Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Women Don’t Expire: Aging, Menopause, and Cultural Myths - Part 2

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

In Part 2 of our conversation on perimenopause and menopause, we move beyond biology and into the healthcare experiences, cultural messages, and societal expectations that shape how women experience aging.We break down the differences between Pap smears and pelvic exams, talk about changing screening recommendations, and discuss why regular healthcare conversations remain important throughout adulthood.Then we zoom out. Why are women so often taught that aging makes them less visible, less desirable, or less valuable? Why are menopausal experiences so often reduced to stereotypes while companies market endless products promising to “fix” what aging changes?We unzip media portrayals of menopause, body image, desirability, and the pressure women face to resist aging rather than experience it. We also talk about self-acceptance, questioning messages designed to profit from insecurity, and the growing movement of women rejecting shame and embracing aging on their own terms.Because women do not lose their value with age—and better conversations create better care, challenge outdated narratives, and make space for women to be fully seen.If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestionsIf you want to ask Dr Sue a sex question for the weekly Q&A you can submit it here: Ask a question

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We're here to explore the questions you've always been curious about, but maybe don't always feel comfortable asking out loud. Minimal to no judgment is my new qualifier over the past couple of episodes because I realized sometimes we do have some judgment, but certainly no shame in the questions and just open honest conversations. So zip down and let's get candid. Today is part two of our conversation around perimenopause and menopause and hopefully listen to part one. It's not a prerequisite, but just know that we're dropping into the conversation today. So if something feels a little lost, maybe go listen to part one. So before we unzip the rest

of our thoughts and uh dr sue's uh education on perimenopause and menopause hi dr sue hey charlie how are you today i don't know i feel like it's too early to ask that question fair enough i feel like the day can still unravel if the days there's that there's that east coast optimism that we've all become accustomed to i mean overall it's well i i really do love the fact that we have enough conversation about menopause to go to a second part. Like that just speaks volumes about how far we've come, but also how far we still have to go. Because we have thoughts. Would you like to give our listeners a little bit about your background before we get started?

Sure. So I have a bachelor's and a master's degree in health education. And so that's kind of the lens I come through as a health education lens. I decided to get really specific with my torturous process called a doctorate and I decided to focus on human sexuality education and I've been doing all those things ever since so combining health education with human human sexuality education I primarily work as a professor and do the professor thing so I I publish I teach including women's health which is where a lot of these questions come up but then I also do a lot of work through my consulting firm where I basically talk to whoever wants to hire me to talk to them but for a long time when I was still in the Washington DC

area I was doing a lot of work with seniors a lot of work with seniors and people who were supporting seniors and they have a lot of questions about menopause both the seniors themselves and their partners who may or may not be seniors and children of adult parent of adult children of parents have questions as their parents are moving through the aging process support staff has questions so like there's this thing that happens to everybody i mean if you live long enough you're going to go through this if you're a woman and when we say women meaning people who have vulvas people who who identify as female but do not have female genitalia will not go through menopause so i do want i i want to own that kind of language um but i mean if a woman's

going to live long enough she'll go through this and yet we never talk to her about it so we're here to fix that well fix so many things or try to or at least tell you about the problem that's why we're here mostly to be like here's the problem good luck no that's not us um but along with this journey of making us question things and have this these conversations is charlie you heard her at the top of the show um for those of you who do and do not know charlie she is our curious co-host who's always ready to i i almost said dive in i have to get better about using the show to unzip um all those conversations about sex and sexuality and all the things that go near it with it to it from it that just we as a culture tend to shy away from

so you should you should do more you should i mean he nailed it so there we go okay good yeah so let's get into it wait why do you get to take a bye because i don't have the cv you do in this space no i think you should do more other consents of things so i can't afford you i as dr c said i am charlie uh we have been friends for many years and found that having these types of conversations about all matter of subjects be uh was really natural and um and and kind and easy to have together um no matter where our opinions landed if they differed if they were similar there was still a desire to dig into really the the the meat of whatever we were talking about and because part of that is because i am someone who is genuinely curious especially around things um

that society conditions us to believe and to abide by and especially depending on our role in society uh you know growing up a woman in american society there are certain things that um that you're taught not to be too much of or not to do so you're not thought to be too much of um and it just never really it never really made sense to me because to me i'm human and we're all human and we're we're a part of humanity so why aren't we just letting people work on being the best versions of themselves you know kind of socioeconomic uh inequities aside um I do know that there's a privilege for that I have in saying this but but also that's that's really what it comes down to. We are all human. We are all trying to survive, live, love, experience

what we can. And so that's, I just see, I see opportunities to chip at the way to chip at a way at things where the answer is, well, that's just the way it is. That's never a good enough answer for me I always feel like that's the answer that's going to get me and you both to be like oh that's not okay so now we change it like that's the way it's always been done is the worst rationale for me yeah yeah because you can't and and especially for the issues where that does be tend to be the answer that's something that's meant to be broken and dismantled and disintegrated so that's me uh just genuine curiosity and and trying to figure out why the who these rules serve and us obeying them who does that serve so all of that is me

okay i'm charlie the host of unzipping taboos i'm the charlie and dr sue and charlie for anyone that wants to email us oh god anyway part two doctors part two of menopause anyone who listened to part one knows that i am in perimenopause so which i shared so maybe that's where that little quip came from about people emailing us no it comes because i mean we've talked about this before but if anyone is listening we get a lot of requests for like to have guests on our show um and they will either leave off my title or they will leave off charlie completely completely or not and not address me

right it's just like or they'll do both like hi sue and i'm like yeah okay so if you didn't get a response that was why so no it came from somewhere and it's irritating it is irritating yeah anywho no matter what stage of life you're in that is irritating so we we left our listeners off with um the difference between a pap smear and a pelvic exam mm-hmm shall we pick back up yeah and i need to expand that a little bit too yeah um and i i want to be careful of how i'm saying this because so i have gotten a couple of questions in person about timing of this um and and one of the people well digitally in person um one of the

people who who reached out to me i i don't think that their gynecologist was explaining things very well ah yes but they like their gynecologist so i was trying to like frame the answer in a way that i wasn't like hey your gynecologist isn't explaining this because it can be a little bit confusing so we talked about pap and pelvic um they are pap exams are when we're taking actual samples of the cervical cells and we're sending them off to a lab pelvic exam is where like we're checking all the other things too to make sure there's no lesions or you know nothing's oozing there's no there's such a descriptive word for what you're talking about um it's so but you can also you can also do an HPV test where they're just looking for the virus and so what we're

using now is this term co-testing where we're looking at for the virus and we're looking at the cervical cells if we are looking at the for the virus and the cervical cells and all looks good we will tell you we do not need to do those tests except for every five years if you're between the ages of 25 and 65 hold on yep i did write it down that was right um because those i don't want to screw with but i also want to say that by the if you're listening to this in 2027 or beyond they may have changed the recommendations we do change the recommendations as we science better so always i mean there's some really good spaces to find information about this i'm i'm a big fan of the cleveland clinic as we know and the mayo clinic they have they they keep up to

date when when things change so um if you are only doing a pap smear and everything is good they will ask you to come back every three years so now we've already got a 25 to 65 range and two different recommendations so it can get confusing but you still will probably be going in for your pelvic exam every year um just to make sure all the bits are working and an opportunity to talk to you um but even as you go through menopause you we are still we are still having you do those exams it's just every either three years or five years so it depends on what test they're doing if they find something concerning on a pap smear they're not going to make you wait three years they're going to have you come back usually in six months i was going to say depending on your

risk factors, right? Yeah. And then depending on your risk factors, if you're having lots of unprotected sex with lots of partners, then that's going to increase your chances of being exposed to HPV. And if a test comes back inconclusive, they're not going to just be like, oh, man, it was inconclusive. We'll see in a few years. Like they're going to redo that. Yeah. If your gynecologist is telling you now that you don't have to come back for every five years, it may be that they're doing co-testing where before they were only doing a pap smear. they should have explained that to you and they should have explained it to you while your clothes were on so sorry that was accurate but i love that i love that distinction because there's

something very different about being able to receive the information when you're sitting upright face to face with your provider versus naked naked because they also uh do breast exams laying down in a very vulnerable position with your feet in the little stirrups, the cold ass things. So that's very different. And you're able to, I think, receive information and hear a little bit more clearly prior to the exam. Information, in my opinion, I'm not a fan of small talk when I'm in that prone position so that's just me yeah and like you know you're scooting to the end of the table so it almost feels like you're falling off of it and it's it's a very prone it literally is prone but also very vulnerable position and if you have concerns maybe a friend of yours was

