更年期的秘密力量

The Secret Power of Menopause

更年期的秘密力量

Why the end of fertility doesn’t mark the start of decline—and may even help explain our success as a species

LIZA MUNDY

OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE

为什么生育能力的终结不会标志着衰落的开始 - 甚至可能有助于解释我们作为一个物种的成功

LIZA MUNDY

2019年10月期

Don’t try to tell this to a mother sitting in the bleachers during a four-hour swim meet; or enduring a birthday party involving toddlers and craft projects; or resting in an armchair on a peaceful evening, savoring the heft of a tiny body and the scent of an infant’s freshly washed hair. Interminable or sweetly languid though they may feel in the moment, the childbearing years are startlingly brief. Fertility, which typically ends in a woman’s mid-40s, occupies less than half of her adult life. And then, if she’s lucky, she has 30 or 40 years in which to do something else.

在四小时的游泳比赛中，不要试图告诉坐在看台上的母亲;或经历涉及幼儿和工艺项目的生日聚会;或者在一个宁静的夜晚在扶手椅上休息，品尝一个小小的身体的重量和婴儿刚洗过的头发的香味。虽然他们可能觉得此刻无休止或甜蜜的倦怠，但育龄期却令人吃惊。生育率通常在40岁左右的女性中结束，不到成年后的一半。然后，如果她很幸运，她有30或40年的时间做其他事情。

Most people don’t realize how unusual humans are, in the way that nonreproductive females (how shall I put this?) persist. Females of most other species can bear young until they die, and many do, or at best enjoy a brief respite from breeding before death. This is true not only of creatures you might expect, such as rabbits, but also of long-lived mammals such as Asian elephants, and of primates such as gorillas and chimps. The odd exceptions—the Japanese aphid, for example, enters a “glue bomb” stage after her reproductive phase, ready to immobilize a colony intruder—only prove the rule.

The mystery of why women go on and on and on after their procreative function has ceased has occupied some of the great minds of the ages. I am sorry to report that many of those minds have not been forward-thinking. “It is a well-known fact … that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration” and they become “quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing,” Sigmund Freud pronounced. The male-dominated medical community of the mid-20th century was similarly dismissive. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,” opined the gynecologist Robert Wilson, who elaborated on this theme in his 1966 best seller, Feminine Forever. The influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone-replacement therapy.

大多数人都没有意识到人类有多么不寻常，就像非生殖性女性一样（我该怎么说呢？）坚持下去。大多数其他物种的雌性在它们死亡之前可以生育幼崽，并且许多人在死亡前享受短暂的暂时休息。这不仅适用于您可能期望的生物，例如兔子，也适用于亚洲大象等长寿哺乳动物以及大猩猩和黑猩猩等灵长类动物。奇怪的例外 - 日本蚜虫，例如，在她的生殖阶段进入“胶弹”阶段，准备固定殖民地入侵者 - 只证明规则。

女性为什么在她们的生育功能停止之后继续下去的谜团已经占据了这个时代的一些伟大思想。我很遗憾地报告说，许多人都没有前瞻性思维。西格蒙德·弗洛伊德说：“这是一个众所周知的事实......在女性失去生殖器功能之后，她们的性格经常会发生特殊的改变”，并且他们变成了“争吵，无理取闹和霸道”。 20世纪中期以男性为主的医学界同样不屑一顾。 “必须面对所有绝经后妇女都是阉割的令人不快的事实，”妇科医生罗伯特威尔逊认为，他在1966年畅销书“女性永远”中详细阐述了这一主题。这本有影响力的书后来出现，得到了一家急于推出激素替代疗法的制药公司的支持。

Even the architects of the sexual revolution were fixated on fertility as a marker of femininity, an attitude that seems doubly unfair coming from the people who gave us the pill. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,” wrote the psychiatrist David Reuben in 1969 in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, adding that the postmenopausal woman comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.”

