On men and menopause
and the stories we women need to tell
Just what would we do if we actually had to come up with a “non-zoning out” activity?
It is Friday night and we’re driving in the car with the dog in the back seat. Only an hour ago, a pounding rain finished blowing through our town, coloring the sky an otherworldly orange. Steam rises from the roads and raindrops slide off the slick green leaves as we wind our way along the side streets following the GPS. I have my bare foot on the dashboard and Swirly has her head down between her two paws, her eyes gazing at the floor.
“She seems pretty relaxed tonight,” I say to my spouse Janyce who is at the wheel.
“She’s a good girl,” says Janyce without taking her eyes from the road.
At dinner, we lost the wifi in the house while the rain was pelting the backyard, so that meant we didn’t have an old movie to rewatch. Taking Swirly on a short drive outing for an ice cream on National Dog Day was my instant alternative to the nagging question neither one of us really wanted to answer. Just what would we do if we actually had to come up with a “non-zoning out” activity?
I had some of my college girlfriends over for dinner the previous night and the kitchen was still strewn with dirty dishes, casseroles and pans, every glass we own —martini, wine, water goblet, cordial— all lined up on every available surface, waiting to be washed. “You know, I’m mostly pissed off that this is not an issue for men,” said Janyce while opening the dishwasher door and stacking glasses. “No matter what is going on with them— health, age, worries or whatever—clearly, they still feel it in their bodies.”
I nodded. I knew what she was referring to. After the cocktails in the garden had moved to dinner at the dining table the previous night, the four of us girlfriends took our places on the couch and chairs in the living room with our feet up on the coffee table and started swapping stories. Janyce, who had decided at the last minute to abandon her solo plans and join us for dinner, pulled up a chair and joined the discussion. As the only non-binary, non-mom in the room, she was mostly quiet as the conversation took its familiar route through the subjects of our grown-up kids, dealing with aging parents with dementia, all of our middle-aged health complaints, every single thing that husbands do to annoy us, and sex.
“Wait!— you’ve gotta see it to believe it,” said my friend brandishing her cell phone in the air. “And mind you, this was presented to me as a special gift at the end of what was a perfect day for my birthday.” We all groaned and grimaced with sympathetic eyes as we looked at the black maxi pad held together with dental floss. The “string bikini” presented to her for “inspiration” later.
“Couldn’t it at least have been something expensive from La Perla,” someone said.
“The thing is, it’s just so much work and at 4am I want to be sleeping and then I ask myself, why am I the one that feels guilty?” said another woman.
Without turning my head I could feel Janyce trying to stand up to leave the room. I grabbed her hand and held it.“Look, they are holding hands. All right, you two. What’s it like? We want to know,” said my friend sitting on the other side of me on the couch.
“Let me just say, we are two women both in the throes of menopause. We have our issues,” I said.
To Janyce’s relief, four women college friends had way too much to share about their own issues to linger on this one question about our sex life held under the spotlight.
But the question reverberated for us still a day later. Fourteen years ago, we promised each other that we would hold our sex life front and center in our lives. Now that it has mysteriously retreated to the background, slowly and quietly, without letting us know that it was leaving, we both want it back. Desperately, even. We just don’t feel like it. The whole thing makes us spitting mad.
A middle-aged man in a pickup speeds past us as we turn into the strip mall toward the ice cream shop. Janyce swears under her breath. Certain men who drive oversized pick-up trucks inspire rage in both of us. We have started calling them prick-ups, especially when they speed by us on our busy street, causing us to sidestep on the sidewalk and lean closer to the woodsy edge as they roar on past. But this is not about hating men, and I’m not so sure that a waning sex drive isn’t an issue for many middle-aged men, either. It’s just that the truck whizzing past us is a daily reminder of a patriarchal society that cares about a man’s sex drive while systematically trying to strip women of all of our rights and negate that we have any needs at all. Yeah, we’re angry.
In the book Body Work, Melissa Febos writes, “I used my own adolescent girlhood as a touchstone to examine the insidious ways that patriarchy conditions us to discipline our own bodies, thoughts, and interactions, even as we actively work to expel those conditions.”
I’ve just started reading this book and I can’t put it down. She’s writing for writers, for women who write about their own experiences, giving us all permission to tell the stories that are central to us. I’m secretly hoping I will get to the part where she explains why we’re hesitant to talk too long or too openly about the things that are bothering us the most.