Hi
“Menopause is having a moment”, how many times have you heard that? And in part it is true. Menopause is talked about more freely than before. There are books, podcasts, news articles, Substack articles, blog posts, etc. Celebrities are opening up about their own menopause transition journeys. It has nicknames like the Age of Rage, or Reverse Puberty.
It feels like everyone is talking about it
Even men (yes, myself included) are writing and talking about it (though not in great numbers). But it’s happening. There are supplements being advocated for, MHT conversations about whether it is a good solution, a solution at all, the answer to everything. There are sex toys that promise better sex during the menopause transition. Many of them are promoted by well known clinicians. This article by Naomi Gottlieb Miller -
describes the issues with that particular aspect of the menopause conversation, so I won’t repeat it here. Needless to say, separating the wheat from the chaff is no easy task.
I decided to look at a small ecosystem - Substack and see how the menopause conversation is going there. I publish a weekly article - The Midlife Brief - https://www.thequiettransition.com/t/midlife-brief where I feature four different writers covering the menopause transition each week. I have been publishing this for 27 weeks and have featured 108 different writers over that time. And those are just the ones I selected for the article, there were many more to choose from.
It would seem from my own experiment that Substack has a healthy amount of conversations happening about the menopause transition. I decided to broaden my scope and look at Substacks own rankings for Health & Wellness - https://substack.com/explore/category/health
What does Substack tell us
Of the 166 distinct publications represented across the bestseller and rising lists I looked at (some publications appear on both the bestseller and the rising lists) I found only four that explicitly referenced menopause in their publication title or bio.
(If this topic interests you at all, I highly recommend subscribing to these writers).
For the people writing, reading, listening and watching menopause content on a regular basis this can seem like it is the topic du jour but is it? Writers read one another. Doctors appear on the same podcasts. Advocates follow one another. Readers subscribe to several menopause publications. Algorithms learn that we’re interested in menopause and consequently show us even more menopause content.
All this creates the impression that menopause has entered the mainstream conversation. In some ways it clearly has. Being visible isn’t the same thing as being integrated into the wider health conversation.
In a 2025 AARP survey of 4,436 U.S. women aged 18+, 32% said they lacked important knowledge about menopause. Nearly 70% said there was a need for greater public education about menopause. We have more menopause information than perhaps ever before, while women themselves continue to report that they need more information.
Another study of 947 perimenopausal women found that more than 60% said they had felt “not informed at all” about perimenopause/menopause before age 40. 68.2% only began looking for menopause information once their symptoms had started. If women are largely encountering menopause information only once they have a reason to search for it, then producing more menopause content alone doesn’t necessarily close the information gap. The information also has to reach women before they know they need it.
Has menopause become a widely discussed subject without yet becoming a widely integrated health subject?
What does “mainstream menopause” look like?
We tend to measure the success of a topic by the amount it is being talked about. But is that really just a crude measurement that only holds true for those already seeking the information?
The next real stage is if menopause becomes part of the greater women’s health conversations. A woman reading about cardiovascular health in midlife should encounter menopause. Someone trying to understand changing sleep shouldn’t have to already suspect perimenopause before it enters the conversation. The same applies to bone health, mental health, sexual health and cognition. Women shouldn’t have to know the word they are looking for.
The menopause conversation hasn’t failed to grow, but it seems to be growing sideways, at least that’s what my small experiment seems to show. There are a lot of writers and clinicians creating extraordinary work about this stage of life. A lot of that conversation is still happening within the menopause ecosystem.
Perhaps a better measure of progress isn’t how much menopause content we can find when we go looking for it. It’s how much we find when we aren’t looking for it at all.
Want to add to the conversation. Leave a comment. I reply to them all.
This substack runs on copious amounts of tea. If you’d like to support it, you could always buy me a cuppa.
The ecosystem can feel crowded while the pathway into it remains narrow. If menopause content appears only after a woman has already connected her sleep, pain, mood or cognitive changes to perimenopause, she has had to do the hardest part herself. Integration would mean those links appearing in ordinary midlife health conversations before she knows the word to search for.