Everything you thought you knew about sex after menopause is wrong

Mona Eltahawy's newest book "Bloody Hell," offers a liberatory global perspective on menopause

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The author Mona Eltahawy Photo by Robert E. Rutledge

Mona Eltahawy does daily battle with the patriarchy.

She’s been doing it for years, with books like Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution and The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls.

I’ve been obsessed with her newsletter, Feminist Giant (subscribe!) for the ways she blends political commentary, personal essays and global feminist news.

Her latest book is called, “Bloody Hell: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World.”

It features 17 essays from writers who live all over the world, including Kenya, Syria, Ghana, and the U.K.

It’s about menopause as it’s experienced by all kinds of people. It’s also about weightlifting, and cancer, and diet culture. It's about fishnet stockings. It's about witchcraft. It's about trans liberation.

It's about all these things — because all of these things start to emerge when we actually talk to each other about the realities of menopause.

I spoke with Mona recently about the new anthology and about her own writing. (I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity).

In your essay, Moisturize Your Vagina, you write, “Patriarchy deploys shame a drone, it shadows you, ready to take you at any moment, exhausting you by keeping you forever aware of its presence, to the detriment of all the other things you could be investing your attention in.”

I thought that was a really powerful image to describe how patriarchy operates on us. How does this book about menopause, and these 17 essays, serve as an attack on patriarchy?

I consider this anthology a Molotov cocktail that we can, each of us, throw at this drone of shame that patriarchy employs or deploys to keep us stuck forever.

I wanted to speak about feminism in a way that I didn't see being spoken publicly when I entered perimenopause. There’s so much silencing, stigma and shame. This book is meant to open it up and just dissipate all of that.

This is not a medical book. It's not even an advice book. You wanted to write what you called a “dedicated shamelessness account.”

Right. I'm not here to tell you whether you should start hormone therapy or not. That's between you and your healthcare provider. I am a writer. I fix hearts. I deal with the metaphysical. I wanted the metaphysical experience of menopause, rather than just specifically the physical experience of menopause.

So here 17 people are telling you, ”This is my experience,” and each one is so wonderfully different and contributes to this umbrella of the metaphysics of menopause.

Marilyn Muthoni Kamuru’s essay opens with a description of women she called “African aunties”: women who, in their 40s and 50s, start to leave their homes. She opens her piece with the question, “When we are free, what will we do with our freedom?”

We don't often hear about menopause being discussed as a form of liberation. That's, I think, primarily because menopause is still seen through this prism of a cis-het, white woman.

And the narrative of menopause to these women is: “I've become invisible.”

This drives me fucking nuts. First of all, invisible to who? Second of all: Are you aware that you are probably the most visible of any female creature on earth, the white woman?

Eurocentric notions of beauty, conventional standards of beauty, posit the cis- het, white woman as the pinnacle of beauty, and everyone else has to measure up against that. But when she can no longer pop out babies for the white patriarchy, she suddenly feels invisible.

So here is a Kenyan woman who is telling you that there is an array of black women on the continent of Africa who seize upon menopause as: “Finally, this is the time for me.”

You know, there are some of us out here who have never had the benefits that white patriarchy gave you as a cis-white woman, who are now telling you, “Oh, so you finally see what we've been saying. We've been invisible to the white patriarchy all along.”

Come over here now and learn there are other ways to be visible that do not reward you with the crumbs of patriarchy.

Throw those crumbs away and, as I say, bake your own cake.

One of the essays in the book is by Omisade Burney-Scott, who writes “understanding the historical and contemporary experiences of black women, trans and gender expansive people intergenerationally is critical for body sovereignty.”

She makes the point forcefully that black people are the experts on their own bodies. Why is that such an important part of understanding menopause for black women?

We're talking about a community in this country that was enslaved for many, many nefarious reasons, and one of them was to be used for medical experimentation.

So it's completely understandable that the black community in the United States is very suspicious of medicine and any practitioners of medicine. When Omi sent me that essay, it beautifully covered all those points. Absolutely black people know their body better than anybody else, and absolutely deserve bodily sovereignty, and especially when it comes to menopause.

We've now seen from research how menopause affects black people and people of color differently than white people. One of the main reasons that it impacts them differently is systemic racism and their ability — or inability — to access the medical care that they need, and also the pressure and the stress that comes from systemic racism and the micro and macroaggressions of every day, and the way these impact the way that they move through the world when they go through the menopause transition.

