From Girlhood to Menopause

And remembering that one shrimp dinner

In December, I read Melissa Febos’ book Girlhood. A good friend had recommended it with words that made it feel like required reading: She’d never heard, read, or seen her experiences as a girl reflected as honestly as Febos does in this book. Reading Girlhood was something wholly different for me. It was like seeing my friends’ experiences written down, recoiling in fear and sadness, taking a deep breath, and recognizing that my own girlhood looked radically different than many women’s around me. Febos describes her own jarring transition away from childhood, when the world began to sexualize her body and existence, which felt anathema to her own budding sexual desires. She provides examples of sexual encounters she had forced on her that made me shudder.

Although Febos’ specific experiences felt removed from my own, many of her larger observations struck a personal cord. When I had a little distance from the brutality of my adolescence, I could see how absurd it was that I’d imbued boys—very young, naive, horny, cruel, silly, dumb, scatterbrained boys—with power over my sense of worth. Their power could feel absolute. Why? What would it look like to free girls from that power—power wielded by the literal boys around them, often unknowingly, and also the girls that enforce it and larger systems that establish it.

Sitting with these thoughts, I realized that I’d come upon a few ways that I’d armed myself as a girl, ones I don’t remember being taught but that I held firmly to for years.

The first was simply sarcasm and a hyper-vigilant critical eye. I believed that media targeted at teen girls was absurd. This didn’t prevent me from consuming images that made me feel ugly, fat, and uncool, but it did make me self-conscious about consuming them—about buying teen magazines or watching teen movies—because I saw them as embarrassing. I still feel this sometimes: realizing that specific advertising or television is targeted at me, recognizing how much they think they have my number, and wanting desperately to rebel and prove them wrong.

My friend Ana and I would make fun of advertising as a game. I met Ana when we were eleven. I loved her from the first moment she spoke. Her child’s voice was low and raspy. She had a button nose and a deadpan expression that made her seem stoic, obscuring her sensitivity. In middle school, we were both beleaguered by what it meant to become grown-up women. I remember crawling around in the mud pretending we were models in a Calvin Klein perfume ad for a fragrance we’d invented called “Obsternity.” “Obsternity, a fragrance by Calvin Klein,” we’d whisper seductively, pantomiming sexiness, and then laugh until we couldn’t breathe. We didn’t know what this imaginary aroma signified, only that it summed up exactly how we felt. Obsternity: Being a prisoner of puberty for what felt like an eternity. Obsternity: The absurdity of performing proscribed femininity. Obsternity: Our obtuse longing to be objectified because we thought it would prove we were worthy of love.

Another way I defended myself was by belittling boys. I’m sure I did this to girls and have buried the memories—I could be very judgmental—but I specifically remember doing it to boys who held social capital. These weren’t boys I thought were cute or charming whose attention I wanted; they were ones I didn’t know well who I found smug and faintly sinister. I discovered my tactic in middle school. After bumping into an especially gregarious and popular boy who loved to manipulate his friends, I decided to pretend I couldn’t remember his name. “I’m sorry, what’s your name?” I asked, enacting innocence. He was flustered. “You know my name,” he responded. I could feel that I’d hit a deeper nerve than I’d aimed for. “No really, I’m sorry, what’s your name?” He was deeply annoyed, and I felt a rush of power.

I repeated this with the same boy a few more times, and it always rankled him. I hadn’t realized how powerful it is to deny someone their name. I did this in high school once or twice. I did this in college repeatedly. I’d misname boys as we walked past, boys who I barely knew who I’d flagged as having too much ease and power. “Hi Ted,” I’d call out from across the green to a man whose name was not Ted, especially if his friends were around. At some point in college, in someone’s dorm smoking weed, one of these boys screamed at me, “I know you know my name!”

I now see this as cruel and petty. These boys were going through their own shit storms. And yet, it helped me a lot! I stopped after college. It began to feel less necessary. But it had been useful, and I felt grateful that this trick came to me when I needed it.

Many of my coping mechanisms weren’t so goofy. None of this is to say that these teen years were nice for me, that I felt powerful or free, that I escaped the impact of media or the harassment of boys, men, and other girls, that I didn’t enact my own cruelties. These years were nightmarish. I recently went through a cache of my father’s photos, and I could barely look at ones of me when I was between 13 and 18. The pain and embarrassment are still too fresh, twenty years later! I remember listening to an Ursula K. Le Guin interview in which someone asked her why she had faith in her readers to understand pain, suffering, and adversity, and she responded with something like: “Everyone has been a teen. Everyone has known suffering.” How true!

