A woman gets to a certain age and all she wants is to be left alone. No chance. Writing in the medical journal Post Reproductive Health, a group of academics warned recently of a “menopause gold rush” leaving women vulnerable to financial exploitation, misinformation and, frankly, a sweat-inducingly gigantic avalanche of advertising. A lot of this activity has been driven by – guess what? – social media. One respondent told the researchers: “Everything I know about the menopause I learned on Instagram from other women.” As gold rushes go, this has got to be the one you’d least like to see dramatised in a Hollywood movie: “Quick, Bianca, activate the algorithmic analysis of the campaign for the vitamin B6 supplement!”
The academics warned of “a rapid expansion in unregulated private companies and individuals providing menopause information and support for profit”. So now, instead of talking about the treatment and management of menopause, we are talking about how to cope with an equally pernicious condition and one that seems to have no cure or end: the ubiquitous commercialisation of menopause.
Whereas a lucky minority of women can sail through the naturally occurring real-life menopause without any symptoms at all, the entirely manufactured condition known as “meno marketing” is now likely to affect 100% of the adult population. This is purely my personal guesstimate. But algorithm or no, I find it hard to believe that even men have escaped the clutches of the Instagram ads for bladder pills, vitamin supplements, health-giving smoothies, calming gels, collagen concoctions and skincare solutions, all formulated with menopause in mind and often cheerfully pushed by celebrities with followings of all ages and genders. “Christmas is coming – why not treat your mum?”
I don’t want to spoil anyone’s retail therapy. And if maca root, ashwagandha or lion’s mane mushroom (all offered with menopause in mind) are your poison and you want to consume them with your eyes wide open, then be my guest. But do we really have to have so many things with exotic names marketed to us endlessly as the easy-to-swallow solution to a highly complex and under-researched issue?
There would surely be an outcry if anyone prescribed lipstick as an essential menopause aid. (For topical application. Although, frankly, there are days when I would eat anything.) But it struck me recently that the mood-enhancing effect of lipstick might be as significant as any medical placebo. And it’s certainly a cheaper and more reliable pick-me-up than many of the menopause aids on the market. Indeed, I became so convinced of this genius money-spinner that I looked it up to see if anyone else had already thought of it. And, lo and behold, there are already several brands of lip balm marketed under the banner of “menopause management”.
The biggest problem with menopause is that there are about 13 million women in the UK experiencing it at any one time. And the slowly dawning realisation that these women might be slightly underserved after centuries of demonising female ageing has unfortunately coincided with the high-water mark of aggressive capitalism. The impulse to rinse the market has eclipsed the need for public education.
I wouldn’t mind if it weren’t so nakedly foolish. After all, as far as market segmentation goes, this seems like the least niche market ever. How can 13 million human beings all benefit from the same specialist products in the same way at the same time? The truth is, you can’t. But the algorithm doesn’t care about that.
The uncomfortable fact is that menopause – just like menstruation and childbirth – is not a one-size-fits-all. In menopause, you can have a nonexistent experience (some women don’t notice it happening and have no symptoms). Or you can feel so bad that you start to think life is not worth living: one in 10 women in this cohort have suicidal thoughts. Or you can be in between those two extremes, with any combination of the 100-plus documented menopausal symptoms. No two women’s experiences of the “same” life event are necessarily remotely alike. In short, this demographic is so vague and meaningless as to be a marketer’s dream.
I suspect this would all be less annoying if there were – as the academics recommended – a proper information campaign about symptoms, treatment and expectations. As things stand, my guess is that most of us know far more about the contraceptive pill than we do about hormone replacement therapy (HRT). It’s pretty obvious who stands to benefit from that state of affairs and it’s certainly not menopausal women.
We need a happy medium in the world of menopause, where it is a phenomenon that is neither constantly being marketed at us nor swept shamefully under the carpet. We have gone from a time when the word was barely spoken aloud to an era when it’s hard to find a podcast that is not discussing testosterone gel. The sad thing is, I’m not sure we are any better informed about menopause, HRT, hormones or women’s cycles than we were 20 years ago. Buying the social-media-marketed equivalent of a shovel – the biggest money-spinner in the original gold rush – is not going to make anything better.
Viv Groskop is a comedian and author of How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking
