RUN DON'T WALK FROM THE MENOPAUSE

THOUGHTS (TLDR, AVEC MONSTRO ELISASUE DRAWING)

menopause

when i was just a little girl, i asked my mother: what will i be? denied, destined, the target of triangulated laughter, etc.

when a new colleague, meaning to be kind, talks about a poem i wrote in 2011 as being “one of your best, one my favourites, just so good”, rather than being flattered, i have to fight back an irrational rage; pushing it down until i can feel it burning the soles of my feet from the inside-out. the object of this rage is both my colleague, and the twenty-odd year-old self who wrote the poem. in singling out a piece of juvenilia for silly, exorbitant praise, i cannot help but sense (imagine, if you prefer) an implied disavowal of my mature practice. it has been fourteen years since i wrote that poem. fourteen long years. during which time i have published sixteen books, with two more on the way. so to speak about this early, relatively untried effort as one of my “best” is obscurely insulting; is to figure those years of risk, rigour, and pain as wasted or irrelevant. worse, the comment brings into focus (or seems to, if you prefer) an entire insidious value system, one that glorifies youth, energy, or any other vaguely zeitgeisty quality over subtler, more difficult and disturbing forms of poetic power. the rage that rounds against the self is something else again: a complex knot of jealously and shame.

this is ridiculous. but not uncommon: i realise that i have separated and disowned my younger self to such an extent that i experience her as a distinct person. i can visualise her, collecting utterly unearned compliments simply on the basis of her “sexy”, “edgy” and “accessible” performance of our trauma. this is hateful to me. i describe my climb towards mental equilibrium, somewhat-stability, insight and acceptance as being akin to sadako in the ring series, hauling herself from the (literal) haunted well of her past by her fingernails. that the work made in the wake of this is not recognised as intellectually or artistically valuable hurts. this other me is celebrated, wanted, and rewarded for the ways in which she performs our pain; offering up a crowd-pleasing re-inscription of our otherness, our victimisation. i draw a line under her, split her off from my present self as an object of anger because this is less horrible than truly owning what it was like to be her: coerced, manipulated. naïve, ambitious, vain. it is less horrible to hate her than to itemise and work through the humiliations and absurdities to which she (i) was subjected. or to countenance the fact that the version of my writing (self) deemed “best” by the literary and artistic culture within which i move is work that proceeds from a child-in-craft, from an insecure and exploited numpty.

and yet. while the “splitting” that occurs between present self and past self, old and young is indeed a psychic defence, it is also the very logical and concrete consequence of a broader culture that values older women not at all. that values us so little in fact, as to construct middle age as a tragic aftermath, a desert of expired potential. values us so little as to erect a wall, a strenuously policed border between before and after, now and then. a wall which separates women from themselves and from each other, and through which not one single molecule of pleasure, joy, or self-worth will be suffered to pass. this “splitting” is a central theme in coralie fargeat's 2024 body-horror opus, the substance, which vividly dramatises (and literalises) the way in which women – caught between the objectifying gaze (youth) and the annihilating stare (age) of the patriarchy– become violently divided within. what the film exposes, and this is one of the many things i love about it, is that capitalism is the true villain of the piece. it is capitalism, after all, that creates and profits from this division. it is capitalism that makes a fetish out of youth and beauty the better to cannibalise youth and beauty as mere resources. young women, encouraged to use and to celebrate their “erotic capital” and the hedged power it affords them within a world of men, are kindling that mistakes itself for fire. they do not love you, babies, they love the heat and light you throw off when they burn you. and when they've burnt you, you are nothing, less than nothing: a bundle of blackened sticks, a heap of ash.

one of the most heart-breaking moments in the substance is when elizabeth (demi moore) is given the opportunity to destroy “sue” (margaret qualley), her dangerously narcissistic younger self/ alter-ego, but cannot because: “she's the only part of me that's loveable”. sue is literally killing elizabeth, but elizabeth is so enmeshed in the masochist's pact that is patriarchy, she finds herself driven to desperately seek affirmation and affection from a system that exploits, consumes, and ultimately rejects her. poor elizabeth. that is not true. that is not love.

somehow, my colleague's innocuous comment knocks loose these thoughts. menopause: never far away, always on my mind. kept there. on purpose. even the algorithms that target me have swapped out their line of attack. brace! brace! brace! because here comes an advertising tidal-wave of elasticated waistbands, discreet panty-liners, “meno-balance vegan gummies”, lube, bridgerton, etc. my online attention was once awash with a varied diet of yes, enraging and misplaced child-focussed shite, but also hiking gear, animal charities, slasher films, iggy pop. as far as the algorithm is concerned there are no individuals, only composite approximations. i do know this. nevertheless, it is striking to me that some non-individuals are less individual than others. and apparently i live here now: in the flat, unvarying beigescape of middle age. in the punchline and the cul-de-sac of identity.

