Menopause and sexuality : resisting representations of the abject asexual woman

In Western cultures, the aging reproductive body is the epitome of the abject. Older women are all but invisible within cultural representations of idealized femininity, and silence surrounds women's embodied experiences of aging (Hillyer, 1998). When the menopausal or postmenopausal women is represented, she is routinely shown as the crone, the hag, or the dried-up grandmother figure, her body covered, and her sexuality long left behind. If she is depicted as sexual, this in itself makes her an object of fascination because of the contradiction of age and sexuality; women who present a sexually desirable visage postmenopause apparently defy the ravages of time (Rostosky & Travis, 2000) or are caricatured as "cougars," their sexuality ridiculed and derided (McHugh & Interligi, 2015).