These two tactics don’t explain why I avoided so much of the harassment my friends experienced. I think some of it was luck, some of it was circumstance, some of it was going through puberty very late, some of it was being especially outspoken in class and wielding social power in those spaces that I didn’t realize I had—and so much more! I’d told myself a really grotesque narrative: that the reason I didn’t get harassed or assaulted was because I was undesirable. Isn’t that incredible—the way the mind can turn anything into self-criticism. That even not being harassed could become a source of shame. But in my twenties, I had a series of encounters with men that obliterated that and to this day make me laugh.

One hot stinky day in Brooklyn walking down Atlantic Avenue in the middle of the day, a man leaned in and said to me, “I’m gonna lick your pussy.” I walked on silently, in complete shock. The question that resounded in my mind afterwards, weirdly, was: “like right now, or later?” And that question, strangely, made me realize that these were just words. Men often wield more than words, which is what makes their words so threatening, but this was not an instance of that. This freak had no desire to eat me out! He was harassing me for some kind of feeling it gave him. It was different than the way I misnamed boys, but not completely separate. We were both trying to make someone else feel disembodied and powerless. In this instance, I had the presence of mind to see it as ridiculous and toothless and realize it had nothing to do with me.

And then, in Portland, in my early twenties, I was biking up to an ATM in the Pearl District on a Friday night in winter to get some cash. I locked up my bike and approached the ATM. A handsome and confident man around my age approached me. I was standing there in the dark in an enormous coat still wearing my helmet when he said, “Hi! What are you up to tonight?” After a long pause, he continued, “There’s nothing I would like more than to buy you a shrimp dinner.”

A shrimp dinner! I imagined us going to a Red Lobster where the sizzling shrimp would jump around in the air like in the ads, spraying us with their hot liquids. I imagined then going to a Red Lion hotel (because why not more red creatures) and having sex all night. Like in Tampopo, we’d bring a live shrimp with us for foreplay. Those few words he’d spoken sent my imagination rocketing, and it was all I could do not to burst into laughter. “Sorry, I have plans with friends,” I said to this complete stranger who wanted nothing more than to buy [me] a shrimp dinner. Then I walked back to my bike and left.

Febos’ book caused all these memories to flood back, but they’ve lingered longer than I might have expected, in part because I’m facing a different transition: menopause. It’s not right around the corner—but hell, it might be, because who knows! There’s a lot of mystery to menopause, I think in large part because it’s something so rarely talked about, even among women. I see strong parallels between these different transitions in women’s lives.

As a teen girl, I felt embarrassed for how late I grew breasts, had a period, and had sexual experiences. Everything is shameful at that time in life—being sexual, being asexual, being sort of sexual, being looked at, being ignored, having your period, not having your period. Girlhood is a time of unbelievable vulnerability, and girls often feel incredibly alone and competitive. If only we could transmit into their brains how important it is that we laugh together, not at each other. There is so much power in laughing together.

This piece of practical advice feels especially relevant to me right now because I think the exact same thing is true for menopause. We need to feel less alone. We need to talk about it more. We need to laugh and cry together. Which is why I was and am over the moon that my friend Sasha Davies wrote a book all about menopause called The Menopause Companion. I’ve been telling friends about her book and how I want to essentially “book club” it for the next decade plus. I want to gather all my friends around and talk openly about our experiences, laugh at some of the darkest bits, cry at others, and have each other’s backs in a way we tried to do in middle and high school but are more equipped to accomplish now.

Find a link to pre-orders plus a discount code at sashadavies.com.

My friends have written me back with so many eager responses because I think none of us realized that we were already feeling alone facing this mysterious transition:

“I’m going thru peri-men. My mom didn’t go thru [what I am] and I’m having difficulty even talking to my gyno about this… This would mean to much. A lot of ups/downs/confusion.”

“Well, we know who needs this pretty soon/yesterday!”

“This topic just came up at a work lunch recently where my boss and another person her age were talking about how their generation didn’t talk about menopause at all - so a book on this topic is so welcome!!”

“Thank god this exists! I always tell people I want to write the Great American Menopause Novel but this is better.”

I told Sasha that I was going to start a menopause support group and encourage my friends to do the same and she responded, “A coven of crones-in-training.” I love that because it reminds me again of Le Guin, always our guide, whose essay “The Space Crone” was the first time I remember reading about menopause as something meaningful, powerful, worth celebrating. In it, Le Guin writes, only a crone has “experienced, accepted, and acted the entire human condition—the essential quality of which is Change.”

Sometimes when I talk about “group living,” this is what I mean—gathering together and creating solidarity, finding each other in moments that feel isolating and tumultuous, telling each other our stories as a way to expand our collective sense of what’s possible, giving each other permission to be vulnerable, laughing at ourselves, laughing together. There is so much power in laughing together.