更年期的秘密力量

The Secret Power of Menopause

更年期的秘密力量

Why the end of fertility doesn』t mark the start of decline—and may even help explain our success as a species

LIZA MUNDY

OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE

為什麼生育能力的終結不會標誌著衰落的開始 - 甚至可能有助於解釋我們作為一個物種的成功

LIZA MUNDY

2019年10月期

Don』t try to tell this to a mother sitting in the bleachers during a four-hour swim meet; or enduring a birthday party involving toddlers and craft projects; or resting in an armchair on a peaceful evening, savoring the heft of a tiny body and the scent of an infant』s freshly washed hair. Interminable or sweetly languid though they may feel in the moment, the childbearing years are startlingly brief. Fertility, which typically ends in a woman』s mid-40s, occupies less than half of her adult life. And then, if she』s lucky, she has 30 or 40 years in which to do something else.

在四小時的游泳比賽中，不要試圖告訴坐在看台上的母親;或經歷涉及幼兒和工藝項目的生日聚會;或者在一個寧靜的夜晚在扶手椅上休息，品嘗一個小小的身體的重量和嬰兒剛洗過的頭髮的香味。雖然他們可能覺得此刻無休止或甜蜜的倦怠，但育齡期卻令人吃驚。生育率通常在40歲左右的女性中結束，不到成年後的一半。然後，如果她很幸運，她有30或40年的時間做其他事情。

Most people don』t realize how unusual humans are, in the way that nonreproductive females (how shall I put this?) persist. Females of most other species can bear young until they die, and many do, or at best enjoy a brief respite from breeding before death. This is true not only of creatures you might expect, such as rabbits, but also of long-lived mammals such as Asian elephants, and of primates such as gorillas and chimps. The odd exceptions—the Japanese aphid, for example, enters a 「glue bomb」 stage after her reproductive phase, ready to immobilize a colony intruder—only prove the rule.

The mystery of why women go on and on and on after their procreative function has ceased has occupied some of the great minds of the ages. I am sorry to report that many of those minds have not been forward-thinking. 「It is a well-known fact … that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration」 and they become 「quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing,」 Sigmund Freud pronounced. The male-dominated medical community of the mid-20th century was similarly dismissive. 「The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,」 opined the gynecologist Robert Wilson, who elaborated on this theme in his 1966 best seller, Feminine Forever. The influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone-replacement therapy.

大多數人都沒有意識到人類有多麼不尋常，就像非生殖性女性一樣（我該怎麼說呢？）堅持下去。大多數其他物種的雌性在它們死亡之前可以生育幼崽，並且許多人在死亡前享受短暫的暫時休息。這不僅適用於您可能期望的生物，例如兔子，也適用於亞洲大象等長壽哺乳動物以及大猩猩和黑猩猩等靈長類動物。奇怪的例外 - 日本蚜蟲，例如，在她的生殖階段進入「膠彈」階段，準備固定殖民地入侵者 - 只證明規則。

女性為什麼在她們的生育功能停止之後繼續下去的謎團已經佔據了這個時代的一些偉大思想。我很遺憾地報告說，許多人都沒有前瞻性思維。西格蒙德·弗洛伊德說：「這是一個眾所周知的事實......在女性失去生殖器功能之後，她們的性格經常會發生特殊的改變」，並且他們變成了「爭吵，無理取鬧和霸道」。 20世紀中期以男性為主的醫學界同樣不屑一顧。 「必須面對所有絕經後婦女都是閹割的令人不快的事實，」婦科醫生羅伯特威爾遜認為，他在1966年暢銷書「女性永遠」中詳細闡述了這一主題。這本有影響力的書後來出現，得到了一家急於推出激素替代療法的製藥公司的支持。

Even the architects of the sexual revolution were fixated on fertility as a marker of femininity, an attitude that seems doubly unfair coming from the people who gave us the pill. 「Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,」 wrote the psychiatrist David Reuben in 1969 in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, adding that the postmenopausal woman comes 「as close as she can to being a man.」 Or rather, 「not really a man but no longer a functional woman.」

