"Me.No.Pause.": anxieties and fantasies of ageing and femininity in contemporary menopause advertising

In the context of heightened cultural visibility of menopause and a burgeoning market of menopause-related products in the UK and the US, this article examines how menopause is constructed in contemporary advertising. Informed by a psychosocial understanding of advertisements as fantasy texts which operate through the mobilisation of psychic desires, identifications, and conflicts, we ask: how are women exhorted to relate to menopause? What larger psychic and social tensions pertinent to women and feminism do these exhortations rest on? What fantasies do the advertisements incite to resolve these tensions? A reflexive thematic and multimodal analysis of 20 outdoor, print, TV, and online advertisements reveals that current advertising exhorts women to relate to menopause in three central ways: defy, disavow, and embrace. These exhortations tap into wider contemporary anxieties around ageing, 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 ageing, re-securing patriarchal heteronormative notions of youthful femininity, desirability, and economic productivity, and placing responsibility of 'managing' menopause on women individually.