having itself created the conventions i am supposed to embody, capitalist adland is nevertheless content to supply me with myriad alternative “solutions” which are variously geared towards defying, concealing, or staving off a) the slow erosion of my individual personality, b) the depletion of my psychic and sexual energy, and c) the collapsing structural integrity of my body. cue commercial, in which fifty-year-old women in white denim play the menopause as some kind of protracted adolescence; an unconvincing spectacle of gurning, hooting horniness. they are odour-neutral, these women. they do not seep, or leak, or smell. they are not tired or sad or sore. they are available and interested. they are (fair) game. they do not incite abjection in men. honestly, i think this is their first mistake. because, if what we lose in menopause is our relevance and value within and to regimes of capitalist patriarchal power, then isn't our transformation not wonderful? a radical expansion of possibility and freedom; an escape from the deadening referential frameworks that have contoured and delimited so much of our lives? they tell us that nothing grows here, that to accept what is happening to our bodies is to resign ourselves to an unlovable wasteland, waiting out our days, running out the clock. they keep telling us this. their hope is to trap us within the object status of the stare. they recruit young women (objects of the gaze) into this project of entrapment; encourage contempt or ridicule (or both) for the over-burdened, under-valued, “unattractive” hags in their midst. in a sense, who can blame young women for this? fear of “losing your looks” is, in itself, presented as vain, shallow, or silly, but if “your looks” are your best (if hedged) guarantee of approximate power in a world that denies you more varied expressions of autonomy, then who wouldn't be afraid? in this special sense we are against the clock: to cover as much ground as we can, to establish some security, to find a place for ourselves, to do something before we are rendered invisible. this is what drives our desperation, our irrational, futile attempts to defer the ageing process. we see the foreclosed future before us and it scares us. it should. what could be more cruel than to create this desperation, then to laugh and point at those who live under or within it?

dudes, i see you. your laughter is retaliatory, its origin is fear. this body frightens you, disgusts you. this rage. well good. in my most furious moments, then i am resolved to become so monstrous as to place your horror beyond the reach of ridicule. “monster” is from “freak” but also “omen”, “prediction”, “sign” and “wonder”. the distortions of the monstrous body signal to plenitude, to an excess of energy and meaning that cannot be captured or reduced. “monster” is the body as event: singular, unbearable, irreparable, unrepeatable. its meaning exceeds your collective gaze or grasp, is unavailable to (male) desire. “monster” is a kind of miracle, a form of transcendence. to encounter the “monster” is to enter a state of shock that troubles your smug assurance; that shakes your canons, your standards, and the value systems that produce them. run, don't walk. “monster” knocks aside her receiving subjects: bam! give me the courage and the daring to be “monster”, like monstro elisasue at the end of fargeat's film. only alive. oh, to be the monster. and live.

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i hate planes. on a flight to new york for a work event in november, i ground my teeth together with such continuous, unconscious ferocity that i chipped my central incisors. the damage isn't excessive, but there's a hairline fissure that's opened up on the back side of both teeth, and daily compulsive exploration with the tip of my tongue tells me that its spreading. this is horrible, maddening. i'm not quite shane macgowan, but my smile is far from prepossessing. i'm a zealous brusher, always have been, and i've never much gone in for processed food, but years of throwing up (don't ask) means stomach acid has taken the enamel off, and my frankly heroic coffee consumption has given my teeth an unpleasant yellowish cast. i've a slight overbite, which could (ought to) have been corrected in childhood. but wasn't. i don't smile with my mouth open, not without covering my mouth with my hand, i haven't since i was a kid. dental care is one of those “extras” that is first to fall by the wayside for poor people of any age. and in my forties, my mouth remains a profound marker of early-life inequality, one that continues to differentiate me from my more affluent middle class colleagues; one which marks me as “ugly” and fills me with shame. ageing is a more profound and readily legible process for working-class women. our bodies weather and wear according to the classed conditions (material, social) in which we live and move. inequality of access, opportunity, and provision is inscribed upon and through our physical selves. because we lack cultural, symbolic, economic or social capital we are compelled to use what physical capital we have to exist in the world. our bodies trap us, as surely as the manual labourer is trapped, in a social world from which there is no escape. class functions as a form of built-in obsolescence, which for us is also sexual, reproductive, and domestic. we are the most subjected to hard use, the least likely to receive adequate diagnosis or treatment for any resulting health issues, and the least able to afford the ameliorating cosmetic “fixes” available to our middle class peers. the clothes we wear, the weight we carry, the condition of our teeth and skin are all insidiously, intimately linked to perceptions of femininity, sexual availability, and moral worth. we age more quickly and more noticeably. and to move through the world takes longer, our progress towards stability or achievement is slower, and our arc towards non-personhood is infinitely sharper. sometimes i look at myself in the mirror and am filled with such a fury. to live a continual negotiation with my crummy, crumbling body, who had precious little joy from it in its “prime”. to inhabit middle age is to feel myself trapped within a dark tunnel of revolving mirrors, caught between unfulfilled potential and unobtainable eminence. and the older men in my family cannot open their mouths to talk about any woman of my age and our class without uttering the hateful sentence: she's really let herself go.

