OWN YOUR CRONE!

Why 'invisible' post-menopausal women should never have to say 'sorry' for not being adorable...

I subscribe to several national newspapers, all of which I read via phone apps. Having been alerted by my partner this morning to some interesting news (that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Northern Ireland Protocol), I scrolled to the Sports ‘pages’ of my regular go-to-first paper, looking to read about the achievements of the extraordinary Mia Brookes—the 16-year-old Brit whose snowboarding ‘slopestyle’ gold medal at the World Championships yesterday made her — Woop-Woop! Smashed it! You Go, Girl! etc — the youngest world champion in her sport.

The, er, icing (forgive me…) on Mia’s medal-winning-cake was that she had also landed the first ‘Cab 1440 double-grab’ by a woman in competition; an implausibly difficult-sounding manoeuvre named after a skateboarder, Steve Caballero, in which competitors take-off backwards and complete four 360-degree aerial rotations while grabbing the board twice.

It was with some surprise — not to mention disappointment —that I scrolled through many stories on this national newspaper’s apps’ ‘sports pages’ without finding a single mention of Mia. Though maybe this was because it was 8am and they just hadn’t got it up online yet, despite the event happening the previous day…? I moved on to another national paper, via its app, where, once again, there was no mention of Mia on the sports pages. On a third app, I did find Mia—albeit only as the final sports story at the very end of a lengthy scroll.

By lunchtime, however, there was still no change at the first paper. Instead, a fresh scroll revealed (as of 1.30pm) a headline on the Six Nations Rugby, a cricket story, the news that Spurs plan to build a racetrack under their stadium after striking a deal with F1 (I paused here; I support Spurs and am interested in F1). After this, there was more cricket, more football, more rugby and an interview with Andy Murray (I paused here, too; I love tennis), followed by three more football stories and a column about the Six Nations. After which there was a brief diversion into boxing, two more football pieces, a smidgen of golf, some columnising on cricket and football (the latter by a writer whom, I discovered recently via Private Eye, has a contract with this paper worth a staggering 400k pa; if you can give me the name of a single female journalist in the country earning that for specialising in one subject I’d be astonished). The last few stories were divvied up between sports photography, more football and cricket, another serving of tennis and, finally, some racing tips. So, out of the 27 sports stories in this paper not only was there no mention of Mia there were precisely zero stories about either women in sport, or women’s sport, per se. And I guess, unless the Lionesses are playing, this is the case most days in most of the sports pages, in all the papers. Which, in 2023, is not even mildly eye-rolling, it’s just completely absurd.

Just to clarify, Mia’s story has been told in the press today however it’s not being treated as a sports story, instead it’s (what I describe as) a ‘girl-does-cool-thing’ story, very often written by blokes. Even so, when I last looked at the paper I’ve already criticised, Mia’s great achievement was only 29^th on the news-feed scroll-down—way behind the clickbait-y horror-show that is the ‘missing aristocrat’ and her missing baby… because that’s the kind of story about a woman we can all get behind, right?

Wrong.

So, I am angry partly because we need all the good news we can get at the moment (and if Mia’s story isn’t a proper Good News story I don’t know what is) but also because I’m totally sick of reading about females as victims (RIP Nicola Bulley and Emma Pattison)—whether as victims of coercive control or of their own hormones or the media treating women like either a freaky sideshow or a kind of amuse bouche for the bigger, more ‘important’ news.

Anyway, there are virtually no news stories in this same paper today that have positioned women as anything other than victims; see also THREE IN TEN WOMEN ARE HARASSED WHILE EXERCISING. So, one picture a week of an Ursula von der Leyen shaking the hand of a King doesn’t cut it. (I’m kind of missing the Queen, too, at the moment — mostly because she wasn’t a King).

Yesterday, the same paper went large on menopause, which is (imho) a bit problematic because although it’s fine, laudable even, for glamorous high-profile media women to wave their metaphorical pantyliners-as-flags for women’s mid-life ishoos, it doesn’t really speak to those of us out here in the provinces with our wattle-y necks and elasticated waistbands shuffling around Aldi in not-so-Mrs-Sunak-y slippers… women who think that shouting a bit too much about meno-matters just reinforces our status as second-tier humans.

I still smart with quiet fury when I recall my late father, a few years ago, cocking his head to one side and giving me a slightly pitying look while saying, faux-concerned: ‘Katie, darling, I really don’t want to have to say this but … the thing is, you’ve really let yourself go. You’re terribly overweight and you look dreadful. Which is a shame because you were such an attractive girl when you were young!’ (To which the through-gritted-teeth response was: ‘Do you know anything about menopause, Dad?—’ he shook his head, grimacing ‘—Right, so if you mention the way I look ever again, trust me, I will be nowhere near as polite.’)

