Dear Editor,
For years, I often have asked people conversationally the question, “What is the one thing that notably separates humans from most other animals?” Some answers included bipedalism, brain size, religion, etc. At no time, however, did any woman or man answer, “menopause.”
Menopause is a natural evolutionary selection in human females with profound life-changing consequences. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development article, “What causes menopause?” states that, “During the transition to menopause a woman’s ovaries stop releasing eggs and making the hormones estrogen and progesterone. When this occurs, a woman stops having her period and is no longer fertile.”
The one unifying feature of menopause, therefore, is that women are no longer able to have children. For the first time in a mature woman’s life, she is free to focus on her own “self-actualization,” where her newfound sense of sexual liberation celebrates the freedom from the risk of pregnancy. Moreover, menopause grants women a lengthy life extension well beyond having babies. It’s at that point that women are truly free. And for the first time in their lives, they have sexual agency with equality, on par with men. Like men, women can have all the sex they want, anytime they want it, and with whoever they want to have sex with. It can’t get better than that.
Unfortunately, too many women live in patriarchal societies that subjugate women where male superiority is literally the supercilious stuff of hideous fairytales. And those make-believe fabrications are heavily weighted in favor of men and entirely intended to deceive. They falsely represent that women’s place in their schemes is the fault of the women themselves. The American political mood that prevails where you can no longer count the number of lies spoken as truth means that women can never realistically overcome the stigma of being created in the image of male serial liars.
Menopause, as a scientific set of facts, empower women to avoid pregnancy issues. Yet, what will happen to them when the American Republicans, pass biased laws restricting and policing women’s rights and criminalizing a woman when she acts for herself? Sexual freedom at any adult age includes the right for women to control the future of their bodies without patriarchal interference according to the laws of man.
Will popular opinion based on common sense values and tolerance of plurality rights become irrelevant by entrenched law-making Republican minorities? Extended female menopause is one of the most essential reasons why humans are especially unique among mammalians.
If there are any reasons why one gender should be superior to the other, plainly, women should be superior to men. Historically through today, the fact that men cheated women out of their rightful equality disqualifies men from ever claiming the higher ground for themselves.
As mothers of our species, women are innately and permanently the most vital gender of the two.
This is not a man’s world. It should never have been.
Vidda Crochetta,
Brattleboro
