My thoughts on Menopause

There are three questions driving my interest in menopause:
Why did menopause evolve?
Why do some women experience menopause at forty-two, while others cycle like clockwork to the age of fifty-eight?
Why does menopause pass unnoticed for some women, while others suffer from unrelenting hot flashes?

Oh! sorry. Its not over I got some other 'SERIOUS' questions too;
Why do human females close down childbearing long before the end of life, while most chimpanzees reproduce until shortly before death?
Why didn’t my mother have any hot flashes, while other women remove strategic layers of clothing and visibly sweat?

Bring up the topic of menopause, and I’m more than happy to contribute curious observations, interesting hypotheses, and leaps of biological faith. Yet there are so many questions that I can’t answer. Friends and colleagues at work ask, “I can’t remember names anymore. Is that menopause?” “My left arm goes numb. Is that menopause?” “I want to have sex twice a day. Is that menopause?” “I’m more depressed than I have ever been. Is that menopause?”

Variation in age at menopause and in symptom experience can be understood
at the level of the population by combining a familiarity with biology with observations of cultural difference. I have summarized much of what is known across a wide variety of populations, including those that are most familiar to me: upstate New York (where women talk about menopause as something natural, ordained by God), western Massachusetts
(where women proactively smear themselves with yam cream and eat blue-green algae for menopausal health), Puebla, Mexico (where marital stress is a constant topic of concern among women of menopausal age), the Selsa ka Valley, Slovenia (where menopause is an uncomfortable, taboo topic of conversation), and Asunción, Paraguay (where some women describe menopause as un alivio, a relief, but others volunteer the word desesparación, despair, as a menopausal symptom).

I focus on menopause both as a onetime event, the last menstrual period, and as an ongoing process, the transition from pre- to postreproductive life. These two points of view—event and process—reflect different approaches to the study of menopause, and both are necessary. I also examine the evolution and contemporary experience of menopause in a particular way—from a biocultural perspective.