Menopause Now
This ain't your mama's menopause. Today, women are weathering the transition with hormones, bioidenticals, exercise, diet, humor, wine ... you name it. We're talking about menopause more than our foremothers did, too. Case in point: This package, which includes the most hilarious essay ever on why menopause doesn't suck, by Odd Mom Out's Jill Kargman; a detailed breakdown on what happens to your body during menopause and what you can do about it; 51 women's menopause journeys, and celebrity takes on post-PMS life. You'll laugh, you'll cry — who knows, you may even flash. It's okay, you're in good company.
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Why Menopause Doesn't Suck
Writer, actor, genius Jill Kargman shares why dreading the inevitable is a big fat waste of time.
By Jill Kargman
I’ve been warned about menopause: I’m going to wake up in a Jill-shaped sweat stain, I won’t be able to sleep and I’ll have a dried-up box with sand falling out like it’s the Sahara. My cooter, already a wizard’s sleeve after three vaginal births, will have a Ghostbusters sign on it, and dust bunnies will form in my ute as I become as irritable as I was during my pregnancies. But there will be no birth presents, just gray pubes sprouting.
But I refuse to flip out about menopause like it’s some old-lady Grim Reaper coming with her scythe to rip away my fertility and leave me barren and crusty. By the way, bitch: Go for it. For the last 11 years, I had that copper IUD that gave me periods that left my bedsheet looking like the flag of Japan. Good fucking riddance to that monthly tsunami.
However, while it’s easy to bid adieu to the Crimson Tide, most of us aren’t psyched about getting wrinkles or having less energy. But if we dread the inevitable, we will inevitably be depressed. So, my method at 45 is to embrace whatever Mother Nature throws my way — while giving myself a little leeway to adjust if things get completely out of hand. It’s better than the alternative! Not to be cheesy, but if you frame shit with gratitude, it’s easier not to sweat the small stuff like losing hair on your head while having it reappear on your mons veneris after spending thousands of dollars to laser it off.
I had my first hot flash at my son’s super-preppy all-boys school class cocktail party in a lavish townhouse. I was conversing with the headmaster, who already saw me as some tattooed weirdo in black leather, when I felt dizzy, started to perspire and slipped out into the snowy night. The next one came, of all places, at the Met Gala, moments before Madonna was performing; my pits were legit Niagara and my husband, Harry, fashioned a fan out of a stack of napkins as I went to find a seat. It was scary and disorienting, but I popped back up when I saw Madge, because, hey, she’s sexy at 60 and didn’t let menopause stop her!
I also had a common perimenopausal affliction known as “frozen shoulder,” which was NO picnic. And while I whined about cortisone shots and physical therapy, I stopped when I remembered that there were other women going through round four of chemo. Who cares about a little pain? People can always have it worse, and only more so as we age.
I won’t surrender to the notion that menopause sucks, because I’ve found women I admire who have gone through it and still look fabulous, project strength and have something badass to express. In season two of Fleabag, I felt so liberated by Kristin Scott Thomas’s bar stool chatter about menopause being freeing; she’s someone I’ve always thought was regal and gorgeous, and now more than ever in her solidity and confidence. They can take away our vaginal moisture, but they can’t take our cheekbones!
Plus, there are so many ways to offset the cruel march of time now. There’s fitness and eating right and acupuncture and a new stretch place that pulls you into a human pretzel. There are even shots for your clit that can quintuple your orgasms! It’s true. I tried them!
Raise your hand if your desire to bone has decreased with perimenopause or menopause. Exactly. Same. Yet after I put out, I’m always glad I did because I feel connected to my husband with whom I have a great relationship. A parallel point: Last year I had a double mastectomy after my mammo revealed two precancerous lumps. Three weeks later, I found I had a breast cancer gene. Getting my cans removed didn’t bother me; they were never part of my identity to begin with. However, one bummer was that my nips were kinda like two more unresponsive clits, but up top — when they scooped out the boobage, they excised the mysterious arousal nerves behind them.
