It started last Wednesday, with an email from the gym. I’d just attended a class and had been feeling rather good about myself. But had I, the message warned, been paying enough attention to the threat of “meno belly”? This is, it seems, something very scientific and specific, not to be confused with “putting on a bit of weight because you’re older”. Unfortunately, however, much of the  advice surrounding it sounds like a million other lectures on not letting yourself go.  

Later that day I bought some shampoo — the same one I normally get. I did not select a menopause-specific product, which worried me. Was I now going to have terrible hair, as well as a bloated stomach? The existence of this pressure also annoyed me, but it could have been because I didn’t buy any menopause almonds for “mood support”, either. In fact, when it comes to acquiring suitable products and practices for navigating perimenopause without becoming a miserable misshapen minger, it seems I have a lot to learn. 

Women of my generation, we are often told, are approaching menopause with more knowledge and openness than ever before. Yet confronted with menopause shampoo, there was a part of me that couldn’t help feeling I was ten years old again. Then as now, I found myself being invited to learn about a significant stage of the female lifecycle, one which, up until that very moment, has been shrouded in shame and secrecy. But — lucky me! — I’ve reached that stage at just the right time. Finally, everyone is talking about it! And there is practical advice in getting through it! It just so happens that much of said advice is laced with hints and tips that seem less to do with wellbeing, more to do with becoming — or in the case of menopause, remaining — a suitably attractive, inoffensive sexual object. 

Back in the late eighties and early nineties, women my age — then pubescent, now middle-aged — were the targets of a trend in publishing which increasingly reminds me of the current meno-boom. Various “life guides” would appear in the non-fiction section, promising to help us get through this challenging stage of our lives. Unlike earlier, prudish guidance on “becoming a woman”, these books would be “getting real” with some “serious body talk”. I read quite a lot of them. While there was plenty about basic hygiene and choosing the right sanitary protection, what I remember most are the weight charts and “beauty tips”. I’d pore over Every Girl’s Life Guide and How to be a Supergirl and think, not about becoming bigger and stronger, but about how to ward off the threat of becoming grotesque. 

There was a difficulty in distinguishing the good advice from the bad. If the world has treated the female body as other and menstruation has been considered disgusting, you can be very grateful to be told that actually, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. You are normal and wonderful — just as long as you remove all body hair, don’t get spots and don’t get fat. When your body is changing, often dramatically so, precise guidelines on how to manage it can feel like a gift. Indeed, it can feel taboo-breaking, a corrective to the view female bodies are inferior, leaky versions of male ones, hardly deserving of attention in their own right. If the price of changing this is receiving the odd lecture on remaining suitably fragrant, isn’t it worth it? Yet there is a point at which the “taboo breaking” can start to feel like packaging for the main message: be thin, pretty, and smile. Whatever your age, never, ever let up. 

I sense a lot of the same tension in the menopause revolution going on around me now. While there have been obvious examples of companies “menowashing” perfectly ordinary products in order to exploit a newly fashionable market segment — Holland and Barrett’s “menopause almonds” being a case in point — some of it is more subtle. It is true that body shape, hair and skin change as women go through menopause, often in ways that have not been adequately discussed and understood. Nonetheless, just as lessons on skincare and make-up directed at pubescent girls decades ago were only tenuously linked to managing adolescent skin, I can’t help feeling that there is an unpleasant opportunism in play. Just as a diet can be recast as a detox or a health kick, guidance which remains, at core, “keep young and beautiful” can be repackaged as “looking after” your menopausal self. 

… it is less acceptable for women to ease into craggy, saggy old age

The messaging can be very effective. Indeed, there’s a part of me that still thinks I should be buying more “menopausal” products — from moisturisers to Primark pants — if only to show my feminist appreciation for those who recognise female life changes at all. The trouble is, a lack of advice and product ranges has never been clear-cut evidence of whose body is or isn’t being neglected. There have always been more moisturisers for women than for men. They have always been getting more specific, high-tech and “scientifically” proven. This is not because women’s skin has been considered more important, but because it is less acceptable for women to ease into craggy, saggy old age and, knowing this, women will pay. 

As someone who tried to “do: adolescence well (namely, by not gaining weight), I find myself less keen — and a lot more suspicious — about advice on “doing” menopause properly. I did not expect to reach middle age only to find there’s another reason why I am supposed to be obsessing over my belly. The advice sounds well-meaning, but then it always does. As a middle-aged woman, I want to feel at one with my changing body, not to separate from it once more, to view it, once again, as an unstable object to be managed. Is it anti-feminist to say that sometimes, we’re perfectly fine as we are?