“Hot flash!” I announced as I reached for something to fan myself with. The conversation over the coffee-shop counter stopped dead. The other customers had that get-me-out-of-here look, and the barista turned bright red, like he was having an even hotter flash himself.
I fanned away, shamelessly. And intrigued. Call it my moment of menopausal enlightenment. With just two words, I seemed to have stumbled on a whole new mode of transgression, voicing something most people would rather be left unvoiced. The menopausal woman as social transgressor? Count me in!
That was more than 20 years ago. You’d think a whole generation of outspoken women would have moved things forward since then. But even though we no longer refer to menopause as “the change”—which, like most euphemisms, is absurd, like you’re going to metamorphose into a giant insect—it’s still merely whispered among women, as though there were something shameful about it.