An Italian Take On Menopause And The Male Gaze

-Analysis-

TURIN — Until a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to speak openly about menopause. It was a subject that had long been reserved as fodder for sexist jokes, and provoked shame or denial among those experiencing it.

I think back to the jokes about middle-aged teachers when I was in school, or to that dinner where a famous Italian philosopher, then in his sixties, startled us all by admitting he found his female peers “repugnant.”

But demographics eventually took over. When the boomer generation entered public life and assumed positions of influence, the “m” word began to shed its stigma. No longer confined to private exchanges between mothers and daughters, menopause came to be recognized as an inevitable phase in every woman’s life, one that deserves medical, psychological, cultural, and social understanding. And that, unquestionably, is a good thing.

The breaking of this taboo began in other countries; and, as often happens with cultural changes, it was sparked by the testimony of public figures, actress Naomi Watts among them, who spoke openly about the shock of an early menopause that caught her unprepared.

More informative, more activist

Here in Italy, the subject has now arrived like a wave: in recent months, new articles and podcasts have appeared (listen to Vamp by Lisa Ginzburg and Valeria Parrella, or Selvaggia Lucarelli’s L’Indicibile episode featuring a gynecologist and a psychologist), culminating with Gloria Origgi’s essay La donna è mobile. Filosofia della menopausa (“Woman Is Fickle: A Philosophy of Menopause”).

Before that, I had read Antonella Moscati’s splendid little book Una quasi eternità (“A Near Eternity”), first published in 2006, which approached the subject with an ambivalent, melancholic literary sensibility. The opening page, where the narrator describes her altered bodily perception and the mortification of sexual invisibility, is unforgettable.

Today’s renewed interest takes a different tone: more informative, more activist, and grounded in shared experience, like a vast feminist consciousness-raising circle.

Menopause is a “transformative experience” that overturns identity

Origgi offers a philosophical exploration of the climacteric, that period between roughly 45 and 55 when fertility ends, a kind of negative counterpart to puberty. She outlines the scientific background, particularly the role of hormones, describes its symptoms and treatments, and, in the most compelling part of the book, reflects on its moral meaning.

Menopause, she writes, is a “transformative experience” that overturns identity, physically and psychologically, and ushers in the birth of a new self: a formative journey that opens new possibilities and relationships with others and with the world.

Biopolitical world

Among the reflections this reading inspires, the first concerns the realm of “biopolitics,” that is, the way public policies regulate bodies in advanced Western societies. Having long accepted, consciously or not, the idea that a woman’s essential function (if not her only one) is motherhood, and having been slow to understand the role of hormones, gynecology has for centuries focused almost exclusively on pregnancy and childbirth, neglecting the rest of female physiology.

The ignorance that still afflicts women’s health, a gap widely denounced in relation to endometriosis and postpartum depression, is even more serious and paradoxical when it comes to menopause, which, unlike those conditions, is a universal stage of female experience.

Its discomforts, not only hot flashes, but also cognitive lapses, panic attacks, mood swings, circulatory and cardiac issues, weight gain, and bone fragility, can often be eased with changes in lifestyle and, when needed, with appropriate medical treatment. The growing media attention around menopause gives hope that this blind spot in medicine will finally be addressed.

The same society that stigmatizes women for losing their sexual appeal celebrates older men, whose age supposedly makes them more attractive.

Another reflection concerns what Susan Sontag famously called the “double standard of aging.” The same society that stigmatizes women for losing their sexual appeal celebrates older men, whose age supposedly makes them more attractive. I say “supposedly” because, while Sontag’s critique remains valid, some counter-images have emerged, the mature, powerful woman with a younger partner, for instance.

At the same time, aging men have hardly been spared discrimination, particularly in entertainment, on dating apps, and even within segments of gay culture, where the term “gay ageism” has taken hold. Fortunately, biology never has the last word on human life. What truly matters are the cultural representations and value systems that shape how we perceive bodies. It is here that change must occur, restoring to the later stages of life, male and female alike, the dignity that an ideology obsessed with eternal youth has stripped away.

The ultimate work of art

In her elegant collection of aphorisms Proverbs of a Dandy, the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson suggests that the menopausal woman, whose reproductive organs have ceased to function and whose body has been forcibly freed from the desires of others, is the ultimate work of art, not a means to an end, but an end in herself.

After the death of Giorgio Armani, I’d written that the Italian designer’s clothes grant women a form of aesthetic sovereignty, a divine indifference to the male gaze. Why not think of menopause in the same way, as the ultimate expression of dandyism, not the climax of decline, but of a new and self-possessed female freedom?

P.S. To see this spirit captured perfectly, don’t miss Fleabag’s menopause monologue: