Menopause Is Having A Moment. My Uterus Would Like A Word.
Apparently we're in our Crone Era now.
Opinion piece by Anna Lee-Renwick, Anni Founder.
Tressie McMillan Cottom said so in the New York Times this week, and honestly, good. After decades of hot flashes being a punchline and hormone therapy being a whispered secret between women in supermarket car parks, menopause has a marketing budget, a celebrity press tour, and its own punk festival. Yes, a real one. It was called Menopunkapalooza. No, I am not going to explain that further, you can Google it.
Melinda French Gates is calling it a revolution. Olivia Wilde and Penélope Cruz are doing magazine interviews about perimenopause. Halle Berry and Kate Winslet are out here promoting hormone therapy like it's a skincare line. Being menopausal used to be something you managed quietly. Now it is a demographic with purchasing power, and every private equity fund in the Western world has noticed.
Here is the part of the column that actually stopped me mid-scroll though. It is not really about the marketing. It is about what the marketing is standing in front of.
The Wellness Industry Will Sell You A Serum Before The Health System Will Screen You For Cancer
Cottom's argument, and I am paraphrasing her heavily here because I am legally and morally required to, is that the sudden cultural embrace of menopause has not actually translated into better medical care. Most women experiencing menopausal symptoms still get no treatment for them at all. And the gap is worse for Black and Hispanic women, who tend to enter menopause earlier and carry more of the downstream health consequences, while being the least likely group to get medical support for it.
The example she leans on is uterine cancer, and it is worth sitting with for a second because it is not influencer content, it is data. Uterine cancer is genuinely one of the only cancers where both new diagnoses and deaths are climbing, not falling, in the US, with diagnoses rising by more than half between 2010 and 2020 alone. Modelling out to 2050, the picture gets worse, and it gets a lot worse for Black women specifically, with projected incidence and mortality both rising faster for Black women than for white women over that window. Right now, Black women are already about twice as likely as white women to die of uterine cancer, with a five year survival rate of 63 percent compared with 84 percent.
That is not a hormone-serum problem. That is a screening and access problem, and no amount of glossy magazine coverage fixes it.
The Crone Was Always A Goddess. The Church Just Ran A Very Successful Smear Campaign
Cottom's "crone era" line sent me straight to my actual, personal, deeply held obsession, which is Hekate. If you don't know her, buckle up, because I will talk about her at any dinner party that lets me. She is the Greek goddess of crossroads, doorways, and the liminal spaces where one phase of life hands off to the next, always shown carrying twin torches because her whole job is lighting the path through the parts nobody can see clearly yet. She is also one of the original faces of the maiden, mother, crone triad, and she has been an icon of mine for years, long before I had any personal stake in which third of that triad I was heading into.
The crone was never supposed to be the insult she became. That's not some quirk of the English language, it's a demolition job. Pre-Christian Europe generally understood the old woman, the wise woman, the one who had seen a birth and a death and knew which herbs did what, as someone with authority. Then several centuries of Christian men in positions of enormous institutional power spent a very long time recasting exactly that figure, the older woman with knowledge, as something to fear and burn rather than consult. The witch trials didn't come out of nowhere. They came out of turning wisdom into a threat, specifically the kind of wisdom women had built up and passed down outside the official channels because the official channels wouldn't have them. That's the same instinct Cottom is describing today, just with fewer stakes and better lighting.
When the formal medical system fails women, they build their own, and they always have. Sometimes that's genuinely useful, folk knowledge quietly ahead of the research by decades. The useful version of this showed up on our own After Hours with Anni episode with naturopath Andrea Robertson. We spent a chunk of that conversation on histamine intolerance, which sounds like a fringe TikTok concept until you look at the actual mechanism. Estrogen ramps up mast cell activity and suppresses the enzyme that clears histamine, called DAO, while progesterone does the opposite, calming mast cells and supporting DAO. So when progesterone drops off a cliff in perimenopause and estrogen is left wobbling around unopposed, histamine builds up and you get migraines, hives, and sudden reactions to foods you have eaten your whole life without issue. That mechanism is documented in the literature, not just influencer lore. It just took most of us decades and a viral video to hear about it, because nobody's GP mentioned it.
So the folk wisdom and the science actually agree here. The problem was never that women's bodies are mysterious. The problem is that the information took a scenic route to reach us, usually via a stranger's car selfie video rather than an appointment we paid for.
Choose Your Own Menopause Adventure, But Book The Scan
Cottom's closing argument is basically permission to enjoy the moment without feeling guilty about it. Follow the influencers if they're useful. Try the serum if you want. Relish whatever sexual liberation menopause supposedly brings, apparently that's a thing now too. Just do not let the vibe shift replace the appointment. Ask about uterine cancer risk early. Ask what "normal" bloodwork actually means for you specifically, not for the average 40 year old in a textbook.
This is genuinely the whole philosophy behind Anni. Holistic support and proper medical care were never supposed to be a choose-one situation. Book time with an Anni practitioner for the histamine deep dive, the sleep rebuild, the protein plan Andrea won't stop talking about. And also, separately, non-negotiably, keep your actual doctor's appointments and ask the uncomfortable questions. The golden dragon era Andrea talks about on the podcast, the one where your energy finally comes back to you instead of leaking out through your cycle every month, is a real and lovely thing to look forward to. It is just easier to get there if you are not simultaneously ignoring a symptom that needed a scan two years ago.
Crone era, golden dragon era, Hekate at the crossroads with her torches, whatever we're calling it this week, the point is the same. Have the moment. Light the path with whatever helps you see it. Just don't let the moment be the whole plan.
Anna x
P.S. If the histamine deep dive, the sleep rebuild, or Andrea’s protein plan sound like conversations worth having, that is exactly what Anni exists for. Real practitioners, real support, alongside a doctor, never instead of one. askanni.com
P.P.S This article is general information only, not medical advice. Speak with a qualified practitioner about your own situation.
References
Wright, J.D. et al. "Uterine Cancer Rates Predicted to Rise, Especially Among Black Women." Columbia University Irving Medical Center, July 2025.
Wright, J.D. et al. "U.S. Uterine Cancer Incidence and Mortality Rates Expected to Significantly Increase by 2050." American Association for Cancer Research, 2025.
Suh-Burgmann, E. et al. "Aggressive type of uterine cancer responsible for higher death rates in Black women." Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, 2026.
McMillan Cottom, T. "Ladies, We're Entering Our Crone Era. It's About Time." The New York Times, Opinion, July 13, 2026.
"When Hormones and Histamine Collide: Why MCAS Symptoms So Often Worsen in Perimenopause and Menopause." Referencing 2026 Frontiers in Allergy review on estrogen, progesterone, mast cells, and DAO.
This article originally appeared on Bots & Gals on Substack.
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