No question – Poise’s Second Talk Campaign is undeniably courageous, taking on Menopause, the Previously Unmentionable. Call me impatient and unappreciative, but I just can’t help mourning the missed opportunity to REALLY empower women, instead of aligning with those unrelenting forces bent on squeezing the Mojo from the second half of our lives.

Seeped as I am in the journey of menopause, (my own, and as co-creator of the Menopausal Mojo Teleseminar program), my curiosity was cautiously piqued when I opened the Poise link in this blog post  last month. (Cautious because, after all, Poise is an incontinence product and the association is not only anxiety provoking but inadvertently quantizes my experience into a demeaning and unimaginative metaphor — something like shame meets discouragement meets insult. Sorry, that’s just how it feels to me. Let it be known, I am not in denial here – it has been a while since I could safely jump on a trampoline with anything in my bladder.)

Nevertheless — someone is talking publicly about menopause. And I am certainly curious to see what aspect of this rich, challenging and potentially transformative experience they are choosing to highlight.

The first thing we see: “8 in 10 women agree, it’s time to change the way we think about menopause”.

YES!!! What we’ve been saying all along, my wonderful co-conspirator, Karen Clothier (creator of the body-mind-spirit focused and unexpectedly successful Menopause the Magical Telesummit) and me. We find ourselves coming back again and again to feeling the urgent need to rebrand menopause. We clearly do want another way to understand peri/menopause. After hundreds of years of agents of the male paradigm systematically dismantling our authority of our experience, using shame to silence our inherent collaborative tendencies, we have lost the language to talk about the transformative experience of our 40’s and 50’s – as we move from fertile women to mature women, from “child bearer’s to bearers of wisdom” (Kristi Meisenbach Boylan The Seven Sacred Rites of Menopause).

Clearly the difficulty begins with the term “menopause” itself. The term was coined in 1812 by the French physician de Gardanne and is defined as (a moment in time) 12 months after the last menstrual period. A little hard to acknowledge a rite of passage when its beginning, middle and end are as elusive, instantaneous and vague as that. But that’s not all, that’s simply the scientific use of the word. Our everyday use of it also describes perimenopause (the 5-10 year period before the Moment-In-Time) as well as post-menopause (an unspecified period after the Moment-In-Time). Confused yet?

Small wonder that we need new, updated language, imagery, descriptions, mythology and role-models — a full-spectrum, holographic map to describe the physical, emotional and spiritual terrain of our midlife experience.

Wait, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Back to the Poise menopause page, and how it misleads women by reducing this remarkable transition into … yes, you got it … SYMPTOMS. As if symptoms are the menopausal experience. And the successful management of said symptoms is all there is to this phase of our life cycle. Tragically reductionist, when seen from the perspective of how insidiously the media molds our reality. This is brilliantly elucidated in Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s movie Miss Representation, which shows “the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women … to feel powerful.”

“Disparaging”. Hold that thought while we listen to Dr. Jennifer Berman, Poise’s menopause and intimacy expert, describing mood swings. In the clip  “What’s the DEAL with my moodswings”*, does she validate our experience and perhaps suggest that our emotions might be valuable indicators of our experience? Does she acknowledge the virtually universal need of women at this stage to retreat (I would venture to say the developmental milestone in the female psyche to withdraw and self-reflect), and then acknowledge how at odds with our externally driven, production oriented culture this urge is? Perhaps she suggests that THAT might be the reason WHY our moods are swinging – that our emotions are accurately reflecting the environmental imbalance of the whole paradigm? Wouldn’t it be the moment for Poise, and all those interested in empowering women, to ask this crucial question: why are we making menopause all about what’s wrong with us?

Here’s what the good doctor says:   “Moodswings are very common during the perimenopause and menopause.  Women will describe symptoms of feeling more irritable and short fused, more weepy and depressed, more (uh) anxious and sort of, (uh) difficulty concentrating …and that’s very common during perimenopause, and it tends to level out, to some degree, as women approach menopause.”

Firstly, is it just me or is her tone patronizing? Is she explaining anything new here and offering solutions as promised? Is she even answering the question: “What’s the DEAL with my moodswings”?!

Now of course I see what a masterful campaign Poise have created here. They’ve captured an untapped market, have obviously paid close attention to the terms used by women in their focus group and have echoed the aspirations of menopausal women to save us from our Symptoms.

How much more interesting would it be if they used the global reach and collective power of the internet to invite us to create new language and ways to define our midlife experience that go beyond complaining about hot flashes (see “personal stories” on the site)? Ladies, instead of letting them reduce our experience to managing our symptoms, let’s demand inspiring stories about how we are stepping into the second half of our lives with the Mojo that comes from accessing our collective wisdom, our wizened humor and our well-earned self-respect. Now that’s a branding campaign worth following.