just diagnosed with something where you're not feeling the way you normally do or like there's been a just like if you're there because you have a concern you are not hearing anything yeah I worked with one gynecologist so I've worked I've worked as a health educator as a at a couple of reproductive health centers and there was one usually I was out and about doing things in the community but sometimes I was working directly with patients doing education and we had one gynecologist who insisted on not speaking to their patients about anything of import until they were dressed and could come into their office so it wasn't even like they had the meeting in the exam room wow yeah it was like okay like we did what we need to do get dressed come to the office sit

down in a chair like a human not in the exam room which actually for the staff made it great because then they could start cleaning out the room and getting ready for the next patient yeah yeah and I know that might not be genius yeah no it was really for so many reasons and I know that might not be possible like i worked at a clinic where that would not have been possible we didn't really have that kind of meeting space yeah um but like you could see the difference in patients as they were like walking out and i don't always know what was happening in those rooms but they there's like this thing when you get out of the paper you know the paper towel and the gown and you're like trying the fucking lube from the speculum for those of you who are kind of lingering for those of you

who are not watching video you may want to go back and look at the faces i just made for the last five seconds but yeah and and then you know to like do that and then they would and and then but when you walk out of a doctor's office even if the news wasn't great you you feel like yourself because you're in your clothes already and you you're sitting and looking someone eye to eye instead of like staring down through your legs at this person's head yeah um so so yeah if your doctor was just suddenly changing the years on you it could be that they changed the testing that they were just doing pap smears before now they're doing co-testing but again i think they should have told you why yeah um yeah because you also need that context

when you get your after visit summary or your or notification that your test results are in yeah and you see an extra test there that maybe you didn't know know about or understand yeah and i want to i do want to own that i don't think providers many providers are intentionally withholding testing that they're doing on you but you could have misunderstood or misheard or didn't get a chance to ask questions because you are anticipating the exam etc so well and one of that i don't have permission to share i'm going to do this without consent and i'll apologize and if she gets mad at me i'll i'll own it on another episode one of the people who's asking about me is moving into her late 40s and so for this it was a change in protocol right it's always been

every three years and so that was kind of what prompted the conversation with me was like what happened why are they saying five years now so for the provider they may have forgotten who they've told especially you know if it's been a year and they change protocols in the office and they just forgot to tell you i would like to think that doctors aren't keeping this a secret but sometimes they forget what you've been told or they assume that the nurse who brought you to the back or possibly an educator which we need more of in these offices um that they perhaps thought someone else told you so yeah yeah she's moving into her late 40s and she's like why like what happened why did we change things i'm like well what they tell you and she's like nothing like i'm sure they

told you something you just didn't hear it because you were naked yeah so all right person who's listening is angry that i gave your age let me know and i will apologize on air for a future episode but she said i could talk about the question but she didn't say i could like age so um so the the pap smear is getting cervical cells to to test and then the pelvic exam is pressing and feeling and um sti testing possibly if you yeah and and the pelvic exam again is something that you should do no matter within that age range right right um and you may want to do it more like if you think you're only supposed to go back every year but you're having a discharge don't wait yeah don't wait go go go go that's only that's that's the routine screenings

we also screen as necessary so if something happened or um if you just want to get sti tested you don't have to go to your ob-gyn there are at-home tests for things like chlamydia and gonorrhea um you can just go to your local sti clinic if that feels more doable or more comfortable or closer to you or whatever it may be um but don't don't wait because if you do have an sti some of those can start to cause damage in that time span so don't wait beyond your reproductive organs yes yes so don't don't wait on that yeah um the other thing is hiv testing so we actually recommend hiv testing for anyone who's sexually active up until the age of 65 i should look at my notes yep sorry i have them in my head but then because

these are actual legit numbers i want to make sure i have them um we do if you're at risk so if you are in your 50s and you're not sexually active and you've already been tested once and you're not sexually active not sexually active do i say that enough times so what you're saying is if you're not having sex if you're not sexually active and you've already tested negative and you're not sharing needles then there's no real reason for you to get tested if you are whatever age and you are sexually active i'm potentially with a new partner then it's not a bad idea to get tested every year or every six months if you're having lots of lots of partners or if you're sharing needles um but we do recommend testing up until 65 and i know i've talked to

doctors who like i don't have to test people after like age 40 and i'm like do you even ask if they're sexually active and they're like no like they'll tell me i'm like no they're not i don't even think i want to tell you like what day it is that this your attitude is yeah if that's the energy you bring into the exam room yeah i'm gonna tell you shit yeah so unless i'm really really worried about something right so if you are in your 30s 40s 50s wherever you are in your perimenopause process wow perimenopause process the alliteration was great thank you it took me a second or if you've already gone through menopause and you are under the age of 65 you should still be talking your ob-gyn on a regular basis at least once a year and if you are sexually

active with new partners then you should be getting tested for the things all the things and if you're over 65 if you've had an all clear your doctor may be like hey i don't need to see you for a couple years like feel free to come in if you've had a problem um but unfortunately if you're I don't even want to say older I don't even know where the line is for some of these doctors like they just don't even ask you about your sexual activity they just assume that you're either not sexually active or sexually active with your one partner which I wonder too yeah I wonder too this is the beautiful state of um our health care being run by for-profit insurance companies right the doctors may not be bringing it up because they

are anticipating an issue of dealing with the insurance claim and the insurance provider to justify the claim possibly possibly just throwing it out there yeah but i don't but i don't want to say that and have listeners not do something because they are afraid of worried about don't want to put their doctor in a position if you have a concern or if you are within this age range or if you are out there having sex or sharing needles get the tests reach out to a clinic a clinician your provider or go to a clinic as dr sue said yeah i mean we when i was living in the dc area we had a fantastic confidential sti clinic that was free for res county residents So you did have to provide ID just so they knew that you were a county resident.

But a lot of those testing sites around the country closed during COVID. Yeah. And it was reopened. Because it wasn't seen as important to serve populations that we usually ignore. Yeah. But there are things you can do. And there is home HIV testing. There's home chlamydia testing, gonorrhea.

We'll talk about cervical testing in an episode coming up. But you can now do that nationwide for a while. That was only you West Coast people were doing it. There are things that you can do at home, and some of those tests are covered by insurance. Some are not. But, yeah, if you're between the ages of 25 and 65, I don't really care where you are in your perimenopausal or menopausal progress. Journey. Thank you.

Era? I don't know. Era. Your era. If you're between 25 and 65, like, you need to still be going to the doctor every year. And part of that, I don't want to go down that. Never mind. Okay.

Retract that. All right. So, yeah, you still need to go. You don't have to have the same testing every year, though. So if the testing's changed, you can also say, hey, doc, this is different from what I usually do. What's going on? But for a lot of us, once we're in, I mean, there's plenty of research to show that very intelligent people who have no problem with learning and reading go into a doctor's office and suddenly can't learn or read anything because you're terrified. So it's okay.

It's such a different power dynamic. Yeah. And so it's okay if you didn't ask at the time. Send a message to the patient portal. uh by the way a lot of the times when you send things because i had i was working with someone who's like well i don't want to bother my doctor i'm like it's not your doctor who's responding to that message it's the care team um and they have someone who does it the same person who used to answer phones is probably now triaging messages uh send a message yeah send a message if you don't

like your answer then maybe call them or find another doctor if you can but it's okay if you didn't ask it in the moment because you were like i don't want to be here it's like you said it's usually cold even though people are half naked or all naked yeah so yeah any anything else around pap and pelvic don't be a dick if you are a provider for older people that's really where that no don't be dismissive yeah so this that that idea charlie's changed the intro about not judging we we do judge people who are being dicks yeah um i was doing a a a live session um i don't i don't want to name the group for for a group of seniors um and this woman in the back of the room i may have talked about this on a previous episode she lost her

husband to death and it was years later she decided to go out and meet people she was adorable and she suddenly starts tearing up and i felt so bad because i was in the back of the room and like she was all the way sorry i was in the front room she's all the way in the back of the room essentially she had tested positive i want to say with chlamydia but it's been a few years it was one of the bacterial that we see that are really common either chlamydia or gonorrhea and she went she knew what was happening and she went to the doctor and the doctor essentially said if you're gonna whore around this is what's gonna happen and i i mean this point she's crying and what's great is that like every person in that room like wanted to like you could see like this outpouring

of support and the people that i'm assuming she was there with because she was sitting really close to them you know they gave her a hug and like people like fuck that guy yeah basically but they weren't going to use that language and hopefully she got another another gynecologist but if that is ever in your repertoire as a medical professional you should not be a medical professional no if you're going to be that judgmental you're in the wrong business go to therapy yeah and don't be patient yeah um figure your shit out but also ask the question just because you know someone was married doesn't mean they're not having relationships outside of their marriage um yeah or that their partner's not having relationships outside their marriage and

