Some profanity ahead… (oh, and this is going somewhere good ;)
I was on a brilliant panel at the University of Birmingham Dubai this week, where we talked about a new way to talk about menopause, and menopause at work.
I felt like I was drinking ice cold water and standing in a cold breeze and getting a kind hug, all at the same time.
I’m going to write about that, and soon.
As a starting point for this discussion, at the center of the event, was an appearance by Dr Pilar Rojas Gaviria and Dr Camilla Quental, who along with Celine del Buccia published their first paper, Menopause and the Dialectic of Zest: Breaking the mold of organizational irrelevance in the journal Gender Work and Organisation.
I covered this paper here when it was released in May, falling in love with the way Pilar, Camilla and Celine approached the entire topic and just generally losing all sense of objectivity on the matter. Because I am a woman going through this and how we talk about it matters to me and the way we have been talking about it hurts me deeply, and I felt like they saw me, and they saw you too.
You can imagine how it felt to hear them speak about it in person, and then sit on a panel with them, and then talk to them after. Better than that time I met Bobby Lee after his show in Abu Dhabi, or interviewed Dev Patel in Dubai, or got a hug from Liza Minelli outside a Broadway theatre.
I’ll get into the Dialectic of Zest, I will, but I need more time, and to wrap my head around it first. To do it properly.
For now, my role on the panel was to try and answer this question: How can the media help drive inclusivity (by shaping attitudes and educating) in the UAE? How can this help build a sense of entitlement among women when asking employers what they need?
And that sorry situation is what I’m going to talk about here, today. And it is not limited to the UAE.
I told those gathered that the media is a big part of the problem in a variety of ways. Example: This week I wrote an article about menopause shedding the shame and stigma it has carried in the Middle East for my former employer The National, and even though I pushed it from 1,100 to 1,500 words, and even though I am so happy they published it, I couldn’t even begin to touch what this topic is all about.
You get one kick at the can on these things. That will be their last menopause article for awhile, I’ll bet all the dirhams in my bank account. (I’m also happy to be proven wrong) I’ve published a lot of op-eds and articles in the last month; I don’t know how many more are possible. No newspaper or magazine has a reporter or editor working for them who knows much about this in the UAE; and even if they did, you have to cover a range of subjects and there are many begging for attention.
Just to give you a sense of what this is like, the media’s wild skepticism about some new things and insane embracing of others: I wrote the first article on Facebook for my old newspaper chain Sun Media back in the day. Facebook’s sole PR rep at the time, Brandee Barker, was my first “friend” and showed me how to use it. A few weeks later, when I wanted to write about it again though, I was discouraged. Because it was an online thing, you know? Online was not cool. Not going to be a real thing. (Threatened much, guys?) I also wanted to profile Avril Lavigne when she was breaking out, a sort of local girl, but my editor who lived in the suburbs and thought he knew everything said no. Then when she was nominated for a Grammy, I had to join the rest of the media schumcks during the lamest of “viewing parties” at her old high school in Napanee. Twelve years ago my science-based article on sound healing sat for months in the queue – “it’s too woo-woo”, I was told – and only ran when they had a emergency hole to fill.
Now we are tripping over gongs and bronze bowls, and the science behind them. Which we had then too.
It’s like that with things editors don’t know or understand in newsrooms.
Truly. Still.
I told them the media is irresponsible, and I described the myth of the 900,000 women leaving the workforce due to menopause (sorry if you believed that one, or “almost a million”, or even one in 10, or any other number that we can’t possibly know yet but I see almost daily). This misinfo lives on in the The Guardian and The Times and so many other places I used to want to work.
Even though it has been thoroughly, to use a word I hate, “debunked”.
“There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.” – Anthropologist and writer Margaret Mead
One of the reasons I have such a crush on Magnificent Midlife’s Rachel Lankester, founder of MenoClarity, is that it didn’t make any sense to her at all either but she did something about it. She explained that the 900,000 figure was extrapolated from a BUPA survey of 1,000 women asked about four different things, menopause being only one of them. I have known the kind of overly certain copy editor who would be the first person to query someone else and yet be able to fuck up an extrapolation like that, with repercussions that will last for literally years to come, and still be able to sleep soundly at night.