Anyway, misogynist dads aside, I have noticed that it is women roughly a decade or so younger than me from whom who I feel most alienated. They are Generation-P (for peri-menopausal) whose ew!-*vibes* (on social media, in print, in the flesh) consistently reveal that a lot of women my age are probably best ignored, if not actively cancelled.

And… I get it!

I know I’m close enough in age to them to be properly scary: proof-negative indeed that eventually even the priciest foundation, the best hair, the occasional non-surgical tweakment and a Pilates habit aren’t going to be enough to stop them also looking like the Ghost of Christmasses Yet To Come.  

But it’s still an odd feeling; it makes me want to shout: Hey, laydeez—forget about all the stuff you think you know—because a lot of it is just your last gasp-of-youth, driven by a need to go with your Peer Group flow. Instead, wait until that post-menopausal love-me-love-me-love-me-say-you-do switch is flicked-off forever and your ‘Wild Is The Wind’ capital-W-Wisdom (along with a wattle) descends at exactly the same time as you wave your waistline goodbye… Because THIS is the moment you have to get to grips with the fact you’ll never again be at the top of anybody’s ‘To-Fuck’ list, that you’re now wearing a not-even-metaphorical ‘Cloak of Invisibility’. This ‘Deathly Hallows’ moment is — if you’re lucky and have some emotional intelligence — the time when you’ll be brave enough to start owning your shit; becoming comfortable saying stuff like ‘well, of course transwomen aren’t bloody women, ffs!’ (among other noble modern heresies) while literally not giving a fuck about the consequences.

That women ten years younger than me may have trouble saying this out loud is partly because their ‘YES’ switch hasn’t yet been flicked-off… and also because they have spent much more of their Prime Time ‘YES’-lives than I have deeply immersed in social media. Addicted to being seen, they are going to feel it so much more when they’re not.

So, writing a substack about the arrival of the Invisibility Cloak of Wisdom (size XXL) enabling woman to row back on their lifetime of simpering/sexing/virtue-signalling in order to become their very own JK Rowling-lite was the one I thought I’d write after I’d read Victoria Smith’s soon-come book ‘Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women’. Which I am of course gagging, haggishly, to read. However, it’s on pre-order and doesn’t arrive until Thursday — and it turns out that I’m not only angry but impatient, too. I can’t wait that long.

I think it was during a local restaurant lunch last Saturday with one of my Best Girls that I felt my foot press firmly against the accelerator-of-righteous-rage, even though there was nothing obviously enraging about the stylish middle-class forty-ish cool guy doing a mildly performative ‘Lone Dad’ solo parenting lunch with his two beautiful (and, blessedly, beautifully behaved) children. Indeed, the Dad, his dear smiley little boy (we soon learned) of 18 months and his angelic, quietly self-absorbed big sister, aged three, were a charming trio. My friend and I were at the cheese board-and-coffee stage of proceedings so we started making faces at the babies and were rewarded with giggles and smiles. Dad eventually turned to us and said ‘Oh, this one may look like an angel but he just won’t sleep at the moment…’

After which came a ‘conversation’ that in terms of how many very different pages it is possible for three people to be on simultaneously was practically an illuminated text. The upshot was that we discussed the sleeping habits of babies (my friend and I have birthed four between us) and were asked what advice we’d give to our younger selves in that regard (I did most of the talking. My friend has an innate ability not to foist her opinions on everybody, at length—a skill I’ve yet to acquire). Then my friend asked Cool Dad what he did for a living — which turned out to be a predictably cool job with sufficient WFH to have made the move from a groovy London postcode during lockdown to our too-speedily-gentrifying/not-speedily-gentrifying-fast-enough (adjust to taste) seaside town a possibility. It was a perfectly pleasant chat and I’m sure that he and his delightful family (he was only Lone-Dad-ing for an hour or so) will live their very best and loveliest lives. And I really hope they do.

So, I couldn’t even put my finger on why I’d found this outwardly perfectly pleasant exchange so discombobulating… until later. And when I did, I Whatsapped my mate:

— In future, when random charming young(er) MEN (don’t) ask us what we do/did for a living, I am going to wink and say ‘well, we both have Wikipedia entries, so let’s just leave it at that, shall we. Please tell us more about you…’

— I know! The more I think about it the more extraordinary I find it. We were just a couple of ancient nans…

— Exactly. Invisible other than as Crones bearing folklore solutions for non-sleeping babies. On the upside, I think I feel a substack coming on…

And here’s the YouTube link to Mia’s thrilling gold medal-winning performance, too.

If you’ve enjoyed this free substack I’d love it if you wanted to BUY ME A COFFEE! Thank you! Kate