so they may just be nice to them yeah and so you like you we need to still ask those questions we this idea of of monogamy is just so infirmly entrenched in so many aspects of our life but that's just not what we're seeing yeah that's not what that's not what's out there yeah i mean there are people who can be monogamous but by and large yeah many of us have have had multiple partners i i've had several friends who have unfortunately well not unfortunately they were getting divorced i'm actually really okay with that part of it because of who they were but like i would get these phone calls or these texts and they're like I just found out they were cheating like I don't even do I get STI tested and I was always like

hey this is something concrete we can do you know like we can do this I will go with you if you want me to like this is something concrete I can't answer why he did it or how often he was doing it or how much of his money he was like I can't do any of that so for me it was a great moment because I was like this I can help with yeah um but I'm pretty sure that had they gone to their gynecologist they would have asked like are you in a monogamous relationship and they would have said yes because they thought that they were yeah so i think we really need to change how we ask those questions on sexual history forms yeah there's one sexual history form i was looking someone was showing me it was one of my students she was getting very irritated by it part of it

was that the language was just she's like i don't know what these words mean i was looking at him like those are too technical like a scientist wrote the form yeah and like there's things like readability that people who write forms should have to do but she was showing me because she was really frustrated it was it was an online form um and she was like i'm not sexually active i've never been sexually active i'm like okay well is that a yes or no question she said yes and so she she said yes it was a yes or no question so she put no and the next question which was required was what is the gender of your sexual partners she's like i've never been with anyone i don't know what i'm supposed to put i'm like can you skip it and there was no there was

there was no way to not so she's already like she's a college student so she already felt like she was supposed to be having sex i will tell you that 15 to 30 percent of my class generally reports they've never engaged in sex so like that idea of you're supposed to we can throw that out the window yeah but she was just like i don't know what i'm supposed to do and i don't want to check one and what if it's not the right one and i'm like oh she was she was very frustrated And she didn't want to call her parents because she didn't want to call. So that was like a real problem with the form. We need to redo forms to make them ask the questions we really want to ask.

Yeah. Well, and especially in the age of online forms, there's a way to make that form dynamic that if she answered no, it automatically skips the follow-up question. Mm-hmm. You know? But anyway, let's come back over to perimenopause and menopause. Yeah, sorry. A little detour there. That's okay.

That's okay. um so do you feel good about what we've covered with pap and pelvic and exams and if you're having sex if you're sexually active if you're having sex if you're sexually active get tested I I want to say no because I really don't want to go into the pissing me off see now I can answer the question of how am I doing today because I'm about to get pissed off I don't want to go into the getting pissed off about how we view people in aging but yes I'm okay with what we've done we can move on

okay so we're preparing our systems to talk about as we said at the end of part one the stereotypes and cultural attitudes towards

women who are in perimenopause menopause or post-menopause wait women exist post-menopause not in our culture no or crones you look you ignore crones yeah that's not true betty white was she was well and also culture and also there are other like not not that we're gonna make this about religion, but there are non-Judeo-Christian religions who honor all three stages of a woman's life and celebrate and see it as a holistic, valuable journey for everyone to learn from. Yep. And that's also something else in this menopause talk. Humans are one of a few,

very few species mammals where the women live beyond their reproductive years the females live beyond their reproductive years and i've seen some professor uh professors talk about this on instagram that it's uh little clips of lectures and the the one of the theories is that's how generations learn from the end. I saw this the other day as well. Elephants being one of them go through menopause, live beyond their reproductive years. The senior females are the herd leaders. Yeah. The matriarchs are no joke. They, they run everything. Yeah. Yeah. but in this culture but in human we kind of have it all backwards we do we really like we really tend to think of women where we used to but now we are again in certain parts of this

country where it's like it's your job to have babies like that is your job and we saw we saw that played out in court cases where the woman was essentially brain dead but she was being used as a human incubator like that was her only job was to give was to give birth that that was her value her sole value and and i would like to say that we've moved past that but i am seeing an alarming move back to it in some parts of the country and if you're not aware of that it's you need to start becoming aware of that because that's going to start to affect how things are happening with policy and not and not just around birth control yeah around care yeah the ripple effect is in my opinion you like a nuclear spread yeah yeah so so the thing is is

