Science has now ‘proven’ what women have known all along: the ability to remember is affected by menopause.
Maybe I’m uber-sensitive (after all, I am post-menopausal), but the tone of the news release about this research strikes me as a tad sexist. The headline reads, “It’s not your imagination: Memory gets muddled at menopause.” How many women of a certain age have been told that their very real symptoms or experiences are, in fact, figments of their imaginations? This type of language (and attitude) about women’s health-related experience has been with us for some time. Was the news release written by a man? Who approved it?
I hope that the North American Menopause Society can in future write their news releases in language that respects the history of women’s oppression by the medical community (and for a humorous take on this oppression I recommend the film “Hysteria”. We might as well laugh.).
The results will be published in December 2013 in the print edition of Menopause: The Journal of The North American Menopause Society. It will be ‘hot’ off the presses…eventually.