Emmett Jack Lundberg’s piece about trans folks who experience menopause offered, for me, a real mental shift. This is another community of people who are neglected by the medical establishment. I thought it was really beautiful how they describe their experience of menopause, with similar symptoms to cis women, as a “time of overwhelming joy.” Can you describe this piece and what it meant to you to include it?

As difficult as the menopause transition is for so many of us who are cisgender, the menopause transition for transgender, intersex and gender expansive people is not only similar in the difficulty that they can go through, but it's silenced and completely invisibilized.

Especially now when we have a fascist regime in power in the United States that is attacking our bodily autonomy, and our gender and sexual identities, the trans experience of menopause is completely denied because Trump says there's no such thing as trans people. It's fascist fuckery.

I truly learned so much from Emmett’s experience, because it completely shifted the idea of what it meant to have a period every month and the bodily dysmorphia that you go through when you're not in the body that you're supposed to be in.

I’ve had a period since I was 11 and a half. It would come on the clock every month. I kept time with it.

For someone who feels that they were assigned a sex at birth that is not what they identify with, a period is not something familiar or comforting that they look forward to.

Emmett’s experience teaches all of us that there is an array of experiences of menopause, and we have to move beyond this binary, and beyond this focus on cis-women and menopause.

You can purchase Mona Eltahawy’s new book here

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Let’s talk about “Don't Bring a Flashlight to the Brain Fog,” by Sonara Jha.

The brain fog thing, for me, personally, was among the most challenging parts of menopause. I loved how Jha writes, “My entire life is built around my brain. Letting it fog up could be devastating to my career.”

But then she says, “The thing about failures is that it frees you up from other people's expectations, and mine freed me up for daydreaming.” As a writer, how did you deal with this?

I was so glad that Sonora wrote about brain fog, because that also for me was among the hardest things. But before the brain fog, it was anxiety.

I remember I would wake up in the morning with this impending sense of doom, and I didn't know what it was. I remember very, very clearly thinking, “My God, is the rest of my life going to be this? Because this can't go on.”

At first I thought it was because I was succumbing to some kind of patriarchal narrative about aging. I'm like, “What kind of fucking feminist am I? I'm all upset about turning 50!”

But it wasn't about that. It was this anxiety from the estrogen declining in my body. I didn't connect the two because I didn't know about anxiety in menopause.

What I realized then, and what I learned was the gift of the menopause, is that it basically pushes on the softest, most vulnerable part of you, and challenges you to figure out what you are when you're not a writer.

For me, it was writing and sex. It was almost like I had a bespoke menopause. Menopause came and took my measurements and said, “What are the two things that Mona is most concerned about? Oh, I know, her brain and her pussy.. So, okay, we're going to challenge her on those two things.” And boy, was I challenged.

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“Moisturize Your Vagina” is such a great, juicy piece. Where are you at with your own sex life now?

Another gift of the menopause is that we begin to own desire. We have the power now to say, “This is what I want, and I'm not going to wait to be chosen anymore.” I realized that I needed to do more than just take these supplements. I wanted more enjoyment from the sex that I was having with my partner, with other partners, and through masturbating with myself.

So it was about pleasure. I'm having the best sex of my life. I know that lots of other menopausal people, especially cis women, say that after menopause, they're having the best sex of their life. And I think it's because we now know what we desire, and also because I can't get pregnant, thank God.

This is where our trans comrades and friends really, really are leading the way when it comes to liberation from patriarchy, because they have reckoned with this in their own lives, and they've thrown the gauntlet down for the rest of us to ask, “What makes me a woman?”

Am I still a woman when I don't have this biological shit to deal with anymore? That's what I found was just so spectacular about all those essays.

Is there a “most important” thing you want readers to take from this book?

Something that I learned about menopause that I didn't know until quite recently, was that research has shown so many cis women complain about not feeling themselves. There's an actual phrase for it, “Not feeling like myself: NFLM”.

This is, for me, the heart of the challenge of menopause. We're not taught to “unbecome.” There's always that striving to fix, to cure, to do because we're not taught to just stand still for a while and let the old you go, so that the new you can come along.

I didn't start hormone therapy to go back to my old self. It's so that I could become what my new self is going to be. And that's how we need to start talking about menopause.

It's a transition for a reason, not just to transition from being able to make babies, but also to letting our old self go, so that our new self can walk with us, take us on the next journey of our life.

You can purchase Bloody Hell here and support Mona’s newsletter, Feminist Giant, here.

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