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22 hours ago
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The fun starts early in Naomi Watts’s Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause. Picture the scene. We’re at chapter three, Vag of Honour, and Watts, who has recently separated from the actor Liev Schreiber, has just embarked on a relationship with Billy Crudup, the star of films such as Almost Famous and Alien: Covenant. Having met on the set of the TV series Gypsy where, as she so elegantly puts it, the two of them spent months “dry-humping each other to the point of exhaustion”, the big night has now at last arrived. She and Crudup will shortly sleep together for the first time.
Before things can get too “hot and frisky”, however, Watts briefly exits. “Let me slip into something more comfortable,” she tells Crudup, heading for the bathroom. Most female readers – most readers, full stop – will assume at this point that she’s going to pee or brush her teeth, or perhaps to reassure herself about which bits were waxed, and when, and that her coy tone is just a joke. But Watts, it seems, has another, quite different worry. What will Crudup think if he sees the skin patch she uses for her HRT (hormone replacement therapy)? “I worried that if he saw it he would realise it meant I was menopausal [and] no longer a vital, fertile human being,” she writes. And so she busily sets about peeling it off.
I must be frank. If Billy Crudup was waiting for me on the other side of a bathroom door, I’m not sure the tricky removal of an overly adhesive HRT patch would be top of my list of priorities. (“Run, don’t walk!” as the theatre posters used to say). But then, this is the problem with Watts’s new book. However hard the menopause is for some (but not all) women, the life of a movie star is not quite like yours or mine. Why, she wonders at one point, has she always “felt too young or too old, but never exactly the right age” in the course of her working life? Hmm. Let’s see. Could it possibly have something to do with Hollywood, and its seeming conviction that it’s better for a woman’s face to be completely immobilised than for it to show any sign of a wrinkle, let alone a wobbly chin?
Fear not. In the end, all went well with Crudup. He reassured her that he had grey hairs on a certain male body part, and now they’re married. (“Loving him is the kindest thing I’ve ever done for myself,” Watts writes, with utmost nobility.) But the menopause, alas, proved a trickier creature to wrestle. Hers, having arrived early, continues to present all kinds of problems, from forgetfulness (she forgot the name of Lena Dunham’s show during a press junket) to dryness (she has started her own business, Stripes Beauty, one of whose products is a hydrating gel called, yes… Vag of Honor). You can’t “push through” menopause, she writes (though in truth this is precisely what all women must do, whether they take HRT or not). You must face it, head-on. Her book, then, is in the business of looking at all the options available to us – an approach that requires the reader not only to take oestrogen seriously, but also the concepts of “future journalling” and “success partners” (if hormones are a must, biology is also, by her telling, just a simple question of motivation).
What follows is a catalogue of woe (hot flushes! anxiety! imminent death!) combined with the lamest advice you’ll ever read (guess what? sleep is good) and some that’s just plain stupid (the idea, floated by a doctor she interviews, that menstruating women should preferably not give blood). British readers will laugh out loud at her suggestion they find a doctor who’ll give them more than 10 minutes of their time. But then Dare… is written for the kind of American woman whose insurance provides annual gynaecological “exams”, and time, for Watts, is a relative concept. Nicole Kidman’s “bestie” may well hate the “messaging” that suggests women must look 10 years younger than they are, but the list of things she does in order to look good is longer by far than most people’s supermarket shopping list.
Menopause discourse is increasingly suspect to me, and this book is a prime example of why. If the subject is so taboo – Watts talks of its “stigma” – how come it’s the current passion of so many celebrities (think Davina McCall or Mariella Frostrup, whose line about “self-care” as a “superpower” Watts quotes with approval)? If we didn’t used to talk about it, the subject’s now so ubiquitous, we may be in danger of achieving an over-correction. Personally, I loathe both the element of grift that seems to accompany some of this stuff and the incredible narcissism. Yes to HRT for those who need it. But I draw the line at “dating myself”, and I bet you a lifetime’s supply of calcium supplements that most women would sincerely prefer not to call a family meeting to discuss their menopause.
In an attempt to show how things are changing for the better, Watts quotes Robert Wilson, the author of a 1966 book called Feminine Forever, in which he describes the menopause as “a serious, painful, and often crippling disease (ha, so people did discuss it before 2019). Like her, I find this statement infuriating and “paternalistic”. But I also wonder if the new menopause warriors, who go on endlessly about brain-fog, mood swings and the need for special cool rooms in workplaces, are really so very different. In a world in which one sex is still so discriminated against, not all of these narratives are helpful. If menopausal women are sometimes on the warm side, their anger and frustration may also be wholly warranted.
