"Me.No.Pause.": Anxieties and fantasies of aging and femininity in contemporary menopause advertising

Amidst heightened cultural visibility of menopause and a burgeoning market of menopause-related products in the United Kingdom and the United States, this article examines how menopause is constructed in contemporary advertising. Informed by a psychosocial understanding of advertisements as fantasy texts which operate through mobilizing psychic desires, identifications, and anxieties, we ask: How are women exhorted to relate to menopause? What fantasies and larger social tensions do the advertisements invoke and how do they resolve them? A reflexive thematic and multimodal analysis of 20 outdoor, print, television, and online advertisements reveals three central exhortations: defy, disavow, and embrace. These exhortations tap into wider contemporary anxieties around aging, women's loss of power, and control over women's bodies. The advertisements help to break the taboo around menopause, contributing to its growing visibility and framing in more positive terms. At the same time, the advertisements incite a fantasy of controlling and denying menopause, reinforcing the imperative to deny aging, resecuring patriarchal heteronormative notions of youthful femininity, desirability, and economic productivity, and placing responsibility of “managing” menopause solely on women.