But even the sexual side effects of menopause won’t deter me. My solution? The O-Shot, which is offered at VSPOT Medi Spa, a medical spa for your down yonders in New York City. The O-Shot uses PRP (platelet-rich plasma) derived from your blood via centrifuge. Allegedly, the dude who invented this in the 1960s later got erectile dysfunction in his advanced age. His nurse, who was his wife, injected some of his PRP into his dick, and it was rock hard ever after. Which made her want some, so he injected it in to her clit. I know what you’re thinking: no fucking thanks. And it did hurt (though I was numbed topically and via nitrous oxide). But by the time I got home, I wanted to slide down the banister and for the first time I was the one who initiated sex, not counting after Peaky Blinders, which you all must binge immediately as it makes you legit want to wring out your Hanky Pankies.
But I digress. Menopause is also a great way to connect with friends! Fuck this whispered shit in the shadows. We need to shout about our symptoms so we can laugh about them! If you’re alone in this just posting rosé on a filtered flamingo float on the ’gram pretending everything is easy-breezy, it will suck. But if you take the dread and own it, it’s weirdly empowering. Por ejemplo, to reappropriate my changing corpus, I got new tattoos to decorate my body and I’m obsessed. I also started collecting harnesses (which I wear over a J.Crew shirt). They are like armor for this shit show world, and I feel protected and strong in them. If you evolve your style and weed the friendship garden down to the real ones who will share this stuff, then the menopausal years are actually a great opportunity to become the balsamic reduction of yourself. Go to Modena; that shit’s in barrels for decades, and with the age comes the flavor.
Dive into menopause! More time on earth means more experience and more you-ness. Think of all the billions of women before us who were pushing daisies by our age! We are here, we are badass—and we have O-Shots.
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51 Women and Their Menopause Journeys
The average age of menopause is 51, so we interviewed 51 women in various stages of transition about what has surprised them most. Can you say sweaty shins?
By Mara Santilli
- I actually had no idea how awful I had been feeling, until I started to feel better!Liz G.
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Menopause Cures Through the Ages
Before menopause even had a name — Charles Pierre Louis De Gardanne coined the term in 1821, with the first article on the subject — it had a bizarre range of treatments.
By Courtney Rubin
Liquor
Historically the therapy was liquor, which helped women sleep and took the edge off anxiety — and painful intercourse. One could argue it is still an unofficial and by no means effective cure, but there you have it.
Vicarious Menstruations
In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, doctors believed the solution to the “hysterick fits” they observed in women ages 45 to 50 was to restore the menses. This they did by so-called vicarious menstruations: purgatives, bleeding and enemas.
Organotherapy
During the late 19th-century, when fascination with the mysterious substances assumed to exist in the endocrine glands of both men and women was at an all-time high, organotherapy emerged. In 1898, fresh cow ovaries were fed for the first time to a young woman who’d had her ovaries removed. By 1910, this treatment had arrived in the U.S., where women were often given the desiccated ovaries of ewes, cows and mares (and it was believed that the most effective ones were those harvested at the animals’ full sexual maturity). Sometimes minced ovaries were combined with alcohol to make “ovarian extracts.”
Lydia Pinkham’s Herbal Supplement
Another popular treatment was cooked up — literally — by a woman named Lydia Pinkham on her Massachusetts stove. She mixed unicorn root, life root, black cohosh, pleurisy root and fenugreek seed and preserved it in 19 percent alcohol, selling it in 1875 as Vegetable Compound that was “A Sure Cure for Prolapsus Uteri or falling of the Womb, and all Female Weaknesses, including Leucorrhea, Painful Menstruation, Inflammation, and Ulceration of the Womb, Irregularities, Floodings, etc.” Pinkham’s face was on all the bottles; she was famous enough to be immortalized in a folk song and a drinking song. Today you can still buy Lydia Pinkham Herbal Supplement, though in a vastly different formula. The high alcohol content has been ditched, and motherwort, gentian, Jamaican dogwood, licorice and dandelion swapped in for some of the other ingredients. And there is a new warning label: Not evaluated by the FDA.