Little wonder that women writers have felt the need to weigh in over the centuries. A few took an upbeat approach. At the age of 41, having just given birth to her sixth child, the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her friend Susan B. Anthony in 1857 to say that their best activist years lay ahead. 「We shall not be in our prime before fifty & after that we shall be good for twenty years at least.」 Others were less sanguine. At 54, writing her memoir, Simone de Beauvoir gloomily prepared to say 「goodbye to all those things I once enjoyed」; women, Freud had taught her, become miserable and sexless as they age. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Helen Gurley Brown, Germaine Greer—all warily chronicled their maturity, as of course did the writer who invented the concept of 「passage,」 Gail Sheehy. Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, and her anxiety spawned a best selle

即便是性革命的建築師也把生育視為女性氣質的標誌，這種態度似乎從給予我們避孕藥的人那裡得到了雙倍的不公平。 「一旦卵巢停止，成為一個女人的本質就會停止，」精神病學家大衛·魯本於1969年在「你總是想要了解性但卻不敢問的一切」中寫道，並補充說，絕經后的女人「儘可能接近」成為一個男人。「或者更確切地說，」不是真正的男人，而是一個功能性的女人。「

難怪女性作家幾百年來感到需要權衡。一些人採取了樂觀的態度。在41歲時，女權主義者伊麗莎白·卡迪·斯坦頓（Elizabeth Cady Stanton）剛剛生下第六個孩子，於1857年寫下了她的朋友蘇珊·安東尼（Susan B. Anthony），說他們最好的活動家年代就在前面。 「我們不會在五十歲之前到達我們的鼎盛時期，之後我們至少會好幾十年。」其他人則不那麼樂觀了。 54歲的時候，寫下她的回憶錄，西蒙娜·德·波伏娃沮喪地準備說「告別我曾經享受的所有事情」;女人，弗洛伊德教過她，隨著年齡的增長變得悲慘和無性。 Betty Friedan，Gloria Steinem，Helen Gurley Brown，Germaine Greer-所有人都小心翼翼地記錄了他們的成熟，當然是作家發明了「通道」的概念，Gail Sheehy。 Nora Ephron對她的脖子感到不好，她的焦慮產生了最好的熱情

Even now it』s hard for a woman not to dread the consequences of moving out of youth. One of the wryest recent meditations is an episode of Inside Amy Schumer, in which the eponymous comedian happens upon three of her comedic icons—Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—picnicking in a meadow. They are celebrating Louis-Dreyfus』s 「last f***able day,」 as adjudicated by the media, Fey explains. Schumer, feigning astonishment, asks whether the media do this to men. The trio laughs and laughs.

Three new books about postmenopausal womanhood show that the conversation is changing. For the first time, The New York Times noted early this year, a sizable cohort of women is moving into the sixth and seventh decades of life with a surfeit of energy and workplace experience. Women are better educated than men. Many spend early middle age constrained by work-life challenges, like athletes training with ankle weights. Once the weights come off, they have the muscle to run. Literally: The 2020 slate of female presidential candidates is Exhibit A.

即使是現在，女人也不會害怕搬離青年的後果。最近最沉思的冥想之一是Inside Amy Schumer的劇集，其中同名喜劇演員發生在她的三個喜劇偶像 -  Tina Fey，Patricia Arquette和Julia Louis-Dreyfus-在草地上野餐。費伊解釋說，他們正在慶祝路易 - 德雷福斯的「最後一個可操作的日子」，由媒體裁決。假裝驚訝的舒默詢問媒體是否對男性這樣做。三人笑著笑。

關於絕經后女性的三本新書表明，談話正在發生變化。 「紐約時報」今年早些時候首次提到，一大批女性正在進入生命的第六和第七十年，過剩的能量和工作場所經驗豐富。女性受教育程度高於男性。許多人在早期中年受到工作 - 生活挑戰的限制，比如運動員用腳踝重量訓練。一旦重量下降，他們就會有肌肉運動。字面意思：2020年女性總統候選人名單見附錄A.

The landscape looks different due to the #MeToo movement as well. In some ways, it has divided women by generation, yet even older women who may regret a return to the idea of feminine fragility are overjoyed to see workplace predators toppled. The unseating of men like Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer has opened the way for women like Christiane Amanpour and Gayle King to occupy top spots, where they exemplify what 60‑something really looks like: pretty freaking great.

