Lump It Or Leave It

FIFTYSOMETHING
Lear's is the magazine "For The Woman Who Wasn't Born Yesterday."
Shakespearean buffs who think it is named for the Lear who said, "Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, with cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks," must think again. Lear's is the brainchild of sixtyish Frances Lear, the former Mrs. Norman Lear, who decided to build the confidence of older women by giving them their own magazine and naming it after the man who paid her $112 million for divorcing him.
Considering the way they edited my copy, they ought to call themselves The Battle-Ax. As far as I can tell, they do nothing for older women unless you want to count the ten years they took off my life.
Writing for women's magazines is a matter of skirting their various taboos. Pedophobia at Family Circle and Lesbianism at Cosmopolitan make sense, but the greattaboo at Lear's, according to one of their many former editors, is the word menopause.
A shame, because I would have loved to write an article on it for them.
My thoughts on the menopause do not go over well with the kind of middle-aged women who say, "You're only as old as you feel," and then give a pert toss of the head. These are the women who buy the most surgical collars. They are also the women who buy the most plastic surgery; I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
About the most these women will say on the forbidden subject is a wistful murmur of "I miss my periods." If you reply, as I did, "That's like missing the Spanish Inquisition," your name will be entered in the Index of Insensitivity under Twatist. Between the upbeat seventies' psychobabble about "passages" and feminism's attempt to reduce menopause to a sheaf of mendacious stereotypes invented by the patriarchy, many women come so close to claiming that there is no such thing as menopause that they come very close to sounding like Mrs. Eddy.
I grew up hearing a very different sort of wishful thinking. My grandmother's disquisition on the menopause always began with a doleful sigh. "Ahhh! That time of life ... . It's got to come to all of us someday."
In the South of my childhood, no woman could weather the "Change" completely unscathed; it was femininity's Appomattox and you had to milk it for every possible drop of theater.
A definite menopause class system existed. The Brahmins, of course, were the women who went hopelessly, gothically, permanently insane. In the next caste down were women with such severe female trouble thattheir "parts" fell out like gifts from a piñata, known as "she felt a whoosh! and then it just went plop!" The last of the Big Three patricians, officially disapproved of but providing a perfect plum of gossip, was the woman who developed another form of looseness known as "she likes men."
The pelvic bourgeoisie were the women who did "something peculiar," a catch-all phrase that might refer to a woman who became a spit-and-polish housekeeper after years of sloth; or one who took to shoplifting inane items like pen wipers; or one who suddenly began wearing white anklets (Granny: "whoopee socks") with black patent leather high heels.
The working class had the "sleeping Change," an extreme form of fatigue manifested by a neighbor of Granny's, who never did see the end of The Sheik despite ten trips to the theater. The phlegmatic quality of the sleeping Change made it déclassé because menopausal women are supposed to be "nervous." It always provoked the disappointed assessment, "She slept right through it," accompanied by a ski-slope gesture going off into infinity where, the speaker left no doubt, the calm one deserved to be banished.
The untouchables were the women who had no trouble whatsoever, known contemptuously as "She sailed right through it."
I started looking forward to the menopause at the age of twelve due to what male gynecologists call "discomfort"--wracking, knotting, waves of cramps and vomiting that lasted the whole of the first day and left me wrung out for most of the second. In high school I missed the annual French contest because of cramps. In college, as soon as the exam schedule was posted, I checked the dates in abject fear that one or more of mine would fall on Der Tag. Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month ashaving twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap. When I heard other women say, "My periods are what make me a woman," I always thought, "My periods are what keep me from being myself."
None of the doctors I consulted could find anything wrong with me. I thought I might have what Granny & Company called a "tilted womb" but my pelvis was normal in every way. Finally, at the age of thirty, I decided to try to get a partial hysterectomy. I picked that particular cut-off age because I had heard that a woman of thirty who had three children could have her tubes tied at her own request on the assumption that her whelping days were over (this was 1966). Since I did not intend to have any children at all, I figured that some version of the same rule would apply to me. (I was working for the Raleigh News and Observer and writing "30" at the end of copy, so it made a certain sense.)
One day while editing canned features I came across one about a contraceptive operation in which the lining of the uterus--the endometrium--is removed via the vagina. Without the porous lining, said the article, menstrual blood had no place to collect; the woman would stop menstruating, and her eggs, if fertilized, would simply slide down the slippery slope and be passed off unnoticed.
It sounded perfect. No surgery. Merely a matter of what Granny, in the fruitiness of her idiom, would have called: "They just reach right up and pull it right out--whisk!"
Feminists are right and wrong about male gynecologists. Yes, they are supercilious bastards; no, they are not swept by irresistible forces of sadism and greed at the thought of performing unnecessary operations on female organs--if they were, I would have gotten what I wanted.
The first one listened to my story, his mouth twitching in amusement, then patted my hand and said, "You'll change your mind when you hold your first baby in your arms."
The second one threw me out of his office.
"We have ways of curing monthly discomfort with medication! If you had a sore toe, would you want to get it cut off?"
"Sure, if it was sore enough," I said. "You can live with nine toes unless you're a ballet dancer, and I'm not."
"I hope you don't have children," he said, his voice shaking. "I'd hate to see what they'd turn out to be like."
A few weeks later while editing the social notes, I saw his daughter's name in a ballet recital list. Doubtless he was as sick of dying swans as I was of twat artists. I gave up the idea of having my endometrium ripped untimely from my womb and went on menstruating.
