MENOPAUSE: WOMEN ENTERING THE ENLIGHTENED AGE
Is biology destiny? Of course not. But there are militant defenders of the opposing doctrine of "cultural determinism" who want us to believe that, beneath the learned male and female roles that culture lays upon us, all people are essentially similar. Understandably, there is strong resistance to believing that our behavior is influenced by the biochemical balance in our bodies, because it suggests that we have very little free will. It's unfortunate, and silly, to make it an either/or argument. If you ask me, do I believe in free will? I would borrow the answer given by Isaac Bashevis Singer. "Of course, I have no choice."
To writers like Barbara Ehrenreich, however, any honest examination of the hormonal differences between women and menor between women and other women, for that matteris dismissed as a surrender to the old biology-as-destiny credo. The cessation of menses, she wants us to believe, is "an obvious nonevent." (Like puberty, I suppose.) Menopause isn't an event at all, but a process that takes place over five to seven years and has as many profound metaphysical, social, and sexual layers of meaning as the passage of menarche, which ushers in a woman's fertility.
These polemicists seriously misrepresent the fledgling movement to bring menopause out of the closet. Beware of this logic when you encounter it. The proponents are often women frozen in an outdated era of feminism. Ignoring a host of new data that demonstrate some clear gender differences stemming, at least in part, from variations in male/female biology, they represent their views as a higher good than the truth. It can make them more dangerous than the wrong drug.
As they age, the female hyenas' level of testosterone dips well below that of the males'. Notwithstanding, the females continue to be the more pugnacious and to remain in charge of their animal hierarchy. Dr. Lawrence Frank and Dr. Steven Glickman, animal behaviorists coordinating the study, tossed a huge hunk of horse meat into the pen of the young adults. The ranking female leapt on it and began reducing it to a grease spot, while the male laid back, passively, until she'd had her fill. "At this point, he defers to her without giving it a second thought," observed Dr. Glickman. By then, learned behavior has taken over from hormones. Thus does it remain difficult to disentangle culture from hormonal effects.
A clear link has been established, for example, between estrogen and women's verbal superiority, just as there is a link between testosterone and men's facility with math and visual-spatial tasks. The levels of hormone matter as well. When women of reproductive age were studied recently, their verbal dexterity was found to peak in the middle of their monthly cyclejust when estrogen levels were at their highest. Immediately after they finished menstruating, when circulating estrogen was at its lowest monthly ebb, their speed on verbal tasks declined. Even at their lowest speed, however, most of the women outperformed men on all verbal tests. By the same token, pubescent boys who have abnormally low levels of testosterone do poorly on spatial tasks.
In pulling together these recent studies, anthropologist Helen E. Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce, proposes that these subtle gender differences make evolutionary sense. When ancestral males squatted in the African veldt to watch and hunt animals many millennia ago, those who were best in the visual-spatial skills of mapping and tracking might well have survived disproportionately. Similarly, ancestral women needed minute manual dexterity to pick seeds and berries out of the dense vegetation, while verbal skills may have been critical to communicating with their young; again, selecting for these traits in modern women.
"For decades, if not centuries, scientists in search of an understanding of human nature have used male behavior as a bench mark and compared all data on females with this standard," writes Fisher, pointing out this is why we have known almost nothing about the biological tendencies of women. Now that we are just beginning to learn, it would be a shame to throw out the baby with the ancestral bathwater. Fisher makes a good case from anthropological findings that the two sexes survived by teaming up and sharing one another's biological advantages. ". . . our ancestors had begun to collect, butcher, and share meat. The sexes had started to make their living as a team . .. this hunting-gathering life-style would produce an intricate balance between women, men, and power."
The question inevitably comes up, is there a male menopause? Not precisely. All men do not become infertile at around the same age, and some men continue to have sufficient testosterone to sire children well into older age. Nevertheless, according to leading endocrinologists I have consulted, a decline in sexual prowess is a clear phenomenon among men, and it is correlated with a decline in testosterone levels. Dr. Pentti Siiteri, former professor and co-director of the Reproductive Endocrinology Center at UC San Francisco, and an authority on hormonal mechanisms, explains, "This is analogous to what happens to a female, the significant difference being there is no sharp demarcation point; therefore, it is impossible to define when the decline in sexual prowess starts. Most men," he adds, "begin to taper off in their mid-fifties to sixties."
But they don't talk about it. Not to their wives. Not even to other men. "Because you don't want to admit weakening," adds Dr. Frank, "Your job as a male is to be strong."
"Sooner or later, however, virtually all men will have a male menopause," states Dr. Siiteri. "It's the difference between a gradual decline and a more abrupt one."
Now here's the good news for women. Biology at the Change of Life works to women's advantage. The turmoil wrought by menopause mixes up the hormonal cocktail in new and different proportions. As the levels of the primary female hormone, estrogen, continually decline, the chaser of male hormone, testosterone, increases in ratio. Before menopause, the average woman's level of testosterone is roughly 300 picograms. After a woman goes through the Change, if her ovaries are still intact, her testosterone level falls from 300 to about 215-220or one third. (If her ovaries are removed, the drop is to about 100, or a two-thirds fall.) At the same time, her estrogen level falls twelvefold, a far greater decrease than that in the male hormone. And after the Change, her estrogen level remains fairly constant.
"Therefore, a postmenopausal woman has 20 times as much testosterone as a premenopausal woman," concludes Dr. Howard Judd, professor of Ob-Gyn at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), whose scientific studies established these norms in the early 1970s.
This provides a biological basis that would explain, at least in part, the widespread phenomenon of postmenopausal zest and the greater assertiveness recorded, cross-culturally, among postmenopausal women. Aggressiveness is rooted in the male hormone testosterone and found in elevated levels in men and male baboons of high rank.
Hence, in many societies, middle-aged womenfreed from the role of breeder and fired up with relatively higher levels of testosteronerise in rank and power, in political, religious, economic, and community life. Margaret Mead, a mentor of mine, summed it up in one sentence: "There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman."
Indeed, the most powerful woman in the world throughout the decade of the eighties was a menopausal woman. Margaret Thatcher was just about fifty when she broke the glass ceiling in British politics and became leader of the Conservative Party. She went through menopause while making the leap to world leader. Eleanor Roosevelt, Golda Meir, and Indira Ghandi all came into their own in their postmenopausal years.
Today, many more women are rising to high levels in public life in Europe and America, and without having to be honorary males. Among the hundred women in the European Parliament are some very glamorous ladies indeed. The British House of Commons now seats sixty women. The first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, and the first woman governor of Texas, the saltytongued Ann Richards, are prime examples of strong-minded women with plenty of postmenopausal zest. Twenty-nine of the fifty-four political women newly elected to the U.S. Congress in 1992 are in their fifties or over. Across Europe and North America there seems to be a new recognition: You don't have to be old and gray and male to be knowledgeable. You can be fifty and female and fabulous.
It would be remiss of me to represent all contemporary women in their middle years as similarly enlightened. Indeed, some of those with readiest access to the facts of life about the postmenopausal years are the most confused by the politicized debate over HRT. Some bury their heads in the sand and refuse to know what they know, or do much about it.
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Womens health