ABSTRACT
A modern demographic profile of postmenopausal women in the United States reveals another socioevolutionary change—postmenopausal women exist in increasing numbers and with decreasing social value. The chapter discusses several challenges to traditional views on menopause which include the elimination of demeaning gender bias in the rhetorics of menopause; the improvement of life circumstances for post-menopausal women, and the termination of a metaphysical misogyny hostile toward the changing physical integrity of the female flesh and inimical to the dignity, power; and knowledge won by the aged crone. "The body" controls both its phenotypic and behavioral display of sex difference. Menopause or the decline of estradiol in the female body is seen as contrary to nature, a heresy in the female body. From a political point of view, the body's rescue is carried out by medical experts, who fix the body and repair its deficiencies, leaving women dependent on these remedies and invested in a frantically perceived "inferiorization" which comes with age.