由於#MeToo運動，景觀看起來也不同。在某些方面，它已經將女性分開了一代人，但即使是那些可能後悔重新回歸女性脆弱觀念的老年女性也很高興看到職場掠奪者被推翻。查理·羅斯（Charlie Rose）和馬特·勞爾（Matt Lauer）這樣的男性脫穎而出，為像Christiane Amanpour和Gayle King等女性佔據榜首開闢了道路，在那裡他們舉例說明了60個真實的樣子：非常棒極了。

The current conversation is also informed by evolutionary biology, which evaluates traits based on their reproductive purpose. Given that menopause is nonreproductive by definition, biologists consider it a 「big evolutionary puzzle,」 the novelist Darcey Steinke writes in her memoir, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. According to the prevailing view, a human female possesses all the eggs she will have while still in the womb; the number promptly begins diminishing, and by her mid-40s, the remaining ova have deteriorated. To an evolutionary biologist, this is interesting and weird. To Steinke, it was miserable and hard. Her book is lyrical but a bit depressing, because she herself was depressed.

目前的對話也是由進化生物學提供的，它根據生殖目的來評估特徵。鑒於更年期根據定義是非生殖性的，生物學家認為這是一個「巨大的進化難題」，小說家Darcey Steinke在她的回憶錄中寫道：Flash Count Diary：Menopause和Vindication of Natural Life。根據流行的觀點，一個人類的女性擁有她仍然在子宮中的所有卵子;這個數字很快就開始減少了，到40多歲時，剩下的卵子已經惡化了。對於進化生物學家來說，這很有趣也很奇怪。對斯坦克而言，這是悲慘而艱難的。她的書很抒情，但有點令人沮喪，因為她自己很沮喪。

Some women experience few symptoms during menopause, but Steinke suffered nearly two awful years of hot flashes, acute episodes that were like 「four-minute surprise anxiety attacks.」 She sensed mortality stalking her: 「For the first time, I feel I have a time stamp, an expiration date.」 She writes vividly and a little wistfully about sex, mourning her lost desirability, as she sees it, and the waning of her own desire. She feels angry; she yells at her husband. 「Early times of sexual frenzy seem almost impossible now.」

Every woman is of course entitled to—can』t escape—her own response to menopause. But Steinke』s melancholy reflections sound a bit retrograde, as if she can』t escape those insufferable doctors, the Wilsons and the Reubens, with their pompous pronouncements about the wreckage that remains when estrogen, like a tide, drains away. 「Without hormones my femininity is fraying,」 she writes. In a transitional state herself, she identifies with people who are transitioning out of their birth gender—not that the empathy brings much relief.

有些女性在絕經期間幾乎沒有癥狀，但斯坦克經歷了近兩年可怕的潮熱，急性發作就像是「四分鐘的突然焦慮症」。她感覺死亡跟蹤她：「我第一次覺得我有一個時間戳，一個失效的日期。「她生動地寫了一些關於性的渴望，哀悼她失去的慾望，正如她所看到的那樣，以及她自己慾望的消失。她感到很生氣;她對丈夫大吼大叫。 「現在，性狂熱的早期幾乎是不可能的。」

每個女人當然有權 - 不能逃避 - 她自己對更年期的反應。但斯坦克的憂鬱反射聽起來有點逆行，好像她無法逃脫那些令人難以忍受的醫生，威爾遜和魯本斯，他們誇張地講述了當雌激素像潮水一樣消失的殘骸。 「沒有荷爾蒙，我的女性氣質正在消失，」她寫道。在她自己的過渡狀態下，她認同正在從出生性別轉變的人 - 而不是同情帶來了很大的緩解。

Steinke also identifies with one of the few other species that enjoy a long postmenopausal life: killer whales. In the ocean, nonreproductive females play an important role. With the wisdom of years, they guide their pod to the best salmon. Steinke kayaks in waters off the coast of Seattle, hoping to commune, and is rewarded with a magnificent breaching. 「The wild matriarchs have given me hope,」 she writes. 「They are neither frail nor apprehensive, but in every way leaders of their communities.」

That menopause may enable a new role and stature for women is the central argument of The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause, by Susan Mattern. A historian at the University of Georgia, she steps away from the personal to consider 「humanity』s massive primeval past.」 Once upon a time, scientists assumed that women (and men) were designed to live to about 50, and that menopause was an accident, a by-product of medical progress. Yet even in primitive societies, it turns out, a portion of women lived well past middle age, which suggests that menopause is a feature, not a bug, of human evolution.