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Relief from Menopause
By Courtney Rubin
Three words: “See your doctor,” says Margaret Nachtigall, MD, a clinical associate professor in NYU Langone Health’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “Don’t assume it’s menopause until you know that’s what it is.” If you’re, say, 48 and experiencing irregular bleeding or period cessation, it could be a hormonal imbalance, a polyp or any number of health problems that might require treatment.
1. Hormone therapy
In 2002, when the Women’s Health Initiative seemed to show that women who underwent hormone therapy had an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, strokes and blood clots, hormone therapy went from being “the best thing since sliced bread to ‘hormone therapy is going to kill you,’ and that’s when everyone bailed,” says Stephanie S. Faubion, MD, the director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health. But hormone therapy — it’s not called hormone replacement therapy anymore, unless it’s for a woman in her 20s or 30s — can be a safe and healthy treatment, she says.
“I think women are incredibly under treated with hormone therapy,” Faubion says. Part of this, she says, is because today’s providers aren’t educated about menopause anymore, and residents don’t feel prepared to manage hormone therapy, according to a 2019 study she co-authored in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Estrogen is fantastic for maintaining bone strength and bone health. It may decrease cataracts (remember, there are estrogen receptors in the eyes), and it certainly decreases hot flashes, improves moods and may help memory, Nachtigall says. (Estrogen affects short-term memory; many studies show that women who take estrogen have better cognitive functioning.) It also improves the elasticity of skin: A French study found that skin cells survived better when surrounded by estrogen, and that women taking the hormone had fewer wrinkles.
And it can help women avoid fat redistribution. “Estrogen is not a weight-loss drug. You can’t take a pill and watch your waistline go down,” Faubion says. But women on estrogen from the time they enter menopause retain the shape they had (assuming their diet does not change drastically). However, the timing of hormone therapy is critical, researchers learned from crunching the WHI data. If women begin the estrogen within five or six years of their period stopping, there’s a decrease in heart disease. But if they wait more than nine years, there’s an 11 percent increase. Wait more than 20 and there’s about a 20 percent increase.
So, one of the big questions when considering hormone therapy is: When was my last period? “There’s a window of opportunity — early is good, and late is bad,” Faubion says. If your last period was more than five years ago, “I’m going to be wondering if it’s the right thing,” Nachtigall adds.
Who should not take estrogen? Women with estrogen-receptor-positive tumors (for example, certain types of breast cancer) or those who have been treated for them, as well as women with liver disease, because estrogen is processed in the liver. (If a woman with liver disease really needs estrogen, a patch is a better approach than an oral agent, because of the way it’s absorbed bypasses the liver.) Anyone with a genetic predisposition to blood clotting — or who has had a pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis — is also not a good candidate for estrogen, which is procoagulant. Ditto smokers, because smoking itself increases blood clotting. For these groups of people, as well as those who prefer to go the non-hormonal route, bioidentical drug therapy is available, though a Harvard Women's Health Watch study debunked the idea that bioidenticals are any safer.
2. The "anti-estrogen" solution
So, back for a moment to that Women’s Health Initiative data, in which more than 25,000 women were given either estrogen or estrogen plus progesterone. When researchers broke down the findings by age, they found their initial conclusions had been wrong. Taking estrogen alone actually decreased the incidence of breast cancer by 23 percent, while taking estrogen plus progesterone slightly increased it. So why not just abandon the progesterone? Women with a uterus, meaning those who have not had a hysterectomy, need small amounts of it. They can’t take estrogen alone because it makes the lining of the uterus hyperplastic, which may lead to endometrial cancer. A more recent solution is an anti-estrogen. It’s sold as Duavee and is “an attractive option for being able to take estrogen without the need for progesterone,” Nachtigall says. (The Food and Drug Administration approved Duavee in 2013. Technically it’s called a conjugated estrogens/bazedoxifene;bazedoxifene is an estrogen receptor modulator.)
