Loving Yourself Through Menopause
Revisiting a conversation with queer health educator, Heather Corinna
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I learned about the work of Heather Corinna, a queer feminist activist, writer and sex educator, through one of my college students. They introduced me to Scarleteen, Corinna’s inclusive site for sex, bodies and relationship education.
I wish I’d had a place like Scarleteen to go to when I was a tween. So I was grateful to learn about her insights into what’s happening in our bodies, minds and health care systems now that I’m older.
I revisited this interview recently after a critical mass of friends and readers kept revisiting themes Corinna writes about: sleeplessness, memory loss, low sex drive, and just a general fearfulness about aging in a society where bias against older people is the norm.
Here’s an edited version of our conversation. You can read the full interview here.
In your chapter, “Ya Basics,” you write, “My root concept of both menopause and myself in menopause positioned us both as burdens. My thoughts were focused on how I would keep our burden on others as minimal as possible.”
How did you unlearn that concept?
I'm definitely still in that process. I feel like from early childhood on, I was positioned as a burden, and felt like a burden. Of course, if we've grown up socialized as anything but cisgender men, we also are given very clear messages that unless we're alleviating somebody else's burden, we are a burden.
So, a lot of it is just setting a ton of boundaries, all the time, and holding the boundaries myself.
You write in “Ya Basics” that to take care of ourselves in menopause we should, reduce and manage stress, improve your sleep, get active, hydrate, quit smoking, get social support.
There's something I find deeply irritating about like, “Honey, you need to sleep more.” No shit. But when you look at the studies, it bears out that this is the stuff that helps. The extra bonus is that you don't need a prescription for this stuff, unlike something like hormone therapy. But biggest thing about the basic stuff is that it is really universal. The way you do it is not universal, but we can all do these things to some degree.
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You point out many times in the book, the more marginalized you are, the more likely it is that the existing healthcare system is just not going to work for you, and may actually do harm to you. So how do you recommend folks best prepare themselves to work within the healthcare systems, and when not to?
If anybody has any expectation that they're not going to deal with the same kind of discrimination they always have, they should probably put that to bed.
It's extra hard and frustrating, because you know, you're sleep deprived, and you're stressed out and scared.
So, I would put a big focus on doing a great job of screening your health care providers, as much as you have the ability to do that.
Or maybe you're a cis person, so you don't think that trans healthcare is for you. But maybe a trans healthcare system or a queer healthcare system is better for you.
One of the interesting things that's happened in this book is that there have been quite a lot of cisgender women that have come in saying, “I don't need this kind of inclusion, but you know what, I don't want to be called a lady. And I don't like this thing where everybody's called girls, and I don't want my experience to be gendered.”
If anything, you're modeling for other people around you that they can do the same thing.
What were some of the big myths around menopause that you really wanted to bust?
One of the big ones is that there's any one approach that takes care of the whole thing. Even people who can go on hormone therapy and do really well, if they have the expectation that they're not going to feel any of this and everything will be sorted by that one thing: No.
It really comes down to finding the things that help us the most, and accepting that, for most of us, we're going to have a hard time for a little while, at some point, even when we're doing all the things. That's just just how it is.
What are some other menopause myths?
The other myth is the idea that this is short.
Working at Scarleteen, almost every day I've had to correct someone who thinks that puberty lasts five years.
I'm like, “No, puberty is like 10 years and change.”
It's almost identical here.
Even if maybe you don't feel impacted the entire time, your body is taking that time.
That comes back to another big myth, which is that, from back in the awful history of the horrible men of menopause that we have to read, talking about how their lives are so disrupted by the women in their lives. And how everything has to be done to make menopause less of a burden.
Not to make the person experiencing it more comfortable — but to make everyone else more comfortable.
The problem isn't menopause, and the problem isn't us. The problem is the world and its systems, and the people in it not making room for menopause and not making room for us.
That still doesn't mean that laying in your own sweat will be your favorite thing ever. It probably won’t.
So when you're not sleeping, you could just stay up and be like, “Okay, I'm just going to stay up and do whatever I do in the middle of the night with no one to bother me. Not the worst.”