this statement is wrong in three equally repugnant ways: 1) in that it identifies female bodies as the proper sites for eternally vigilant containment and control; attaching supreme moral value to the notion of self-denial in ways that do not apply to men. 2) in that the individual woman or girl is burdened with sole responsibility for the ways in which (historical, material) conditions outside of her control impact and affect her. 3) that a woman's “self” is over identified with and determined as body – pure physicality and presence, like heidegger's idea of the animal. yuck.

at such moments i find myself erupting into so fucking what?!? because it isn't simply that age in men is figured in such a way as to confer diverse and “positive” qualities such as embodied authority, resilience, dynastic wealth, hard-won wisdom, steely resolve, etc. it is that men are seen (and judged) by the light of their lives entire, not merely for how they present in the present. men, it seems, have earned the right to be viewed in the context of their long biographies, to be respected and treasured in the glow cast by their past glories. whatever they have done or become; however they present, they are afforded the dignity of continuity. a man is a whole person, and it counts who they were in the struggle, on the picket, on the playing field or stage. the full scope of a woman's life will never be taken into account. no, she will be subject to continuous renewed assessment, a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately logic that allows her no rest, respite or pride; no satisfaction for a life well lived, or a job well done. we can only face forward, and so our achievements – our “best” things – are always, inevitably behind us. we have only the future, and the future – we are told this over and over again – is empty and bleak.

it is not empty or bleak. it is my body itself that tells me this. for me, menopause represents (amongst other things) a promised end to the worst of my endometrial pain. further, it removes me from the cultural expectations against which i have chafed for so long, and it frees me from the nauseating panopticon of male desire. what might i yet accomplish and enjoy in a future less beset by pain, free (ish) from objectifying and inhibiting scrutiny? if my body is worn and tired (it is), then might not this be a time to prioritise rest, care, pleasure? it might. but screaming “self-care” into some poor woman's face is capitalism's shtick: placing the responsibility for such care back solely and squarely onto the shoulders of an already over-burdened individual, so that rather than addressing the systemic causes of suffering and rightly seeking redress from the structures meting it out, it is sufferers who must magically heal themselves. we're told we can do this via the expedient of “stuff”, quick fixes like spa days, face masks, adult colouring books, and scented fucking candles. all these items, crucially, can be used up in mingily metered snippets of time, allowing us just enough respite to function as workers and consumer subjects. in this way, capitalism recuperates value from the very misery and malfunction it creates. that's what care is under consumerism: horribly entangled within the extractive economy; within endless cycles of exhaustion and recovery. i've said it once, and i'll say it again: fuck “wellness”. fuck it right in the gall-bladder.

so, what now? honestly, i don't know. the previous government's own (2019) inquiry found that almost 900,000 women in the uk left their jobs because of menopausal symptoms. the report wanted, and i quote: “to understand what drove women to leave their jobs, the impact on the economy of haemorrhaging talent in this way, and the legal redress for women who have suffered menopause-related discrimination.” great. but menopause is still not a protected characteristic under the equality act (2010), and in any case the report – and much of the surrounding discourse – is overwhelmingly skewed towards the experiences and needs of women in the “professions”, or engaged in clerical and corporate work. always (it seems to me) the hundreds of thousands of working-class women engaged in “unskilled”, casualised work are ignored or unaccounted for. fast forward, and labour's nauseating transformation from party-of-the-working-class to the party-of-work is now complete. this does not fill me with hope. on the most basic level this current labour government wants more of us (however ill-equipped, mentally or physically) in work for longer. setting aside the thigh-masteringly obvious fact that full – or even robust – employment is quite literally impossible, i find myself thinking of my menopausal sisters in a variety of physically demanding and precarious jobs. they've no security, they've no redress, and the toll on their bodies and brains is that much greater than that upon their more affluent peers. keeping this in mind, here's a fun little quote from a leading uk menopause educator: “work is good for menopausal women. it contributes far more than just a salary, it can provide fulfilment, self-esteem, identity and social needs too.” ffs, frankly. you stand behind a bloody cash register all day, you empty bedpans and wipe arses, you pick and pack items in a draughty warehouse for twelve fucking hours where even your piss-breaks are timed, then you come and tell me how fulfilled and brimming with self-esteem you feel. personally, i'm with valerie solanas (as i often am): it's time we cut the crap and identified capitalism as the fulcrum of women's exploitation. it's time we demanded a perpetual labour shutdown. i do not buy the lie that allowing the system in which i work to extract more of my labour for longer is some kind of enormous victory. if the institutions that employ us extend just enough “care” to keep us functioning as economic units, then fuck their concessions and fuck their “care”. i don't want a job to give me self-esteem and identity. jesus wept. i want the luminous, limitless freedom i was never allowed to believe was mine. i'm working-class. so that won't be happening. i can't take a sabbatical, or early retirement, go off and “find myself”. the right to self-determination, to self-knowledge is not a luxury afforded to women like me. unless –

