There are women who lose their jobs because they are unable to keep up with everything in the most busy phase of life, namely caring for aging parents, having teenage children, and a career that requires moments to reap rewards: and are instead ignored by their male colleagues. And there are architects who get caught in the heat on the construction site, in front of the workers, who lose authority in the context of all humans because they don’t understand what is going on. Or there is a sexual stigma where, according to some interpretations, a person loses the male gaze. These and other amenities, as in dystopian tales, echo the advice that, during the Middle Ages, was offered to menopausal women: to devote themselves to retirement and donate all their possessions to the church, to cover their backs and not be immediately assimilated by witches. But there’s much more.
“More freedom and desire: why menopause now makes women smile”
by Maria Novella De Luca
The voices were silent so far
So we listened to the different voices of menopausal women, and found that we gradually became more affected and even moved by how this rarely told phase of life plays host to shadow and light, solitude and freedom, and dense, resonant babble, as if a lexicon did not yet exist, but there was so much to say. Realizing how menopause is still unexplored knowledge. Not inherited by mothers and grandmothers, in the end it doesn’t have much of a feminist theme though. Tapped by the pages of certain literature, in that powerful image Maria Ruefle created it My personal propertyfrom anthropologists Margaret Mead which attributes extraordinary powers to post-menopause, of course Susan Sontag when he emphasizes the richness of adulthood at a moment that is late for the biological clock but also dawning.
What a physical liberation
Among so many voices, we gradually feel less alone in this storm that even gynecologists don’t know how to explain how to protect ourselves. And because as Margareth Mead said: “There is no greater force in the world than the enthusiasm of a post-menopausal woman” with the enormous enthusiasm of those who change their way of thinking, of those who finally talk about something that has been kept secret or hidden, and above all with the extraordinary physical freedom, namely the relief of no longer being prey to hormonal changes, we are witnessing a cultural revolution in the topic; an article like this would have been unthinkable ten years ago. In fact, we witness and act as spokesmen for events that are not labeled as menopause but instead express this enormous power, this enormous enthusiasm of the age starting from the periclimaterium onwards – in a life that in Western countries expanded extraordinarily. We spend almost half our lives without menstrual flow: this is an opportunity to re-read the great menopausal literary figures, Hecuba, Coryphea because she was the keeper of wisdom but also Lysistrata who wanted a kind of communism over land and people and who was a bringer of peace.
A new lineup of ourselves
A female image of authority that comes from life experience but also from the body, from the different ways in which the body in menopause begins to speak to us, hormones change, desires and desires change, a certain silence inside and outside becomes deeper, and before the cognitive fog and many symptoms (seventy-two), and everything that seems to make you drunk but then lo and behold, calm comes because you don’t care about many of the things that tormented you before. Similar to the “butterfly woman” told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes (The woman who ran with the wolves) we fly, tears must be left behind. Among the wrinkles and dryness and other discomforts, there are also smiles, and laughter, like something that always manages to be squeezed out by the other. And there is an urgent need to control these new lines within us, with time having changed its pace and dimensions, no longer racing with the arrival of blood, each month becoming wider and slower and more precious. With its chiaroscuro, menopause is a great time.
