Shortly before his relaunch as a lead apologist for Liz Truss, Sir Iain Duncan Smith had enough time on his hands to try on a MenoVest, a kind of heated gilet now enjoying a moment. This successor to the pregnancy simulator, with its understated hint of the “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt, is advertised as converting its male wearers into “menopause allies”.
Last week’s best known recruit was the BBC presenter Jeremy Vine. After moments in the gilet, he told a campaigner: “I’m now suffering what you suffered.” In fact, Vine suspected, he was already cognitively struggling, just like an actual menopausal woman having a hot flush: “I can’t even think of a question now.” Mercifully it had passed before management got to hear about it.
The response among MPs was equally gratifying. Tim Loughton, a Tory who once said Sarah Teather, a woman with no children, should not be a families minister, is now another qualified ally, inducted into “the challenges that so many women have to go through”. As for IDS, after his simulated hot flush it came home to him, he reported to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, “that we sometimes make a joke about it really – ‘oh well, she’s menopausal or something’ – then dismiss behaviour as though there’s no other reason to dig into that”. Suddenly, you get the inevitability, in 2019, of his all-male Johnson leadership campaign.
Had IDS personally encountered sufferers? Well, his mother,, he said, but also “just women, you know”, when “we could have been a lot more sensitive to this, and we weren’t, and I just recall some sometimes slightly erratic behaviour, uh, difficulties, but people just kind of glossed over it really”.
While it’s unclear what his epiphany will mean in practical terms, given IDS’s known hostility to working from home, he can presumably continue to attribute a hormonal cause to middle-aged female behaviour he judges erratic or difficult, but in a way that is certifiably empathetic. Maybe the erratic Liz Truss is already getting the benefit? “If women go through this and they’re trying to work,” IDS mused, “it must lessen their capability, productivity, their abilities at times.”
We await some similarly illuminating device to help women better understand the occasionally incapable, difficult or erratic behaviour of middle-aged male co-workers and public figures. In the absence of a male simulation suit, we are left guessing why, say, so many senior male politicians in Duncan Smith’s party can seem distracted, even cognitively deficient, to the point that this must lessen their capability and productivity. In terms of empathy, it would help to know that a middle-aged Tory minister’s absences, lapses or confusion might not be something to mock or dismiss as a classic midlife crisis but painful symptoms of hormonal turmoil.
Was some inner imbalance, I wonder, to blame for the pre-empathetic IDS’s memorably insulting comments about Labour’s women-only shortlists (“people who haven’t really performed as politicians”)? Could it explain his fluctuating attitudes to, for instance, Boris Johnson, who went from “capable of [also] capturing a mood of optimism for too long missing”, to “hugely damaging”, to “Johnson must stay”, to “Liz Truss has inner steel”.
It might be argued that three minutes in an IDSVest is too short to appreciate the complexity of the 68-year-old’s predicament as he struggles for status in a culture where occasional brain fog and the mature acquisition of sports cars and a motorbike can still invite heedlessly cruel comments. Some women, certainly, have already recoiled from the proposal that three minutes in the MenoVest offers a man any meaningful insight into the experience of menopause, with its other symptoms potentially including night sweats, insomnia, forgetfulness and depression, along with the inescapable message that much of society considers you superfluous. As for creating women’s allies, any vest that can make those out of recent supporters of Johnson needs to be not so much educational as miraculous.
Inevitably, as with the recent glut of celebrity menopause literature, the gilet’s focus on the extreme, sometimes disabling, discomfort experienced by some women can look unhelpful to those who escaped more lightly, or with manageable symptoms, or who even report feeling liberated by the event. If three out of five women say they’ve been negatively affected at work, as detailed in a new government report, Menopause and the Workplace, that’s two out of five who might consider the MenoVest a virtuous-looking pretext for the new allies to patronise women before, during and after the menopause.
But given the revelatory impact on Vine, IDS and others, there’s possibly something to be said for performative, vest-style male learning, in place of less exciting illustrations of poor health and workplace provision. Women have, after all, been campaigning for years against ignorance about the menopause and inadequate treatment, without IDS concluding that the menopause might not be, contrary to his lived experience, a joke.
Supposing, unlike the now largely discredited homeless-for-a-night, poor-for-a-week and fat-for-a-day media stunts, the menopausal-for-a-moment contraption does make any difference, it’s worth considering similarly immersive techniques to generate male interest in female experience habitually classified as intractable or ignorable. Could some prominent men agree, for instance, to try out working for, say, 10.4% less, or whatever the local gender pay gap is? After a few seconds Vine could discover “I’m now suffering what you suffered!”
Much, then, depends on the allies. While Carolyn Harris, the chair of the menopause taskforce, has been justly congratulated on her MenoVest session, we can’t be sure any related conclusions about female debility were not, for certain parliamentarians, a dream come true. And if that’s unfair, what is it about the menopause that brings out a tender side in figures who have never, until now, done anything for women?
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