Little wonder that women writers have felt the need to weigh in over the centuries. A few took an upbeat approach. At the age of 41, having just given birth to her sixth child, the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her friend Susan B. Anthony in 1857 to say that their best activist years lay ahead. “We shall not be in our prime before fifty & after that we shall be good for twenty years at least.” Others were less sanguine. At 54, writing her memoir, Simone de Beauvoir gloomily prepared to say “goodbye to all those things I once enjoyed”; women, Freud had taught her, become miserable and sexless as they age. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Helen Gurley Brown, Germaine Greer—all warily chronicled their maturity, as of course did the writer who invented the concept of “passage,” Gail Sheehy. Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, and her anxiety spawned a best selle

即便是性革命的建筑师也把生育视为女性气质的标志，这种态度似乎从给予我们避孕药的人那里得到了双倍的不公平。 “一旦卵巢停止，成为一个女人的本质就会停止，”精神病学家大卫·鲁本于1969年在“你总是想要了解性但却不敢问的一切”中写道，并补充说，绝经后的女人“尽可能接近”成为一个男人。“或者更确切地说，”不是真正的男人，而是一个功能性的女人。“

难怪女性作家几百年来感到需要权衡。一些人采取了乐观的态度。在41岁时，女权主义者伊丽莎白·卡迪·斯坦顿（Elizabeth Cady Stanton）刚刚生下第六个孩子，于1857年写下了她的朋友苏珊·安东尼（Susan B. Anthony），说他们最好的活动家年代就在前面。 “我们不会在五十岁之前到达我们的鼎盛时期，之后我们至少会好几十年。”其他人则不那么乐观了。 54岁的时候，写下她的回忆录，西蒙娜·德·波伏娃沮丧地准备说“告别我曾经享受的所有事情”;女人，弗洛伊德教过她，随着年龄的增长变得悲惨和无性。 Betty Friedan，Gloria Steinem，Helen Gurley Brown，Germaine Greer-所有人都小心翼翼地记录了他们的成熟，当然是作家发明了“通道”的概念，Gail Sheehy。 Nora Ephron对她的脖子感到不好，她的焦虑产生了最好的热情

Even now it’s hard for a woman not to dread the consequences of moving out of youth. One of the wryest recent meditations is an episode of Inside Amy Schumer, in which the eponymous comedian happens upon three of her comedic icons—Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—picnicking in a meadow. They are celebrating Louis-Dreyfus’s “last f***able day,” as adjudicated by the media, Fey explains. Schumer, feigning astonishment, asks whether the media do this to men. The trio laughs and laughs.

Three new books about postmenopausal womanhood show that the conversation is changing. For the first time, The New York Times noted early this year, a sizable cohort of women is moving into the sixth and seventh decades of life with a surfeit of energy and workplace experience. Women are better educated than men. Many spend early middle age constrained by work-life challenges, like athletes training with ankle weights. Once the weights come off, they have the muscle to run. Literally: The 2020 slate of female presidential candidates is Exhibit A.

即使是现在，女人也不会害怕搬离青年的后果。最近最沉思的冥想之一是Inside Amy Schumer的剧集，其中同名喜剧演员发生在她的三个喜剧偶像 -  Tina Fey，Patricia Arquette和Julia Louis-Dreyfus-在草地上野餐。费伊解释说，他们正在庆祝路易 - 德雷福斯的“最后一个可操作的日子”，由媒体裁决。假装惊讶的舒默询问媒体是否对男性这样做。三人笑着笑。

关于绝经后女性的三本新书表明，谈话正在发生变化。 “纽约时报”今年早些时候首次提到，一大批女性正在进入生命的第六和第七十年，过剩的能量和工作场所经验丰富。女性受教育程度高于男性。许多人在早期中年受到工作 - 生活挑战的限制，比如运动员用脚踝重量训练。一旦重量下降，他们就会有肌肉运动。字面意思：2020年女性总统候选人名单见附录A.

The landscape looks different due to the #MeToo movement as well. In some ways, it has divided women by generation, yet even older women who may regret a return to the idea of feminine fragility are overjoyed to see workplace predators toppled. The unseating of men like Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer has opened the way for women like Christiane Amanpour and Gayle King to occupy top spots, where they exemplify what 60‑something really looks like: pretty freaking great.

由于#MeToo运动，景观看起来也不同。在某些方面，它已经将女性分开了一代人，但即使是那些可能后悔重新回归女性脆弱观念的老年女性也很高兴看到职场掠夺者被推翻。查理·罗斯（Charlie Rose）和马特·劳尔（Matt Lauer）这样的男性脱颖而出，为像Christiane Amanpour和Gayle King等女性占据榜首开辟了道路，在那里他们举例说明了60个真实的样子：非常棒极了。

The current conversation is also informed by evolutionary biology, which evaluates traits based on their reproductive purpose. Given that menopause is nonreproductive by definition, biologists consider it a “big evolutionary puzzle,” the novelist Darcey Steinke writes in her memoir, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. According to the prevailing view, a human female possesses all the eggs she will have while still in the womb; the number promptly begins diminishing, and by her mid-40s, the remaining ova have deteriorated. To an evolutionary biologist, this is interesting and weird. To Steinke, it was miserable and hard. Her book is lyrical but a bit depressing, because she herself was depressed.

目前的对话也是由进化生物学提供的，它根据生殖目的来评估特征。鉴于更年期根据定义是非生殖性的，生物学家认为这是一个“巨大的进化难题”，小说家Darcey Steinke在她的回忆录中写道：Flash Count Diary：Menopause和Vindication of Natural Life。根据流行的观点，一个人类的女性拥有她仍然在子宫中的所有卵子;这个数字很快就开始减少了，到40多岁时，剩下的卵子已经恶化了。对于进化生物学家来说，这很有趣也很奇怪。对斯坦克而言，这是悲惨而艰难的。她的书很抒情，但有点令人沮丧，因为她自己很沮丧。

Some women experience few symptoms during menopause, but Steinke suffered nearly two awful years of hot flashes, acute episodes that were like “four-minute surprise anxiety attacks.” She sensed mortality stalking her: “For the first time, I feel I have a time stamp, an expiration date.” She writes vividly and a little wistfully about sex, mourning her lost desirability, as she sees it, and the waning of her own desire. She feels angry; she yells at her husband. “Early times of sexual frenzy seem almost impossible now.”

Every woman is of course entitled to—can’t escape—her own response to menopause. But Steinke’s melancholy reflections sound a bit retrograde, as if she can’t escape those insufferable doctors, the Wilsons and the Reubens, with their pompous pronouncements about the wreckage that remains when estrogen, like a tide, drains away. “Without hormones my femininity is fraying,” she writes. In a transitional state herself, she identifies with people who are transitioning out of their birth gender—not that the empathy brings much relief.

有些女性在绝经期间几乎没有症状，但斯坦克经历了近两年可怕的潮热，急性发作就像是“四分钟的突然焦虑症”。她感觉死亡跟踪她：“我第一次觉得我有一个时间戳，一个失效的日期。“她生动地写了一些关于性的渴望，哀悼她失去的欲望，正如她所看到的那样，以及她自己欲望的消失。她感到很生气;她对丈夫大吼大叫。 “现在，性狂热的早期几乎是不可能的。”

每个女人当然有权 - 不能逃避 - 她自己对更年期的反应。但斯坦克的忧郁反射听起来有点逆行，好像她无法逃脱那些令人难以忍受的医生，威尔逊和鲁本斯，他们夸张地讲述了当雌激素像潮水一样消失的残骸。 “没有荷尔蒙，我的女性气质正在消失，”她写道。在她自己的过渡状态下，她认同正在从出生性别转变的人 - 而不是同情带来了很大的缓解。

Steinke also identifies with one of the few other species that enjoy a long postmenopausal life: killer whales. In the ocean, nonreproductive females play an important role. With the wisdom of years, they guide their pod to the best salmon. Steinke kayaks in waters off the coast of Seattle, hoping to commune, and is rewarded with a magnificent breaching. “The wild matriarchs have given me hope,” she writes. “They are neither frail nor apprehensive, but in every way leaders of their communities.”

That menopause may enable a new role and stature for women is the central argument of The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause, by Susan Mattern. A historian at the University of Georgia, she steps away from the personal to consider “humanity’s massive primeval past.” Once upon a time, scientists assumed that women (and men) were designed to live to about 50, and that menopause was an accident, a by-product of medical progress. Yet even in primitive societies, it turns out, a portion of women lived well past middle age, which suggests that menopause is a feature, not a bug, of human evolution.