that as a culture we and when I say as a culture I mean like pop culture I mean the images and the messages we're getting from the media whether it's social media or tv movies podcasts I'm sure missing something in your individual life your grandmother may be like that elephant she is the ruler of this universe that you live in and you don't get that same idea like you value having those years of of wisdom but as a as a culture like as a pop culture world we don't we we really see a lot of women's values disappear when she's no longer young or beautiful or able to bear children and those messages a punchline yeah she absolutely becomes a punchline and it becomes or she's not seen at all it disappears from view or she's a punchline and that is problematic

because so much of what we learn about what's appropriate and expected we're learning from the messages we're getting around us and for years we've been talking about the fact that representation matters and usually we're using that to talk about different races and different religions and all of that is important i am absolutely not disagreeing with that but it also includes lifespan yeah we need more examples of of what it means to be older and healthy and sexy you don't stop being sexy just because your body changes from menopause unless you want to i mean some people are like screw it i'm done i don't care anymore yeah yeah yeah i will say one of the things so um a couple of episodes ago we talked about this series that

i'm watching on apple tv friends and neighbors and amanda pete's character is realizing she's beginning perimenopause and it really feels like there are more men in that writer's room than women or the women and or the women in that room haven't gotten there yet and this is how they think they're supposed to write about it um and and what i mean is there are extreme swings and that can be true i want to i want to say that that can be true for those of us going through it but that's not when you make it a monolith and you don't and you don't bring in the diverse experiences of going through perimenopause as we talked about in part one some of the symptoms are uh genetic in a way like you may not have hot flashes and because maybe your mom didn't

experience um hot flashes or the women on your dad's side didn't experience hot flashes so it's it's written in such a singular way many times of the it's that stupid cartoon that you alluded to in part one as well the seven dwarves of of menopause yeah and in there there are two to um what are they i was never good at this part in english adjectives psycho and bitch it was psycho and bitchy yeah yeah those aren't those aren't great words you think right nobody ever well not ever nobody it's rare when the word psycho is used as a compliment. I won't include bitch in that because there is like, oh, bitch, please, or oh, bitch, look at you, kind of compliment intonation. But psycho and

bitch are not typically used to be complimentary of women and how people are perceiving them. And when that is out there, we've talked about this in other episodes, and this is part of the reason why we have this podcast, to chip away at these things because it just simply isn't true. And as we mentioned in part one, many women don't understand why they feel so irritated or angry or whatever. they don't they know they many of us feel already feel like this is this is a disproportionate reaction that I'm having what what the hell is going on with me but there's not because it's hormonal and it's physiological it's not always easily controlled and we've got to make space for the range of how these symptoms show up in women we can't make this a punchline anymore and and i do want to say i am i do love that it is a storyline yeah in the series

um but the way that it's being written is hyper focused on her being irrational or overreacting or doing something out of anger that that came out of nowhere kind of thing. And so much so that I was watching it with a with a friend of mine. And she looked at me and she was like, if this is what you're going to be like, we need to have a talk. And that's what got me thinking and talking with Dr. Sue about it. Like, I don't feel that way. Yeah, I, I either haven't gotten to that part of my journey yet and I may never have my my hormone swings present that way yeah it's just different and it's not a punchline it's not a punchline and the thing is what that is is a continuation of this idea that women are just too emotional to function in society I mean that's

really what it is yeah like your hormones when you're in your you know your younger years it's like women are just too emotional now it's like oh she's going to menopause and she's just too emotional it's it's the same excuse to discount women who may be having a very emotional reaction to a very appropriate thing to have an emotional reaction to so yeah a lot of that is just kind of continuing that whole dialogue we've had about girls and women throughout their entire lives yeah why they can't be world leaders or which is not fucking true yeah yeah matriarchy so if you want to chip into the revolution where it's going to start by the way um sorry i was going to go in a different direction but i

want to stay with us so yeah so could we talk about the physical aspects of aging and how that also ties into all of this so and i've said this before in other episodes that and i say this in my class all the time that in this country and i am hugely stereotyping and generalizing but in this country we tend to reserve sex for the young and the beautiful and the able-bodied and the white um because that's mostly who we see these images of and who we see as desirable i don't by the way i'm not agreeing with that at all and so when your body starts to change as it will during menopause because metabolism slows and your hormones are changing and you are no longer probably the size you were or the shape you were um but there's also gonna be things like

