It's good to talk — but has there been any real change for menopausal women?

We’ve come a long way in mainstreaming the M word, but talk is cheap. Is life still just the same for menopausal women? 

In patriarchal society, menopausal women lost their value as sexual beings; our magic power — to incubate and pop out new humans at regular intervals — was no more, rendering us redundant. When our periods stopped, so did we.

Type ‘menopause’ into Amazon and 10,000 products pop up. Vitamins, minerals, extracts, tinctures, all promising to rebalance your hormones; plumping skin creams for drying faces, cooling sprays for hot flushes, magic shampoos for thinning hair; every kind of lubricant and moisturiser for thinning vaginal walls; herbal tablets for free-floating anxiety; Kegel balls and Tena Lady products for accidentally weeing yourself; a £350 wristband that promises to control hot flushes. Over at M&S, a menopause clothing range includes vests, non-wired bras, and gigantic knickers, all promising to be ‘cooling’, as well as menopause bed linen, pillows, mattress toppers. It seems there’s nothing that can’t be ‘menopaused’ for profit.

Then there’s the tsunami of menopause books flooding the market. Mostly nonfiction — from menopause blockbusters such as Davina McCall’s Menopausing and Mariella Frostrup’s Cracking the Menopause, via Meg Mathews’ The New Hot and a host of quasi-medical how-to books all the way to meno-fiction such as Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood.