool aren’t they? Even the dumpy Disney Godmother types, I like them. In someone else’s story.

Just not quite sure I’m ready to be one yet, y’know?

And I guess my 50’s is about navigating that road.

I don’t believe I need their wonder pills, patches, their fancy therapies and their pregnant horse piss. Of course, I absolutely want that stuff to be there for others if they feel they need it.

But I don’t. At the moment.

When I see these grifters blatantly capitalising on a normal female rite of passage, it makes me want to come over all Les Dawson, ‘Cissie and Ada’. To start whispering about ‘the change of life’ and ‘women’s problems’. To hold a mirror to the odious cringe by embracing the antithesis of it.

Back when men dressing up as women didn’t feel like an attack because they didn’t want to BE us. When their parodies were unthreatening because the idea of them as females, was frankly, absurd.

As was the notion that the word ‘women’ would one day be as contentious as, say ‘Palestine’.

But let’s face it, neither of the approaches I’ve just mentioned are the right ones, are they?

Women don’t need to go back to the dark ages of hushed conversations, of mouthing ‘downstairs’ whilst glancing at their nether regions, but neither do we need to feel like victims, like we have an enemy within us we need to defeat.

There is a fine line between acknowledging that some women (NOT ‘people’) don’t cope well with menopause, and normalising that not coping, seeing problems as inevitabilities.

At what point is this?

Like all things in #clownworld, these things seem to reach a happy medium, a state of sense and reason, before hurtling downhill quicker than a TV presenter’s career.

Remember a year or two ago when there was a supply issue with HRT drugs and the media tried to promote it as a ‘crisis’? It was like a re-run of the loo rolls shortage of ’21.

There it was again, the familiar refrain of  ‘giveth and taketh away’ but with far more at stake.  So many women, men and kids are now hooked on hormones as Big Pharma plies its wares as remedy for every eventuality. The problem-reaction-solution we’ve all come to know as its hallmark.

Give me Cissie and Ada over Davina and co any day. No-one had a book to flog, a podcast to promote …….and they were a lot bleedin’ funnier too. Do far more for my middle aged mood swings than Rod Stewart’s wife ever did.

To summarise, Red October, sorry ‘World Menopause Month’ is hardly revolutionary.

It’s brought to you by the same people who tried to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

She didn’t need them.

And neither do you.

Thanks for reading. I now have more than 300 posts on substack! If you enjoyed this piece, you can find more of my opinion pieces under the heading ‘opinion pieces’ on my home page.