斯坦克還認定其他少數具有絕經后長壽的物種之一：虎鯨。在海洋中，非生殖性雌性起著重要作用。憑藉多年的智慧，他們將他們的豆莢引導到最好的鮭魚。斯坦克皮划艇在西雅圖海岸附近的海域，希望能夠交通，並獲得了巨大的破壞獎勵。 「野生女族長給了我希望，」她寫道。 「他們既不脆弱也不憂慮，但他們社區的各種領導者都是如此。」

更年期可能會讓女性扮演一個新的角色和身材，這是Susan Mattern的「慢月攀登：更年期的科學，歷史和意義」的核心論點。作為喬治亞大學的一位歷史學家，她遠離個人，考慮「人類大規模的原始過去。」曾幾何時，科學家認為女性（和男性）被設計為活到50歲左右，更年期是一次事故，醫學進步的副產品。然而，即使在原始社會，事實證明，一部分女性在中年以後生活得很好，這表明更年期是人類進化的一個特徵，而不是一個缺陷。

Mattern has her own audacious theory as to why: Menopause is a key to our success as a species. In humanity』s hunter-gatherer days, tribes needed a balance of producers and consumers—people who brought in food, and people who ate it. Most adults did both. Not so children, who remain dependent during the long period of brain development. Members who could bring in food for more than one person without adding to the population were crucial.

Enter the postmenopausal female. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes studied a modern foraging tribe, the Hadza, and found that an energetic group of older women brought 「more food into camp than any other age and sex category.」 This paved the way for the Grandmother Hypothesis: Not only do older women serve as food producers, but they are providers of 「allocare,」 communal child care. In the Hadza and other tribes, Mattern writes, women 「reach peak foraging productivity in their 50s and continue to produce a caloric surplus through old age.」 She points out that tribes have been known to kill members who can』t contribute. If grandmothers aren』t murdered, she reasons, that is because they are useful.

馬特恩有自己的大膽理論，為什麼：更年期是我們作為一個物種成功的關鍵。在人類的狩獵採集時代，部落需要生產者和消費者的平衡 - 食物的人和食物的人。大多數成年人都做了。不是那麼在長期大腦發育期間仍然依賴的孩子。能夠為一個以上的人提供食物而不增加人口的會員至關重要。

進入絕經后的女性。人類學家克里斯汀霍克斯研究了一個現代覓食部落哈扎，並發現一群精力充沛的老年婦女帶來了「比其他任何年齡和性別類別更多的食物進入營地。」這為祖母假設鋪平了道路：不僅做舊婦女擔任糧食生產者，但她們是「分配」社區兒童保育的提供者。 Mattern寫道，在Hadza和其他部落中，女性「在50多歲時達到巔峰覓食生產力，並在年老時繼續產生熱量過剩。」她指出，眾所周知，部落會殺死無法貢獻的成員。如果祖母沒有被謀殺，她的理由，那是因為它們是有用的。

Mattern makes the case that menopause probably emerged in humans when we diverged from chimpanzees millions of years ago. It gave Homo sapiens an advantage over other species of hominids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, she proposes. Limiting childbearing to younger women, whose offspring could be cared for by older women, enabled the species to bounce back from an epidemic or a crisis: Those fertile women could reproduce quickly, but no woman could do so forever, sparing the tribe the risk of overpopulation. With the advent of farming, menopause still served an important purpose. The most prosperous time for a peasant family was postmenopausal, Mattern argues, when older children could help and the family no longer had new members to support. Nowadays, with fewer children and more resources, she brightly adds, 「women past menopause, who historically used their energy surplus to help their families survive, can now use it in other ways.」 While Steinke experienced menopause as a shutting-down, Mattern sees it as an opening-up.

馬特恩認為，當數百萬年前我們與黑猩猩分道揚揚時，更年期可能會出現在人類身上。她提出，它使智人比其他種族的原始人更有優勢，例如尼安德特人和傑尼索瓦人。限制生育對年齡較大的婦女，其後代可以由老年婦女照顧，使得該物種能夠從流行病或危機中恢復過來：那些肥沃的婦女可以迅速繁殖，但沒有婦女可以永遠這樣做，使部落免受風險人口過剩。隨著農業的到來，更年期仍然是一個重要的目的。馬特恩認為，對於一個農民家庭來說，最繁榮的時期是絕經后的，當年齡較大的孩子可以提供幫助時，家庭不再有新成員支持。如今，隨著孩子越來越多，資源越來越多，她明白地補充道，「過去更年期的女性，歷史上使用能量過剩來幫助家人生存，現在可以用其他方式使用它。」雖然Steinke經歷了更年期的關閉，但Mattern將其視為開放。

Both views are true, as the New York Times columnist Gail Collins shows in No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History, which spans the colonial era to the present. Her takeaway is that older women fare well when circumstances permit them to be productive: 「If you』re important economically, you』re important.」 Providing allocare is well and good, but 「eras in which older women were able to earn money or increase their family assets were eras in which they were … popular,」 Collins writes drily.

