Davina McCall’s Sex, Myths and the Menopause highlights yet another thing that women just have to tolerate

I have spent most of my life speaking to women about the subjects that are meant to be taboo. I pride myself on the fact that within minutes of sitting down with a woman I can build up a rapport based on our common experiences as to elicit from her the kind of secrets she might only tell a GP or in fact, has never told anyone.

A woman once told me about how she had been raped while we waited in line in Tesco to use the self-checkout. I have sat on stages in front of audiences of hundreds of women and discussed masturbation and female sexuality. I can talk to women.

This week I tuned in to watch Davina McCall on the Channel 4 show Sex, Myths and the Menopause and was completely dumbfounded by how little I, Jess Phillips women’s rights campaigner, massive over-sharer and all-round obsessive on female organs knew about the menopause.

I learned more in the hour watching this programme than I had ever heard before. I, the usual breaker of myths about women was a firm believer in the myths this programme aimed to smash. I have definitely signed up for very damaging views about hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because my mother hadn’t needed it.

I knew nothing about the effects on a women’s mental ability and concentration other than laughing one time that my mate’s mom had said that the menopause had made her crash her car. I was completely ignorant and frankly just a bit jealous of women who no longer had periods. As someone who gave birth to her final child age 27, I have spent many a year cursing my sentence of thirty years of utterly pointless periods.

The programme explained how many women were being failed by GPs who just didn’t really know about the menopause. It showed how, not dissimilar to childbirth, society seems to have made a virtue of women who deal with this stuff silently without any medical intervention.

I would like to see a man have a vasectomy without a local anaesthetic. I gave birth to a nearly 11lb baby and was then sewn up for a good hour without a jot of pain relief. This doesn’t make me impressive; it makes me a victim of a system that makes a moral virtue out of women bearing pain. Davina McCall’s programme showed me that, as well as excruciating pain, women are also meant to tolerate brittle bones, brain function reduction and acute mental health problems as well, while not talking about it to anyone.

How had I missed all of this information on menopause, other than knowing that services are crap and pretty much all women’s health services are underfunded, under-researched and, frankly, because we are willing to tough out most situations our problems are just utterly ignored.

Perhaps I didn’t know about this stuff because I am young and most of my friends are a similar age to me, but this is absolutely no excuse. My sister in law is currently going through a medical menopause following treatment for breast cancer and my best friend has for the last year been perimenopausal. These women have not hidden from me or others that this is happening, but the conversation doesn’t go very far because we all just accept it as a foregone conclusion. It is just one of those things.

I could scream at the “just one of those things” always being the thing that women have to tolerate. In this category, you can put, sexual assault, harassment on the street, terrible periods, endometriosis, the pain of childbirth, the depression after childbirth, being paid less, being hard to employ in our child-rearing years, people’s religious views determining policy on our fertility and the fact that nothing is designed for people our size. Oh well just a few small things there, not to worry.

How is it that Viagra can now be bought over the counter in a pharmacist, but women’s menopause treatments have to be obtained with a prescription? I remember the nearly decade-long fight we had to get emergency contraceptive pills to be sold over the counter. I was splashed across the pages of the Daily Mail about it. I don’t remember the men in Westminster having to put up the same fight for Viagra and yet it was achieved easily. Why is everything such a battle for women?

We women are only more than half the population and menopause is only something that is going to happen to pretty much every single one of us. Why would GPs know what to do about something that will happen to half of their patients? Why would something that affects pretty much more people than any other medical incident needs mandatory specialist training for health professionals? Why in Birmingham, a city of more than a million people, would we need more than one specialist clinic that can deal with the menopause? Women are so very ill-served by the exact health system that we predominantly staff, because once again we don’t have the power needed to actually change this stuff.

I have just searched the Queen’s Speech and associated briefing document, women get mentioned 14 times, carbon gets mentioned 21 times. In the section on mental health, there is nothing about the massive failings in menopausal women’s mental health. Our experiences are not a nice additional extra, our lives are not just to be tolerated. Forget women’s health needing to level up – for it to be mentioned at all would be a start.

Consider it a mood swing if it helps you understand my frustration but frankly enough is enough.