The New Yorker:

If you’ve got ovaries, you’ll go through it. So why does every generation think it’s the first to have hot flashes?

By Rebecca Mead

Few celebrities have lived so much of their lives in the public eye as Drew Barrymore has. She appeared in commercials as an infant, achieved global fame after starring in Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” at the age of seven, and became notorious for her battles with drugs and alcohol before she even hit her teens. A few years ago, the actress launched “The Drew Barrymore Show,” and it was on an episode of that program that she underwent a usually private transition in the glare of public scrutiny. During an interview with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, Barrymore suddenly peeled off a pin-striped suit jacket as she exhaled and fanned herself, announcing, “I think I’m having my first hot flash!” Aniston gamely ad-libbed, exclaiming, “I’m so honored!,” and laying the back of her hand on Barrymore’s exposed sternum like a mother assessing the temperature of a feverish child, while Sandler looked on in perplexed sympathy. The clip went viral.

Barrymore, who turned fifty this year, is not alone among high-profile women in speaking frankly and openly about the trials of perimenopause, which is now the preferred term for the extended period, lasting as much as a decade, when the reproductive hormones estrogen and progesterone are in flux, but during which a woman is still getting her period, even if sometimes erratically. The phase that encompasses the full transition from perimenopause to postmenopause is referred to clinically as “climacteric” and is colloquially just called “menopause,” although, strictly speaking, menopause designates the single day on which a woman has gone three hundred and sixty-five days without menstruating—a milestone that is easy to miss, at least for the generations who came of middle age before the advent of period-tracking apps. Michelle Obama once described on her podcast her experience of hot flashes: “It was like someone put a furnace in my core and turned it on high.” On Instagram, Courteney Cox satirized a mid-eighties feminine-hygiene advertisement in which she, then an unknown actress, had appeared. (Dressed for an aerobics workout, she confides, “Tampax can change the way you feel about your period.”) Contemporary Cox, clad in an eighties-style leotard and tights, announced, with wide eyes and a rictus grin, “Menopause will eat you alive! It’s horrible.”

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