Tracing their shifting status, she observes that during the colonial period, women continued spinning, weaving, and the like into old age. Physically, of course, the stage could be hell—pelvic disorders, childbirth damage, rotting teeth. Older enslaved women were exiled and horribly neglected. Yet often, the only thing worse than being a woman was being a man: Male mortality was higher, and widowhood could be a blessing—widows, at least white ones, could own property (unlike married women). Then, as the country became more populated, men monopolized the jobs. Women had less of an economic purpose, and they lost status.

這兩種觀點都是正確的，正如「紐約時報」專欄作家蓋爾·柯林斯所展示的那樣：「現在不停止我們：美國歷史上的老年婦女歷險記」，它橫跨殖民時代到現在。她的觀點是老年婦女在情況允許的情況下表現得很好：「如果你在經濟上很重要，那麼你很重要。」提供分配是好的，但是「老年婦女能夠賺錢的時代或者增加他們的家庭資產是他們當時流行的時代，「柯林斯寫道。

追蹤他們的轉變狀態，她觀察到在殖民時期，女性繼續旋轉，編織等進入老年。當然，身體上的階段可能是地獄 - 骨盆疾病，分娩損傷，牙齒腐爛。年長的被奴役婦女被流放，可怕地被忽視。然而，通常情況下，唯一比女性更糟糕的事情就是成為一個男人：男性死亡率更高，寡居可能是一種福氣 - 寡婦，至少是白人，可以擁有財產（與已婚女性不同）。然後，隨著國家人口的增加，男人壟斷了這些工作。婦女的經濟目的較少，她們失去了地位。

Collins highlights the great age of social reform in the mid-19th century as another period when older women enjoyed prestige, though less because they had economic power than because they wielded moral authority. Notably, they used that authority to make the case for, among other things, female clout well into later life. A standout among women』s-rights advocates, Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that women could occupy different spheres at different life stages, moving from narrow domestic concerns to community-minded platforms. Stanton, Collins writes, 「believed that menopause had redirected all her 『vital forces』 from her reproductive organs to her brain.」 Vital she and Susan B. Anthony certainly were as they barnstormed the country, made speeches on tabletops, played cards with soldiers. Their age allowed them to 「have adventures.」 At the same time, one observer wrote, 「stately Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity by a comfortable look of motherliness.」

柯林斯強調了19世紀中葉社會改革的偉大時代，這是老年婦女享有聲望的另一個時期，儘管較少因為她們擁有經濟權力而不是因為她們擁有道德權威。值得注意的是，他們利用這種權力為女性的影響力以及以後的生活提供了理由。在女性權利倡導者中脫穎而出，伊麗莎白卡迪斯坦頓認為女性可以在不同的生命階段佔據不同的領域，從狹隘的國內問題轉向社區意識平台。科林斯斯坦頓寫道，「相信更年期已經將她的所有」生命力量「從她的生殖器官轉移到了她的大腦。」她和蘇珊·安東尼當然是在他們對這個國家進行了抨擊，在桌面上發表演講，與士兵打牌。他們的年齡允許他們「冒險」。與此同時，一位觀察者寫道，「莊嚴的斯坦頓太太通過舒適的母性獲得了很大的免疫力。」

As the white-collar workplace expanded in the industrial era, women were shouldered out of it, eroding female social power across the age range. Older black women were a mainstay of early civil-rights struggles, but the contributions of activists such as Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune were sidelined, the credit given to younger men. And women』s return to the workforce during World War II gave way to postwar pressure to depart it, which delivered mixed results for older women. In the 1960s and 』70s, important strides were made thanks to female workers such as flight attendants, who filed class-action lawsuits protesting rules that obliged them to retire if they married or reached age 35. Yet as women』s earning potential grew along with their work span and sexual freedom, the more senior among them faced newly corrosive pressures.

