France - the land that menopause forgot
Article by
Julie Parker.
Julie Parker lives in Lille, is married to a Frenchman and has been in France for more than 26 years. I asked her to please enlighten us on how french women do La Ménopause. Her reports are fascinating - menopause seems to have a much lesser impact in France, why?
La pharmacie - does it hold the key?
Please tell us about La Ménopause!
When I first agreed to write this article I thought it would be easy. I have several older women friends and sisters-in-law in their fifties and early sixties who would all have, I presumed, their own menopause stories to tell. What could be simpler than to have a little chat about La Ménopause and summarize the results?
These are women who had regaled me with tales of their various pregnancies and births, who have shared details of their marital exploits which make it hard for me to look their husbands in the eye, whose bathroom cabinets are more familiar to me than the cupboards in my own kitchen.
And yet when I settled down hoping for cosy chats and confidences on the menopause, I was confronted by raised eyebrows, gallic shoulder shrugging and answers which ranged from "I don't remember" to "I barely noticed." Not one woman out of the ten or so I approached was willing to discuss - or even acknowledge the existence of - a phenomenon I had believed to be one none of us could escape. One even told me that the trick to avoiding the whole business was finding just the right moment to switch from taking the pill to moving on to HRT.
Women in the public eye like Ségolène Royal are perceived no differently at midlife.
Why does menopause have less impact in France than elsewhere?
Disappointed but intrigued, I set off to try to glean some objective information from that temple of scientific knowledge and reassurance - the local pharmacie.
Among the pristine shelves containing creams and gels promising to ward off wrinkles, cellulite, and heavy legs (yes! a particularly French problem, this), I searched in vain for products designed to alleviate the discomfort of menopausal symptoms but nothing seemed appropriate. A conversation with the pharmacienne revealed that she had very little demand for that sort of thing. Preparations to combat an expanding waistline? Any self-respecting Frenchwoman would already have those in her armoire from the age of 30. Something for hot flushes? Appropriate maquillage regularly applied throughout the day should render those unnoticeable. Vaginal dryness? If Monsieur knows what he is doing, this should not be a problem. If he doesn't, well, the problem could occur at any age...
Of the French women in the public eye, those of menopausal age are viewed no differently than their younger counterparts and doing ones utmost to remain attractive is seen as a simple question of self-respect rather than as an attempt to please members of the opposite sex (the same principle applies to men!). Women like actress Catherine Deneuve or politician Ségolène Royal have an ageless quality and certainly none of the women I spoke to seemed to think that reaching the menopause had had an effect on the way they were perceived.
To my great surprise, a serious academic article I came across on the web, comparing menopausal symptoms across different countries and cultures concluded that the status of women in France was indeed such that the menopause has much less of an impact here than elsewhere:
"For most French women, menopause involved few symptoms and little change in their social value. The distribution of types of experiences indicates that the differences in symptoms are not biologically determined. A given level of independence and emancipation allows women an identity beyond their reproductive function and a status unimpaired by menopause."
Catherine Deneuve - are French women ageless?
My own view is that the image of the femme française, eternally chic and feminine, is quite simply incompatible with the traditional idea of menopause as a kind of end. If the notion of a "deuxième printemps" does not exist here, our French sisters seem rather to have embraced that of a "printemps éternel."
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