(With the amount of sleep I’ve lost in the last 30 years over the possibility of being wrong, which is necessary for every journalist, and in the last dozen due to perimenopause, I’ve always thought this particularly unfair.)
I told them that the media may print corrections, when they have to, but they act mostly as a pack and the pack takes years to walk back their gross exaggerations and misperceptions, and you only need to look at a long line of crises and horrors and injustices including the one that’s happening right now, to find examples. For some reason you can make a Netflix series a few years down the road that everyone can shake their head at, but try getting one mainstream news outlet to stick their neck out from groupthink at the time and use the power of their platform to say ‘this is not right’.
I told them that I still see headlines reading “everything you need to know about menopause”, which is impossible and ridiculous, and that just shows you how little anyone working at those places knows. And that this transition is so just perfect for messing up by the media, because it’s nuanced, and individualized, and differs from region to region and country to country. Because there are some tidy through lines, and they include the ability to install fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about future disease and a ready, long-suffering villain to blame now: the demon that is our hormones. You can write headlines with phrases like “fell off a cliff” and “early-onset dementia” and no one will come and tell you how irresponsible you are being.
You can have Doctor Menopause Gurus literally serving as tools of the patriarchy while using terms like deficiency syndrome, disease and pathology. You get to create the problem and fix it at the same time, and avoid getting too bogged down in facts and say things that sound plausible – women used to die at 50, for example – but don’t make any common or factual sense.
(Someone on my IG said she wondered why people get so hung up on the “menopause is a deficiency” angle. I made a Reel telling her it’s because if you can’t get basic facts straight – and of course we live in a world where you can have all the facts straight and people still won’t believe you, because they are aligned somewhere else – then why would I trust you to interpret complicated data and guide decisions about what to do with my body? But also, seriously, fuck anyone who tries to call me or my sisters deficient in any way. We never were and we aren’t and we never will be. We don’t have to make things up to demonstrate menopause can be serious.)
I told them that I call myself a recovering journalist, for these things, and so very many others in my long career that I am still proud of but no longer see the same way ever since the months leading up to my 50th birthday. That’s when I watched irresponsible, biased, hopelessly one-sided, shaming propaganda coverage of a global pandemic – and its all-purpose solution – that seemed to have been born out of a thin Hollywood blockbuster. And the world I knew began to crumble, and the scales started falling from my eyes.
What I didn’t talk about on the panel, because it’s just too depressing, is how the medicalization of menopause, which is exactly what Pilar and Camilla and Celine are trying to transcend with the Dialectic of Zest, is so thoroughly and indelibly being driven by industry that I don’t know that we will ever see clearly in our lifetime.
I was asked recently by a hormone therapy provider to help them get an article in a major media outlet. They had a contact; I just had to write it. It’s the kind of name I’d get likes and kudos and ooohs and awwws for, and that would buff up my CV, LinkedIn and IG profile. And no one would notice the glaring brand mention in the middle of it, I can almost guarantee.
I guess I’d just hand them my integrity and cash a cheque and go on my merry way.
(I don’t think the company even suggested payment, if you can believe it. I mean, if I’m going to sell my soul, shouldn’t I get back and front end?)
The tentacles of industry are everywhere, like this; medicalization of menopause is their primary tool.
It sure doesn’t serve us: beautiful, wise, confused, tired, possibly brain foggy and hot flashing, hopeful and experienced us.
This is the world we live in. These are the people – the people we need, God, yes we need what they provide, I’m not ever arguing otherwise – who have the fiscal heft to access, buy, shift, alter and steer an entire conversation in thousands of ways, without us ever knowing.
And they are.
I didn’t have many answers to the media question yesterday.
People are trying, that’s about it.
So we need a better way.
And more of us doing it.
Happy Menopause Day.
AMx
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Oh how I wish that all journalists approached their work like this….
“There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.” – Anthropologist and writer Margaret Mead
Thank you for this powerful quote - - it partners beautifully with a word I'm exploring through art: Abscission - the normal separation of flowers, fruit, and leaves from plants and trees.
>>Shedding what no longer serves us only makes us more productive.
Also, keep sticking your neck out; your truthful zest is what the world needs!