3. Topical Estrogen
Estrogen administered vaginally is a separate category and can be safely used by just about everyone (except women with certain types of breast cancer), regardless of how long it’s been since the onset of menopause. It reduces vaginal dryness and lowers the pH of the vagina, bringing it back to premenopausal levels, which improves the bacteria living there and helps prevent infections.
4. Diet and exercise
Because estrogen is an insulin sensitizer, the ideal diet in menopause is as low-glycemic as possible: low in carbs, high in protein, with three meals and two snacks to keep an even glucose level throughout the day. (This means limiting pasta, rice, bread and alcohol.)
Exercise is key — at least 30 minutes per day, Faubion says. Besides helping to maintain weight (after menopause, cutting calories is the only way to lose it), exercise can help take the sugar you eat and ferry it to the cell surface, where it can meet with insulin receptors. The more exercise you do, the more sensitive you become to insulin — meaning your need for insulin decreases, says Nachtigall. People who exercise also tend to have better moods and sleep better.
5. Health and beauty products
A whole cottage industry has sprung up around counteracting the effects (laxity, lines) of estrogen-deficient skin (as reported on by The Plum). In addition to collagen-boosting skincare, lines like Pause make cooling hot-flash sprays, which offer solid temporary relief.
6. Nothing at all!
When considering hormone therapy, it helps to keep in mind that most of the changes brought about by the absence of estrogen are slow in onset; you may not be particularly bothered by them. “There are a lot of women who opt not to be on hormone therapy and do fine,” Nachtigall says. Conversely, women who had bad PMS or postpartum blues will probably feel the effects of menopause more because they are more sensitive to hormonally related mood changes. (Estrogen won’t treat a major depression — you need an antidepressant for that — but women who take the hormone prophylactically for mood changes do well with it, Faubion says.)
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Menopause of the Rich and Famous
Everyone loves hearing what famous people have to say about their reproductive systems!
By Courtney Rubin
Angelina Jolie
“I actually love being in menopause. I haven’t had a terrible reaction to it, so I’m very fortunate. I feel older, and I feel settled being older.”
Gillian Anderson
“I felt like my life was falling apart around me. Friends suggested it might be hormonal. I was used to being able to balance a lot of things, and all of a sudden, I felt completely overwhelmed. How wonderful would it be if we could get to a place where we are able to have these conversations openly and without shame, so we don’t feel like we’re going mad or alone in any of the symptoms we are having.”
Belinda Carlisle
“The worst thing for me were the hot flashes, which started off not being so bad. Then they got to be debilitating, and I would carry a change of clothes in the car.”
Whoopi Goldberg
“Menopause can be hard to deal with because it really is a shock when it hits you. There’s no countdown. It’s just: boom. All those years bitching about my period and when it stopped, I was stunned to realize how much my womanhood was tied to it.”
Emma Thompson
“It’s such a cold night, and it’s the only time I’ve actively been grateful for menopause. I’ve been entirely comfortable.” (Said while accepting an award on a freezing cold night.)
Gwyneth Paltrow
“I think menopause needs a bit of rebranding. I remember when my mother went through menopause, and it was, like, such a big deal and there was grief around it for her and all of these emotions. I don’t think we have in our society a great example of an aspirational menopausal woman.”
Julie Walters
“It was like a chimney and came from the base of my spine. Every take there’d be, ‘Stop! She’s having a flash!’ At the National, I’d come off stage for a quick change and have to shout, ‘Garth, the tray!’ and this guy would come with this big tin tray and fan me.”
Margaret Cho
“I’m going through menopause, and it’s a gateway drug to happiness. I’m at a certain age. It’s given me perspective. I love it.”