Sandra Tsing Loh Tackles the Next Change

~ Laura

18LOH-master675I have a love/hate affair with Sandra Tsing Loh’s writing. She used to do more for the Atlantic. Truthfully, I miss her pieces. They always gave us something to talk about.

She has a new book out, where she argues that menopause isn’t a change, but a return to the default. In the Nation, she says,

It used to be thought that menopause is “the change.” But now that women can live until 90, we see that we’re only fertile those middle twenty-five years—less than a third of our lives. The hormonal “disturbance” is actually fertility. So menopause is not the change. Fertility is the change. When that estrogen cloud descends, a female loses herself. Menopause is your return to where you were before, when your hormone levels are the same as a pre-adolescent girl’s.

 

Published by Laura

11 thoughts on “Sandra Tsing Loh Tackles the Next Change”

  1. I know that baby boomers think that they invented everything, but any genealogist (or demographer) will tell you that, for many centuries, women who survived their childbearing years have had good life expectancies. So most Western women of the past 500 years have spent two-thirds of their lives infertile. It isn’t a new development.

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  2. That was accepted wisdom in India among my grandmother’s generation, and one I’ve believed in all along – makes more sense than the reverse doesn’t it?

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  3. Tried to read the book…it was wildly incoherent. The first quarter of it recounts her affair, which didn’t seem to relate to her menopause at all, but a years-long best friendship, coupled with an absentee husband. Wish she wrote for The Atlantic more, and wrote fewer books.

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  4. I’ve also thought that STL doesn’t work in book format. I thought she was funny eons ago, but have been less amused more recently, with the more serious themes. Most recently her entrepreneurship/self-promotion (not a bad thing, as described in the money raising for the Loh Down on Science, which is a worthwhile endeavor) has made it difficult for me to read her without the octupus of marketing infusing my reading. I don’t begrudge it — I think that self-marketing has become a necessary component of trying to maintain a creative career (as when Laura tells us about the days of promoting an article that’s the requirement of freelance publication). The trend is one of the costs of the changing publication culture — in the old days, one of STL’s jobs might have paid enough to support a middle-class life; now she has to be constantly selling herself.

    Interesting internet Google output — Googling the name of her current paramour finds a Chicago Tribune article on the guy saying that he wore a sandwich board begging for money to send him to Columbia, back in the 70’s. Interesting in the light of thinking about marketing. Again, not wrong, but just interesting.

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  5. I recently listened to a podcast of an interview she gave. She does well on radio. I would be interested in a STL talk show. Not that I’d agree with many of her opinions, but it would be interesting. She did well with some very personal attacks.

    Funny how people get riled up by someone talking about her divorce, when they give a pass to so many divorced people in public life.

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  6. Florence King said some very similar things about menopause–that it’s a relief to be able to give up on sex, and that it’s like a return to being a tomboy and one of the guys. Also, hot flashes cut your heating bill.

    What’s not to like? Aside from the apple-shaped figure, of course.

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