I began missing periods at forty-six and had my last one four years ago at fifty. Since then, I have been living proof of Simone de Beauvoir's assessment of menopause in The Second Sex:
In many, a new endocrine balance becomes established. Woman is now delivered from the servitude imposed by her female nature, but she is not to be likened to a eunuch, for her vitality is unimpaired. And what is more, she is no longer the prey of overwhelming forces; she is herself, she and her body are one. It is sometimes said that women of a certain age constitute "a third sex"; and, in truth, while they are not males, they are no longer females. Often, indeed, this release from female physiology is expressed in a health, a balance, a vigor that they lacked before.
This is the calamity known as "losing your femininity" that women's magazines are so eager to help us stave off.
The prospect of being feminine always makes me think of James M. Cain's reply when asked to write for The New Yorker: "On the whole, I'd rather be dead."
In my youth I did a fairly credible imitation of femininity. I never could manage the big things, such as playing dumb or being undemanding in bed, but I did remember to soften my voice, shorten my stride, and be sweetly helpless about electricity. I played my part so well that eventually I came to believe it. It was easy to convince myself that I was feminine because I thought masculine women had to be athletic and good at sports, which I was not. It took the menopause to teach me that another, more agreeable kind of tomboyhood awaited me.
There are four stages of woman, best defined by looking at a commonplace task: taking the car to the shop. When you are a sweet young thing, the mechanics don't want you to hang around the shop for fear you will get dirty. When you are a sexy broad, they don't want you to hang around the shop for fear you will create such a tempting distraction that they will get hurt. And when you are a little old lady, they don't want you to hang around the shop for fear you will get in the way.
But there is another stage, the one between siren and dear old thing. Stage Three: sexually over the hill but still alert and able to move fast--when the mechanics don't worry about you! It lasts about fifteen years, from fifty to Social Security, but they are the best fifteen years of a woman's life; the debriefing years, the detoxification years, when she can shed her skin and become, for a brief shining moment, a female good ole boy.
It is de rigueur for post-menopausal women to say,"I didn't get older, I got better," and describe how intense their orgasms are now that they no longer have to worry about getting pregnant.
There may be some women who suddenly discover that they "like men," but usually it's because they saved it up too long and must make up for lost time (Granny: "A candle always flares up before it goes out").
In the majority of cases, however, I suspect that the older-but-better brigade are fibbing in the cause of the American economy, which encourages them to do it. If the advertising-dependent women's magazines can make them believe that they never stop feeling horny, they will buy more clothes, cosmetics, vacations, plastic surgery, eighty-dollar haircuts, and Kellogg's Product 19 to feel like nineteen again even though it's as dry as a bone--and I don't mean the cereal.
The sacrilegious truth is, my sex drive diminished sharply when I started skipping periods, and vanished entirely as soon as they stopped for good. Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterwards. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.
There is much to be said for post-menopausal celibacy. Sex is rough on loners because you have to have somebody else around, but now I don't. No more diets to stay slim and desirable: I've had sex and I've had food, and I'd rather eat. Although Mother Nature rather than willpower crafted my celibacy, the result has been the same. My powers of concentration are now as awesome as those of the most successful artistic or priestly practitioner of sublimation; sexual need no longer distracts me from my work.
There is a wholeness to celibacy. For a woman, a sexual relationship is an invasion of privacy, an absorption of individuality, a fragmentation of the personalitythat poses an everpresent threat to the character. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote: "When a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from no crime." He did not mean that non-virgins routinely become murderers and bank robbers, but that a woman in a sexual relationship makes emotional choices rather than ethical ones--what Tammy Wynette was recommending when she sang "Stand By Your Man." I never wanted to stand by anybody except myself, and now I can.
Let's not forget the menopausal blessings of thrift. My heating bill has gone down by more than half over the last few years. So much, in fact, that a compassionate soul from the utility company called me last winter to see if I was in dire economic straits.
"If you've had financial difficulties we can enroll you in our special payment plan," she said.
"I haven't had financial difficulties, I've had the Change. My hot flashes keep me warm now. I've turned into my own furnace."
"Oh ... ."
I love those gulpy oh's. They are part and parcel of another menopausal benefit I call the "boldness syndrome."
When I was menstruating, I used to avoid controversy because I was afraid that when the situation came to a head, I wouldn't "feel well." Always, in the back of my mind, lay the knowledge that if I shot off my mouth on, say, the fourteenth of the month, that by the thirtieth, when everybody was good and mad, I would have cramps and be unable to follow through. Now, I no longer worry.
A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty days, not twenty-five, andwho can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.
The New-Old Me received the ultimate accolade a few months ago in Washington when I went up to the crime capital for a business meeting.
Walking back to my hotel alone in the early evening, I saw coming toward me two black boys of ten or twelve. Their body language was unmistakable; they were weaving like boxers and darting their heads to and fro, checking for police and adult males likely to come to my aid. It was obvious that they were getting ready to snatch my purse.
I tightened my grip on my shoulder strap. As we drew closer I saw their eyes moving over my face in quizzical examination. When we were almost abreast, one of them elbowed the other and waggled his head from side to side.
"Uh-uh. She a mean lady."
The mean lady grinned all the way back to the hotel, suffused in what bad novelists call a "sunburst feeling." The purse snatchers' decision to abort their mission was the most flattering compliment I have ever received from the male sex. They had acknowledged that I had lost my femininity, and it felt great.
I doubt if those two will ever read this book unless Marva Collins gets hold of them, but since there is no way to get in touch with them, I would like to leave them a message here.
"Bad-ass, the mean lady thanks you."
LUMP IT OR LEAVE IT. Copyright © 1990 by Florence King. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010.