wrinkles and your hair falling out and we spend this is definitely not a real number because i think i'm making up the word like a gabillion is a gabillion a number if not it should be i love it we spend like a billion dollars on advertising we get people sorry we are advertising problems to get people spend like a billion amount of money on things that are wrong with them that may not actually physically be wrong but we as a culture have told them it's not acceptable and so hair loss and i'm see you know one of the i opened one of these videos to like see what it's telling people it was like oh my mother was going through menopause and hair loss and i'm like really you think hair loss was her biggest concern but from an outside perspective of i have to meet

people and still function in a world where i'm already being judged as a woman especially in business and now I look like I'm getting older and my hair is thinning it can become something but we we don't we are just trying to throw like solutions at them most of which probably do not work I'm not going to get into like minoxidil and things like that um but we just we're making people become so concerned about how they look and it's it's everything about the outside and yeah and it's just I think I feel like it's something we should talk about because we don't See, we have this conversation in class where I ask my students to name people who are older and then they make me give them a number and then I make one up like 55 or 60 or 60.

It depends on what I'm feeling today. And tell me someone who's sexy. And then recently had to add a live because they were giving me dead people. And I'm like, no. And they struggle. We are seeing some famous people really embracing the aging. um pamela anderson is one you brought up i know when we were talking in one of our pre-shows that she's aging and she's owning it and she's getting slammed in the media for it um i was in the back

of an uber when the new trilogy of star wars came out the last the 789 and my uber driver was like oh that carrie fisher i can't believe she's like let herself go and i'm like dude she got older like have you looked at harrison ford's face he got older too yeah maybe his body hasn't changed in the way because he's not in the same costuming i was not going to have this fight with an uber driver at one in the morning by the way like that's a safety issue but there's this real like how dare she how dare she go through menopause and continue to want to be on screen um it's and so if i'm going into my 50s 60s and 70s and i'm looking around for like what's sexy because that's what we've done our whole lives right we look around and we go oh

that's what's sexy this year okay cool um we we have no real great role models we have a couple helen mirren's been been been owning it i'm sexy yeah um but it's hard to find those and like so if i am losing my hair and i go into my oh you've heard this story if i go into my hair person which would be a stylist if we spoke in English I don't know if I have an image to show them like yes the gray hair is in but I'm seeing that also on younger women of like oh look I'm owning my gray I'm like all right well that's going to be gone in five years like do I have a photo I can show you of what I want that still allows me to be sexy and the story that I've told this a thousand places so I apologize if I've done this another episode I was doing a thing on sex and aging and I was

working with a community group and so we did it separately by gender so we this happened to be the women's group and this woman said she went into her hairstylist and said that she wants to grow her hair long and the stylist was like no you're old now we don't do that first of all your style I mean your style should be like you're going to look like an idiot if you get bangs or whatever the case may be like if it's a really bad haircut they should say something but to pass on that norming that you can't have long hair and then I don't know if the stylist realized this because my understanding was the stylist was not female we have this whole war on short hair in this culture right men don't like short hair like that is if you've never heard that by the way

start looking around you'll start hearing it and i think that happens a lot with folks like they'll hear something and then they start hearing it everywhere what he was really saying was that you are no longer sexy so you don't have to do this and it was really playing into this whole community idea of like you're older that's okay we don't really need to worry about you yeah mm-hmm yes all the thing well and then the other the other thing is um so we're kind of talking away about how these attitudes are normalized in ways that we might not even really realize it um which is part of what i try to allude to in my introduction on our on our episodes um like who's benefiting from all of this when when things are being marketed

to aging women to make them look young all the all the air quote all the bunny rabbit ears um that's that's a company trying to get your dollars yeah in and in many times they're they're uh i don't know i don't know if the kids these days know this term but snake oil salesman yeah like it's just a way to get your money it might not even be a treatment that works or it's a treatment that might have adverse side effects that aren't really talked about um and then the the other way this is normalized is um this kind of erasing older women from being sexy and desirable and owning their sexuality are the clothing sections in stores. Yes. It drives me crazy. Because when I go into a clothing store and I look at the clothes

in the Mrs. or the Petites or whatever. There's nothing there that appeals to me. It's muted color palettes a lot of the times. It's very rarely designed in a way to celebrate your shape, depending on where you're shopping. um and there are clothing uh retailers that do that do have these designs but i just i know that i look in the juniors section because those have the more more fun patterns and colors and styles and cuts and stuff like that and so and then and then we not only do