斯坦克还认定其他少数具有绝经后长寿的物种之一：虎鲸。在海洋中，非生殖性雌性起着重要作用。凭借多年的智慧，他们将他们的豆荚引导到最好的鲑鱼。斯坦克皮划艇在西雅图海岸附近的海域，希望能够交通，并获得了巨大的破坏奖励。 “野生女族长给了我希望，”她写道。 “他们既不脆弱也不忧虑，但他们社区的各种领导者都是如此。”

更年期可能会让女性扮演一个新的角色和身材，这是Susan Mattern的“慢月攀登：更年期的科学，历史和意义”的核心论点。作为佐治亚大学的一位历史学家，她远离个人，考虑“人类大规模的原始过去。”曾几何时，科学家认为女性（和男性）被设计为活到50岁左右，更年期是一次事故，医学进步的副产品。然而，即使在原始社会，事实证明，一部分女性在中年以后生活得很好，这表明更年期是人类进化的一个特征，而不是一个缺陷。

Mattern has her own audacious theory as to why: Menopause is a key to our success as a species. In humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, tribes needed a balance of producers and consumers—people who brought in food, and people who ate it. Most adults did both. Not so children, who remain dependent during the long period of brain development. Members who could bring in food for more than one person without adding to the population were crucial.

Enter the postmenopausal female. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes studied a modern foraging tribe, the Hadza, and found that an energetic group of older women brought “more food into camp than any other age and sex category.” This paved the way for the Grandmother Hypothesis: Not only do older women serve as food producers, but they are providers of “allocare,” communal child care. In the Hadza and other tribes, Mattern writes, women “reach peak foraging productivity in their 50s and continue to produce a caloric surplus through old age.” She points out that tribes have been known to kill members who can’t contribute. If grandmothers aren’t murdered, she reasons, that is because they are useful.

马特恩有自己的大胆理论，为什么：更年期是我们作为一个物种成功的关键。在人类的狩猎采集时代，部落需要生产者和消费者的平衡 - 食物的人和食物的人。大多数成年人都做了。不是那么在长期大脑发育期间仍然依赖的孩子。能够为一个以上的人提供食物而不增加人口的会员至关重要。

进入绝经后的女性。人类学家克里斯汀霍克斯研究了一个现代觅食部落哈扎，并发现一群精力充沛的老年妇女带来了“比其他任何年龄和性别类别更多的食物进入营地。”这为祖母假设铺平了道路：不仅做旧妇女担任粮食生产者，但她们是“分配”社区儿童保育的提供者。 Mattern写道，在Hadza和其他部落中，女性“在50多岁时达到巅峰觅食生产力，并在年老时继续产生热量过剩。”她指出，众所周知，部落会杀死无法贡献的成员。如果祖母没有被谋杀，她的理由，那是因为它们是有用的。

Mattern makes the case that menopause probably emerged in humans when we diverged from chimpanzees millions of years ago. It gave Homo sapiens an advantage over other species of hominids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, she proposes. Limiting childbearing to younger women, whose offspring could be cared for by older women, enabled the species to bounce back from an epidemic or a crisis: Those fertile women could reproduce quickly, but no woman could do so forever, sparing the tribe the risk of overpopulation. With the advent of farming, menopause still served an important purpose. The most prosperous time for a peasant family was postmenopausal, Mattern argues, when older children could help and the family no longer had new members to support. Nowadays, with fewer children and more resources, she brightly adds, “women past menopause, who historically used their energy surplus to help their families survive, can now use it in other ways.” While Steinke experienced menopause as a shutting-down, Mattern sees it as an opening-up.

马特恩认为，当数百万年前我们与黑猩猩分道扬扬时，更年期可能会出现在人类身上。她提出，它使智人比其他种族的原始人更有优势，例如尼安德特人和杰尼索瓦人。限制生育对年龄较大的妇女，其后代可以由老年妇女照顾，使得该物种能够从流行病或危机中恢复过来：那些肥沃的妇女可以迅速繁殖，但没有妇女可以永远这样做，使部落免受风险人口过剩。随着农业的到来，更年期仍然是一个重要的目的。马特恩认为，对于一个农民家庭来说，最繁荣的时期是绝经后的，当年龄较大的孩子可以提供帮助时，家庭不再有新成员支持。如今，随着孩子越来越多，资源越来越多，她明白地补充道，“过去更年期的女性，历史上使用能量过剩来帮助家人生存，现在可以用其他方式使用它。”虽然Steinke经历了更年期的关闭，但Mattern将其视为开放。

Both views are true, as the New York Times columnist Gail Collins shows in No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History, which spans the colonial era to the present. Her takeaway is that older women fare well when circumstances permit them to be productive: “If you’re important economically, you’re important.” Providing allocare is well and good, but “eras in which older women were able to earn money or increase their family assets were eras in which they were … popular,” Collins writes drily.

