The official word of 2025 was “rage-bait”, which isn’t a word. My guess is that if the relevant committee had included more women, it might have been “perimenopause”, which wasn’t a word until recently.
I’ve written before about my reservations about the new menopause narratives, my objection to the way they insist that women’s minds and bodies are broken and useless and require medical repair, often in just the form that the storytellers happen to be selling. The vocabulary of this sorry tale is revealing: women – apparently all women – need “hormone replacement therapy”, as if the natural body has broken down and must be “replaced” by pharmacology. Like the “incompetent cervix” that makes it hard for some women to carry a pregnancy, the terminology of women’s health is all about failure.
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am glad to live in the era of vaccination, contraception, antibiotics and new generations of cancer treatment. I try, by and large, to live an evidence-based life. But I am also a critical thinker and reader and it’s always worth asking who profits from a trend. In the case of the “perimenopause”, the answer is clearly that some women do, those who suffer distressing symptoms with which hormone therapy is proven to help. Also the companies making and selling such therapies profit, which is how the pharmaceutical industry – for good or ill – works.
But when a drug regime is prescribed for an entire generation, to solve every present and future physical and mental trouble arising in every body with XX chromosomes between the ages of 35 and 60, there is something afoot. Some of the symptoms I’ve heard women and healthcare providers assign to “perimenopause” would merit urgent investigation in a man or a younger woman, but once we believe that the midlife female body is innately defective, indications of everything from cancer to coercive control just need HRT, plus for good measure – in case we were getting any ideas – restrictive dieting and hard exercise.
[ I’m not against HRT but are we once again medicating women for being angry?Opens in new window ]
I was chatting recently with a friend in her early 30s, telling her about a great day out I’d had with friends in their 60s, how we’d gone hillwalking and planned wilder adventures together. She was delighted to hear that older women could still enjoy hiking and travel because her contemporaries are now living in fear of “perimenopause”, nervously awaiting cognitive decline, rage, incontinence and muscle weakness, dreading the day when remaining capable of basic adult function requires a full-time regime of protein, weight-training, medication and endless expensive potions and supplements.
No, I said, we’re all fine. I have friends who do take HRT and friends who don’t and until we talk about it you wouldn’t know the difference. (No replacement for randomised controlled trials, obviously; you’d hope those who do are the ones who need it and those who don’t, don’t.) We’re mostly more assertive and less patient than we used to be, certainly greyer and saggier, but many of us are stronger and fitter than we were when we were juggling work and childcare. Those who have stayed ambitious are at the top of their careers, many of the rest of us find our ambitions changed and we’re now freelance or part-time or running our own businesses.
I told my younger friend about a recent conversation with an acquaintance my age who has just been offered a very demanding, very senior job requiring an international move. Yes, she decided, why not; we’re in a precious time of life when the kids, even if still under our roofs, are kids no more, our own health and energy remain strong and 30-year marriages can handle some separation. Seize the day.
So one of my small hopes for this year, other than the end of climate change and the beginning of world peace, is a gentler and kinder story about women’s midlife transition, told not in a vocabulary of deficit and decline but change and curiosity. At the moment, a woman’s “real self” seems to be about 25, conventionally pretty, thin, self-denying and eager to please (men). Any divergence from that “norm” – one that many of us never occupied at all – is a failure or a sin, requiring medical intervention, ruthless self-discipline and infinite expenditure on “beauty” that is doomed by time itself to yield no return.
These are potentially, if you’re lucky, years of relative freedom and strength and opportunity, which is why patriarchy loathes women in midlife. Don’t fall for it.