we gender close, we age close in. That's one part of it is the sections. But that by doing that, this could be a chicken egg situation. But by doing that, when we see an older woman wearing something that has been deemed for younger bodies, we say, Oh, she's too old to be wearing that. Her age, dress your age, that dress your age. I am dressing my age because I am my age and I am dressed yes that's point period full stop yep if I'm wearing the clothes I am dressing my age yep so there you can't erase me no matter how old I get my age is fuck you and that is what I am yeah I don't want to necessarily show this shirt well maybe i will oh you already showed it you flashed yeah yeah there you go respectfully respectfully

so can i change can i turn where we're going because i yeah like i want to say two things before we wrap up and they are in very different directions let's let's go let's turn left and then turn right so i do want to point out something about like the snake oil stuff you were talking about um things like some of the things that are on the market are not actually tested or approved by the fda so including supplements so for those of you like oh it's a supplement it's on the shelf it must be no no so there may be things that are not so great for you and so just kind of keep that of mind i if you're sitting there going yeah yeah yeah i hear you but i don't like the way i feel and i want to feel younger and i'm gonna do that by getting my hair done or my hair dyed or you

know i i i get that aging is okay but i'm not okay with it okay that's totally understand you do you like we are not trying to convince you that you have to just be like i'm getting older and i don't give a shit anymore and this is it if it's important to you what you look like great do something make yourself feel i want you to feel good i just want you to think about why you want to feel that way like not feel good i get why you want to feel good like why is it that you think that maybe doing this is going to give you what you want and i don't want you hating your body in the process so feel their face or anything yeah yeah so if you're like i just don't fit in those clothes anymore if okay and you still want to look a certain way can you just bump up aside

first of all the sizes are arbitrary in this country anyway yeah yeah can you bump up a size still dress the way that makes you feel good about yourself and love your body for it that's that's my thing i just don't want people we've been taught our whole lives that we're not good enough as women i i don't want the menopause and the changes that come through perimenopause to make that even worse so if you want to look great look great if you're like screw you dr steven charlie like this is important to me great yeah just don't hate yourself in the process please yes yeah the other thing which is 180 degrees the other way and this is something i'm seeing a lot on social media um you can always tell when i'm prepping for a certain show because

suddenly my algorithm starts changing what i'm googling yeah i am seeing more and more women her like I am out of fucks like I am just at this age where I don't care usually it's women who say that they're in their 50s or older and they just don't give a shit anymore they're gonna wear what they want they're gonna eat what they want and they're gonna do what they want so there's gonna be a glitch there because I had a glitch so sorry if this doesn't like roll with the conversation but um essentially what i was just saying was that i'm just seeing an increase in women who are on social media who are like i don't care i just don't give a fuck anymore i'm at that age i've done the things you told me to do they didn't make me happy so now i'm just i'm doing me and

that's it and like screw you yeah and i find that really powerful for women i think of all ages yes that's that's the thing too that i think that's another hope for that i have with these two episodes is that this kind of zero fucks given is not reserved for when you start perimenopause and menopause, um, or going through menopause. Um, I wish I had had this, I had a bit of this attitude in certain ways, but there were ways that I was, I bought, you know, I was conditioned into, um, into thinking I needed to look a certain way or be a certain size or be, you know make myself smaller um to be desirable and approachable and all of those things um this zero fucks the respectfully yeah can be at any age yeah my thing is if you're encouraged for

women at any age i i yeah and i think that's one of the great things that's coming out of that um again if you if you're like no i want to play into what i'm being told and that makes you happy great we just want you to be happy and healthy however that means being healthy for you safe yeah healthy healthy and safe like that's really the goal that we want for everybody I don't care your gender I don't care if you're going through menopause or not we we just want people to be able to live their their best authentic lives and I feel like we're seeing that happen sometimes for women now as they're aging that they're getting that opportunity to do that so with that happy healthy safe and we want to thank you for joining us on this episode of

unzipping taboos um part two paramenopause menopause uh we we hope that today's episode maybe gave your gives yourself some permission to to find your journey to healthy happy and safe no matter where you are in your life cycle and that it sparks some new ideas and will open up conversations worth having. Remember that your curiosity is the key to breaking down these barriers and embracing a healthier understanding of sex, your sexuality, your sex health and relationships. If you enjoyed this episode or any other episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who you think might need to hear this or any other episode. And if you've got a question or a topic you want us to unzip reach out to us via the link in the episode

description we want to give a very special shout out as we do to composer and best friend of the show ali o'brien for our incredible theme music thank you so much ali and until next time keep the conversation going keep unzipping those taboos and everyone take care Thanks for watching!