Tracing their shifting status, she observes that during the colonial period, women continued spinning, weaving, and the like into old age. Physically, of course, the stage could be hell—pelvic disorders, childbirth damage, rotting teeth. Older enslaved women were exiled and horribly neglected. Yet often, the only thing worse than being a woman was being a man: Male mortality was higher, and widowhood could be a blessing—widows, at least white ones, could own property (unlike married women). Then, as the country became more populated, men monopolized the jobs. Women had less of an economic purpose, and they lost status.

这两种观点都是正确的，正如“纽约时报”专栏作家盖尔·柯林斯所展示的那样：“现在不停止我们：美国历史上的老年妇女历险记”，它横跨殖民时代到现在。她的观点是老年妇女在情况允许的情况下表现得很好：“如果你在经济上很重要，那么你很重要。”提供分配是好的，但是“老年妇女能够赚钱的时代或者增加他们的家庭资产是他们当时流行的时代，“柯林斯写道。

追踪他们的转变状态，她观察到在殖民时期，女性继续旋转，编织等进入老年。当然，身体上的阶段可能是地狱 - 骨盆疾病，分娩损伤，牙齿腐烂。年长的被奴役妇女被流放，可怕地被忽视。然而，通常情况下，唯一比女性更糟糕的事情就是成为一个男人：男性死亡率更高，寡居可能是一种福气 - 寡妇，至少是白人，可以拥有财产（与已婚女性不同）。然后，随着国家人口的增加，男人垄断了这些工作。妇女的经济目的较少，她们失去了地位。

Collins highlights the great age of social reform in the mid-19th century as another period when older women enjoyed prestige, though less because they had economic power than because they wielded moral authority. Notably, they used that authority to make the case for, among other things, female clout well into later life. A standout among women’s-rights advocates, Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that women could occupy different spheres at different life stages, moving from narrow domestic concerns to community-minded platforms. Stanton, Collins writes, “believed that menopause had redirected all her ‘vital forces’ from her reproductive organs to her brain.” Vital she and Susan B. Anthony certainly were as they barnstormed the country, made speeches on tabletops, played cards with soldiers. Their age allowed them to “have adventures.” At the same time, one observer wrote, “stately Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity by a comfortable look of motherliness.”

柯林斯强调了19世纪中叶社会改革的伟大时代，这是老年妇女享有声望的另一个时期，尽管较少因为她们拥有经济权力而不是因为她们拥有道德权威。值得注意的是，他们利用这种权力为女性的影响力以及以后的生活提供了理由。在女性权利倡导者中脱颖而出，伊丽莎白卡迪斯坦顿认为女性可以在不同的生命阶段占据不同的领域，从狭隘的国内问题转向社区意识平台。科林斯斯坦顿写道，“相信更年期已经将她的所有”生命力量“从她的生殖器官转移到了她的大脑。”她和苏珊·安东尼当然是在他们对这个国家进行了抨击，在桌面上发表演讲，与士兵打牌。他们的年龄允许他们“冒险”。与此同时，一位观察者写道，“庄严的斯坦顿太太通过舒适的母性获得了很大的免疫力。”

As the white-collar workplace expanded in the industrial era, women were shouldered out of it, eroding female social power across the age range. Older black women were a mainstay of early civil-rights struggles, but the contributions of activists such as Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune were sidelined, the credit given to younger men. And women’s return to the workforce during World War II gave way to postwar pressure to depart it, which delivered mixed results for older women. In the 1960s and ’70s, important strides were made thanks to female workers such as flight attendants, who filed class-action lawsuits protesting rules that obliged them to retire if they married or reached age 35. Yet as women’s earning potential grew along with their work span and sexual freedom, the more senior among them faced newly corrosive pressures.

