Likewise, when the world didn’t know that the clitoris is women’s sexual trigger, women routinely faked vaginal orgasms-best spoofed in Meg Ryan’s heavy-breathing-in-the-restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally, written by-who else?-Nora Ephron. Until the huge Women’s Health Initiative research project began in 1997, only a few breast cancer studies had been done-mostly on men. Women were expected to be compliant patients the Internet didn’t exist and you rarely questioned doctors’ authority. (Many of the original Our Bodies, Ourselves creators worked on this new volume, produced by some 60 writers, named in the back of the book.) Before women like them got feisty, a breast lump routinely meant that you woke up from surgery without a breast-and often without lymph nodes, too. We are no longer girls and have not been girls for forty years.”īut both of these are girlfriend books, and in the best way.Īnyone who came of age in the women’s movement in the 1970s-and anyone coming of age now, I hope-knows the original Our Bodies, Ourselves, put together for self-help and celebration by Boston women who knew that their (mostly male) doctors were doing them wrong. Nora Ephron, 65 years old in I Feel Bad About My Neck, pokes fun at her own eccentricities and finds herself writing about “lunch with my girlfriends-I got that far into the sentence and caught myself.
Now that our huge generation is going through the Change, drug companies, plastic surgeons, and hordes of other smaller vultures can’t wait to get at our bodies and our wallets-but we’re all watching and checking with each other. Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause tells us what we need to know, how to talk about it-and how to fight the profiteers. Ever since the consciousness-raising groups and the zeitgeist of the 1970s got women to speak honestly to each other, we’ve been in this together. We’re more able to say no, and we like learning the names for our new vulnerabilities: a “meona,” says Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause, is “a person who pees a lot.” We’re comparing notes, chortling and whining together, and that’s the big message of these two lively and informative books. Sure, many of us boomers have hopes and petty vanities along with our aches and itches, but we also know ourselves better than we used to. You, too, can be endlessly moist and climb Mount Everest at age 85. More often, though, they’re insanely merry. Some writings about women of a certain age are horribly morbid: you’re gonna wither a lot, and then you croak. I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Other Thoughts about Being a Woman
New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2006, 352 pp., $15.00, paperback.
The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective
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