The Change: Women, Aging, and the Menopause. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 18, 1993 by Maggie Gallagher

The Change: Women, Aging, and the Menopause, by Germaine Greer (Knopf, 422 pp., $23.50)

WHERE, o where has the promised land of liberation gone? Germaine Greer has, through twenty years and half a dozen books, wandered far and wide in search of the Holy Grail she outlined, so many years ago, in her international best-selling feminist classic, The Female Eunuch. Having thoroughly investigated the possibilities of copulation as a means of transcendence, discovered (too late) the lure of motherhood, and shared with us weepings of a Rachel who refuses to be comforted because her children will never be, Germaine Greer at last involuntarily set her Sights on the undiscovered country, unknown and unlooked for among the frenzied couplings of youth: menopause.

Miss Greer's book is just one of a spate of recent books by feminists about women and aging, and of those it is by far the most frustrating, convoluted, irrational, and fascinating.

Consistency has never been Miss Greer's strong suit. At each stage of the life cycle she has remained unabashedly preoccupied with her own problems. Once outraged by the unrelenting oppressive sexual attention of men, she now laments her own invisibility to the unfair sex. Then, she railed against the attempts of her elders to oppress the young by enculturating them with outmoded models and morals; now, she indignantly protests the flagrant disrespect of the young for the wisdom that years bring.

The same blithe desire to have it all ways is evident in her scathing denunciations of the male medical establishment, which according to Miss Greer both a) pays attention to menopause, therefore medicalizing it, and b) ignores menopause, therefore marginalizing it. Other reviewers have pointed out the oddity of Miss Greer's insistence both that most women do not suffer medical symptoms at menopause, and that it is a myth that "there are women who experience nothing significant at this time."

Part of the reason for the confusion is that Miss Greer is actually not very interested in menopause, medically defined as the cessation of ovulation. For her the "climacteric," as she prefers to call it, denotes not so much the end of fertility as the end of flirtation. The real change, according to Miss Greet, is social and sexual, not biological and reproductive: "Sooner or later the middle-aged woman becomes aware of a change in the attitude of other people toward her. She can no longer trade on her appearance, something which she has done unconsciously all her life."

Having spent thirty years celebrating the allure of the hunt, the joy of trading sexual favors and trading in sexual partners, former sexual revolutionaries such as Miss Greet are now discovering that as a formula for giving life meaning, sex games have, for women, at least one distinct drawback: after a certain age, nobody wants to play with you any more.

What happens when your sexual license expires? While successful, affluent men so inclined can continue to play the game, and continue to find eager young things to massage (among other things) their egos, women face a different, perhaps bleaker future.

"Now what do I do?" an unmarried middle-aged friend complained to Miss Greet over lunch. "Am I supposed to haunt the singles bars to try and pick up younger men? Am I supposed to descend lower and lower into squalor because I won't live without love? . . . Just thinking about it fills me with terrors. I lie awake at night, worrying."

"What actually happens to the aging woman during the climacteric is that men lose interest in manipulating her femaleness," Miss Greer writes. "They no longer sniff around her."

Older cultures, she says, understood that sex, like theoretical physics, is a young man's game, and after a time gave aging bodies permission to retire; in particular, Miss Greer believes traditional cultures give women permission to relinquish the "duty to attract," to exchange at an appropriate age the sexual power of youth for the spiritual power of the old. For happily married women, the loss of the power to attract the random sexual attention of strangers may be scarcely felt or noticed. But Miss Greer is surely right when she notes that the climacteric--morally, not medically, defined--cannot help being a troubling rite of passage for the large and increasing number of women who, because of divorce, widowhood, or failure to marry, face the prospect of entering old age alone.

Despite its many flaws, The Change contains jewels of unexpected (from this source) insight. Seldom has any writer penned a more incisive condemnation of orthodox feminism than this: "The modern woman has only two possible sources of satisfaction, her relationship with her husband and her relationship with her employer."

Nor can any critic of the sexual revolution fail to recognize the truth of Miss Greer's observation that: "The sexual revolutionaries' belief that sex was only destructive when distorted by repression has been shown to be wrong .... Nevertheless the belief in a domestic brand of sex, which is regular, benign, wholesome, and affectionate, has completely driven out any idea of love as essentially related to death."