Monetizing Menopause with Halle Berry

Menopause is a moneymaker, does that mean we'll finally get answers?

I’m a fairly regular listener of Trevor Noah’s podcast, but it’s not unusual for me to skip an episode with a guest I’m not all that interested in. When I saw Halle Berry was last week’s guest, I decided it’d be a skip week — What’s she doing, promoting a new movie?

Then, while working on a roundup for work, I noticed she was on the show to promote her new products aimed at women experiencing menopause.

Menopause is a topic I’m very interested in, and if you subscribe to this newsletter you likely are too. So I gave it listen. Halle tells this story about experiencing extreme vaginal pain after an active evening with her new love. He rushes her to the doctor where her doctor informs her she has an extreme case of herpes. She’s pissed. Her and the love argue. He gets tested. He’s negative. Her test results comeback, she doesn’t actually have herpes and her doctor doesn’t actually know what’s up with her vagina.

Turns out, she was experiencing vaginal atrophy! And unfortch, her doctor isn’t the anomaly. Halle informs us that medical school has like one chapter on menopause and it wasn’t until the last decade or so that it was actually even acknowledged as A THING versus just part of old age and women needed to suck it up. Which means, even less known about perimenopause, which can actually be a much greater disruption to a person’s life than menopause.

This is where I should pause and mention that not only women experience menopause — trans men, non-binary people, etc — also go through menopause too, but most of the language is aimed at cis women and that’s the lived experience I write from as well. But I’ll try to do my part to be expansive with the language I choose, even writing about sources who used more narrow language.

I listened to Glynnis MacNicol’s “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself” on audio. The book is marketed as her sleeping her way through grand ol’ Paris in her late 40s, but is mostly about her enjoying the city and the company of her pals. I’ve got a Paris trip coming up this summer and while I’ll certainly be fantasizing about the early-40s version of the former, I’ll prolly end up doing the latter as well.

Anyways, near the beginning of the book, she writes about seeing her doctor and how the doctor is basically like any odd thing happening to her body in her 40s can likely be chalked up to perimenopause but that there’s been such little research done into the subject there’s no way of knowing for sure. But the doctor feels like that’s gonna change because MacNicol belongs to a generation of women who are used to having the answers to life’s mysteries a la Google. There just not being an answer isn’t as readily accepted these days.

I hope McNicol’s doc is right, but with the Trump administrations freeze of NIH funding for medical research only partially thawing, I’m not sure how quickly much needed new knowledge is going to come along. I’m 40 now. And how we manage menopause and perimenopause will contribute greatly to our quality of life and our longevity. These days it’s not just about your lifespan, it’s also about your health span.

Enter Halle Berry’s latest business venture: Re-Spin.

Lemme not go too hard on Halle, she’s honestly just providing solutions for problems she’s faced — Tabatha Brown has raved about her new lube! And having someone like Halle Berry pushing this convo around menopause into the mainstream media is certainly making menopause more of a talking point. Shew as well-informed on the podcast and I found value in much of what she had to say. And I really appreciate her candor.

The thing is, is that the menopause industry has been valued at nearly 17B. So we’ve been seeing a lot of products, media outlets and all whatever else targeted at turning a profit off this era of our lives. So it’s not just Halle Berry going into the menopause business and without the proper, vetted medical research to back up these solutions, there’s a lot of snake oil that can infiltrate the marketplace. A lot of pricey, pricey time consuming snake oil.

I don’t want to spend the next decade tossing perimenopause products into the drawer of abandoned haircare, skincare and makeup purchases.

In other news:

• I have an interview out today for Nieman’s Storyboard with Edgar Gomez about a scene from an essay in his new memoir, Alligator Tears.

• My “Black Women at Work[SHOP]” beta is sold out, but if you hit me up, I’ll add you to the waiting list for when the fall slots become available.

• There are still a few spots left in the memoir workshop I’m leading with the International Women’s Writers Guild in April (you don’t have to have done Pt. 1 to enroll in Pt. 2).