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all day long i dream of insurrection. in the meantime, talk to my friend k about those early poems and why they continue to haunt me. it hasn't escaped my attention that the work that repeats is that portion of my practice attempting to “get at” an experience of working-class girlhood; the trauma of (often sexual) abuse and exploitation, but also the profound moments of joy, exploration, and comradeship we shared with one another. with this work i was trying to say something about victimisation and agency, how “victim” is so often a category that comes into focus only with hindsight; that it is not how we identified or experienced ourselves, and how this misplaced bravery and resilience was – and still is – used to deny us empathy or redress. “if you're silent about your pain” writes zora neale hurston, “they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it”. i'd add that if you talk about your pain with anything less than abject, unequivocal, performative misery, they'll destroy you and say that you chose it. i was trying to have my girl-speakers show what this was like: their ambivalent experience of their own exploitation, their heart-breaking mixture of savviness and naivety. one of the things that bothers me about these poems' long survival is the persistent suspicion that what resounds for and delights (especially my male) readers is precisely a misreading of these speakers' agency; something in the poems that confirms rather than combats everything they think they already know about working-class girls, and traveller girls in particular. have i unwittingly reduced my speakers to a bunch of feisty, sexually precocious stereotypes? does my portrayal of these girls – of us – allow for the kind of (wilful) misinterpretation that makes a fetish out of “agency” and “choice” the better to excuse abuse and obfuscate exploitation? k says: did you write it for those ass-hats? fuck no. is it your fault if they crow-bar their way into a space not meant for them? well. is it your job to do their thinking for them? or censor yourself so as to to cater to their bottomless ignorance? no, but. well, there you go. and because she is my friend she allows me to get away with zero shit: be honest, what really bothers you about those poems?

okay. maybe they make me uneasy because their staying-power inscribes and reinscribes a particular moment, a particular narrative, a particular version of victimisation and feminine vulnerability. when i started writing, these experiences were still raw for me, and wider society didn't want to look at or talk about those things. it's different now. young-girl-as-victim is a vivid trope, fully assimilated into the broader culture. she's a narrative and thematic staple, a plot device. she engages our attention, our sympathy. she's got main character energy. we root for her, we feel with her. she is young. she is easy to love. we keep telling her story, but we somehow never make it to the end. no one wants to move beyond the exciting or dramatic circumstances of her abuse. no one wants to interest themselves in the minutiae of what comes after, how she ages, grows and changes; what she makes and thinks and does in the wake of trauma. how she lives at all, how she carries the body that is the reminder and repository of her experiences; how she deals day-to-day with the somatic imprint of these things. to me, this is madness, and a horribly impoverished way to engage with art and literature. k: so, what do you want?

in terms of the work and the way i am received in the world? on a petty, personal level, i want the magazines and journals that publish and write about me to stop using old-ass photos from my twenties when i have taken the trouble to provide them with a recent one. the photo you used is not “just better”, it is inaccurate. it no longer represents the embodied presence that produced the work. i want the right to age. the right to be unattractive. i would like an acknowledgement of my mature practice, and not a disproportionate focus on the edgy “trauma-porn” of my youth. i'd rather the entire work was ignored or discarded than chopped into bits, divided from itself. and, in a broader sense, this is also what i want for my life – our lives. i want for my present to be more than an aftermath or an epilogue. i don't want the life (and the joy, the pleasure) that was stolen from me in my youth to be denied me in maturity. i want us to have rest, care, peace. but i also want challenge, adventure and surprise. i want the world that (mainly white, middle class) men of any age get to take for granted.