隨著白領工作場所在工業時代的擴大，女性受到了影響，從而侵蝕了整個年齡段的女性社會力量。年長的黑人婦女是早期民權鬥爭的支柱，但是瑪麗·特雷爾和瑪麗·麥克勞德·白求恩等活動家的貢獻被擱置，這是對年輕人的信任。在第二次世界大戰期間，女性重返勞動力隊讓位於戰後的離職壓力，這給年長女性帶來了不同的結果。在20世紀60年代和70年代，由於空乘人員等女性工作人員提出了重大進展，他們提出了集體訴訟抗議規則，如果他們結婚或年滿35歲，他們必須退休。但隨著女性的收入潛力隨著她們的增長而增長。工作範圍和性自由，其中較高級的人面臨新的腐蝕壓力。

It may not be a coincidence that Wilson, Reuben, and their ilk pushed the perils of 「the menopause」 during this era. The centrality of sexual liberty to the women』s movement arguably left second-wave feminists more vulnerable to insecurity about their bodies and looks. Susan Mattern proposes that the very concept of a menopausal syndrome was the invention of a culture that aimed to psychologically weaken women in a strong period of life—at a historical moment when female power was rising. 「Dominant groups,」 she observes, 「can be very creative in inventing new ways of oppressing people.」

威爾遜，魯本等人在這個時代推動了「更年期」的危險，這可能不是巧合。性自由對女性運動的中心地位可以說是第二波女權主義者更容易受到身體和外表不安全的影響。蘇珊馬特恩提出，更年期綜合症的概念是一種文化的發明，旨在在女性權力上升的歷史時刻，在強烈的生命時期心理削弱女性。她指出，「主導群體」在發明壓迫人們的新方式方面非常有創意。

Yet I』m struck, reading these accounts, that Stanton intuited what remains true today: Women have a different life trajectory than men, and the place of menopause in it is liberating in a way that』s worth considering. To describe a passage of life, even a painful one, can itself be a form of empowerment. Men, too, feel loss and insecurity as they age, and perhaps could use a map of sorts themselves. Crossing the midlife point, many struggle to recalibrate professional ambition (as Arthur Brooks』s article in The Atlantic』s July issue revealed) and to build stronger social and intimate ties. Online-dating sites betray men』s own anxiety about physical decline (「My friends say I look much younger than 60!」) and suggest that many men are perfectly willing to date women across the age range. The sex books are right: Men aren』t as picky about women』s bodies as women fear. Men crave sex, but they also crave conversation, a partner with confidence and achievements. Even Simone de Beauvoir changed her mind. In The Coming of Age, a book about the experience of getting older, she wrote that she had crossed a 「frontier」 and found peace. She had also taken a younger lover. 「It has been far less sombre,」 she reported, 「than I had foreseen.」

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

LIZA MUNDY』s is the author most recently of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. She is a senior fellow at New America.

然而，在閱讀這些說法時，我很震驚，斯坦頓直覺說明了今天仍然如此：女性的生活軌跡與男性不同，更年期的地方正以一種值得考慮的方式解放。描述生命的通道，即使是痛苦的通道，本身也可以成為一種賦權形式。隨著年齡的增長，男人也會感到失落和不安全，也許他們可能會使用自己的地圖。跨越中年，許多人努力重新調整職業抱負（正如亞瑟布魯克斯在大西洋7月刊中發表的文章所揭示的那樣），並建立更強大的社會和親密關係。在線交友網站背叛了男性對身體衰退的焦慮（「我的朋友們說我看起來比60歲還要年輕！」）並建議許多男性完全願意與年齡範圍內的女性約會。性書是正確的：男人對女性的身體並不像女人所擔心的那樣挑剔。男人渴望性愛，但他們也渴望談話，有信心和成就的夥伴。甚至西蒙娜·德·波伏瓦也改變了主意。在「時代的到來」這本關於變老的經歷的書中，她寫道，她已經越過了一個「邊疆」並找到了和平。她還帶走了一個年輕的情人。她報告說：「這遠不如我所預想的那麼嚴重。」

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LIZA MUNDY是最近出現的Code Girls：第二次世界大戰美國女性代碼破壞者的不為人知的故事。她是新美國的高級研究員。