随着白领工作场所在工业时代的扩大，女性受到了影响，从而侵蚀了整个年龄段的女性社会力量。年长的黑人妇女是早期民权斗争的支柱，但是玛丽·特雷尔和玛丽·麦克劳德·白求恩等活动家的贡献被搁置，这是对年轻人的信任。在第二次世界大战期间，女性重返劳动力队让位于战后的离职压力，这给年长女性带来了不同的结果。在20世纪60年代和70年代，由于空乘人员等女性工作人员提出了重大进展，他们提出了集体诉讼抗议规则，如果他们结婚或年满35岁，他们必须退休。但随着女性的收入潜力随着她们的增长而增长。工作范围和性自由，其中较高级的人面临新的腐蚀压力。

It may not be a coincidence that Wilson, Reuben, and their ilk pushed the perils of “the menopause” during this era. The centrality of sexual liberty to the women’s movement arguably left second-wave feminists more vulnerable to insecurity about their bodies and looks. Susan Mattern proposes that the very concept of a menopausal syndrome was the invention of a culture that aimed to psychologically weaken women in a strong period of life—at a historical moment when female power was rising. “Dominant groups,” she observes, “can be very creative in inventing new ways of oppressing people.”

威尔逊，鲁本等人在这个时代推动了“更年期”的危险，这可能不是巧合。性自由对女性运动的中心地位可以说是第二波女权主义者更容易受到身体和外表不安全的影响。苏珊马特恩提出，更年期综合症的概念是一种文化的发明，旨在在女性权力上升的历史时刻，在强烈的生命时期心理削弱女性。她指出，“主导群体”在发明压迫人们的新方式方面非常有创意。

Yet I’m struck, reading these accounts, that Stanton intuited what remains true today: Women have a different life trajectory than men, and the place of menopause in it is liberating in a way that’s worth considering. To describe a passage of life, even a painful one, can itself be a form of empowerment. Men, too, feel loss and insecurity as they age, and perhaps could use a map of sorts themselves. Crossing the midlife point, many struggle to recalibrate professional ambition (as Arthur Brooks’s article in The Atlantic’s July issue revealed) and to build stronger social and intimate ties. Online-dating sites betray men’s own anxiety about physical decline (“My friends say I look much younger than 60!”) and suggest that many men are perfectly willing to date women across the age range. The sex books are right: Men aren’t as picky about women’s bodies as women fear. Men crave sex, but they also crave conversation, a partner with confidence and achievements. Even Simone de Beauvoir changed her mind. In The Coming of Age, a book about the experience of getting older, she wrote that she had crossed a “frontier” and found peace. She had also taken a younger lover. “It has been far less sombre,” she reported, “than I had foreseen.”

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LIZA MUNDY’s is the author most recently of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. She is a senior fellow at New America.

然而，在阅读这些说法时，我很震惊，斯坦顿直觉说明了今天仍然如此：女性的生活轨迹与男性不同，更年期的地方正以一种值得考虑的方式解放。描述生命的通道，即使是痛苦的通道，本身也可以成为一种赋权形式。随着年龄的增长，男人也会感到失落和不安全，也许他们可能会使用自己的地图。跨越中年，许多人努力重新调整职业抱负（正如亚瑟布鲁克斯在大西洋7月刊中发表的文章所揭示的那样），并建立更强大的社会和亲密关系。在线交友网站背叛了男性对身体衰退的焦虑（“我的朋友们说我看起来比60岁还要年轻！”）并建议许多男性完全愿意与年龄范围内的女性约会。性书是正确的：男人对女性的身体并不像女人所担心的那样挑剔。男人渴望性爱，但他们也渴望谈话，有信心和成就的伙伴。甚至西蒙娜·德·波伏瓦也改变了主意。在“时代的到来”这本关于变老的经历的书中，她写道，她已经越过了一个“边疆”并找到了和平。她还带走了一个年轻的情人。她报告说：“这远不如我所预想的那么严重。”

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LIZA MUNDY是最近出现的Code Girls：第二次世界大战美国女性代码破坏者的不为人知的故事。她是新美国的高级研究员。