You write about how the second biggest risk group for eating disorders after adolescence is people in menopause. Can you talk about diet culture preying on people in menopause?
It’s concerning, because it may be for our benefit that we gain some weight in this. None of the frames of weight loss are ultimately healthy, especially emotionally. But if you’re taking something away from your body that your body's trying to do to help you out, that's not good.
And, as is the case with eating disorders with people at any age, when everything feels out of control, it's something that you can try to control.
For all of the inconveniences that menopause and the transition in menopause can create for us, one of the opportunities that it gives us is to check things that we're changing for now, and look towards changing them for good.
So now is a really great time to stop chronically dieting. I'm not only not going to do this now, I'm done. Let’s let this stop forever.
Let’s talk about sex. You write, “Queering things up goes a long way, whatever your sexual orientation or identity. I mean centering sex on pleasure, joy, freedom, experimentation, and exploration, not reproduction, obligation, or rigid gender of sex role. I mean sex that’s about all kinds of pleasure and the whole of our bodies and selves.”
As a sex educator, I know that heterosexual scripts are so wrong when it comes to sex. It's also not just wrong for people with vulvas. It's one of these things where maybe you're dealing with what you have accepted as fine, but you don't have to accept that as fine. It could be better. Who wants to a fine sex life? I mean, sex carries risks. So why do it at all, if it's just fine? Just don't. Go do something else. Go jet skiing.
There are a lot of things that, while they've never been great for people at any age, once you get to menopause, it can be particularly bad. Maybe you never use lube, and it wasn't great without lube, but you could still do it. You could perform what you needed to perform.
Whereas for some people here [at menopause], it's like, literally, nobody's getting in there. You, anybody else, with anything else, without lube. Or it's just not going to feel good.
Or, people rushing into penis and vagina intercourse without any kind of lead up. By lead up, I don't even mean another kind of sex. I mean a good date. Or some sleep the night before, and not a terrible week at work.
Especially for people who will go through menopause, there's been a lot of obligation built into their sexual frameworks. “I have to do it if I want to have this kind of relationship, I have to do it this way to make this other person satisfied and happy. I can't ask for these things without making this person uncomfortable.“
Which is why sometimes hear older people, especially people who aren't of our generation, saying that they just stopped. Even though all the research that we have on sexuality so far on older people lets us know that actually can be some of the best sex of your life.
So to just stop because you don't want to do all of these pleasure-based things is really unfortunate.
The cultural message that we get is that sex is as good as it's going to get in your 20s and 30s.
But it's just like anything that we practice doing, the more that we practice, the better we get at it, the more experiences we have with it, the more information we have.
Something you can do in menopause is amp up your body acceptance, because shit is happening, and some of it is weird.
Just like in puberty, it's weird. You’ve just got to go with it.
You can adopt a devil-may-care attitude about it. “My body's going to do what it’s going to do,” is a great attitude for really good sex.
Is there anything that I didn't ask you about this book, and your work?
I think it is really important for everyone to keep banging the drum of being included in this.
If enough people just keep making enough noise, and don't buy this stuff that doesn't include them in any way, whether that stuff is a book, or that stuff is medicine or a certain kind of health care, then you can force systems to change and adapt.
I always try and remind people that, statistically, we are in the head of the biggest menopausal and perimenopausal cohort that has ever existed.
Gen X and millennials are really close in age. There are millennials just going into menopause, and that's some of why this group is so big. When you're a big group, it is much easier to get a system to change. More and more of us are agents of or within those systems. So we do have some power.
When I hear people with privilege being like, “I feel bad because I have privilege,” I'm like, “Don't feel bad. Use it.”
It does not help anyone to feel bad. No one benefits from you feeling bad. Everyone benefits if you take what you have and you use it to make things better for everyone.
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MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter works at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York where she’s the Associate Dean. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.
I really liked that she says puberty and menopause each last over a 10 year period. We don't have to be in a rush to integrate all these changes.
Wow thanks for sharing this resource. I’m excited to get this book. Great interview.