The Space Crone

Let's talk menopause

The first episode of

Dire Straights

, my new podcast with

Tracy Clark-Flory

, is live! The pod has already received buzz at The Meteor and New York Magazine. If you’re into space crones, you’re gonna love our pod—and our Substack community, where our subscriber chat is currently unpacking Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” lyrics as a rich text that speaks volumes about the current mood for straight women.

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The results are in— this month, we’re reading “The Space Crone” by Ursula Le Guin, originally published in a truly wild 1976 edition of an old journal called The Co-Evolution Quarterly, which also features Jacques Cousteau visiting NASA, a piece on Joni Mitchell in high school, and anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson fighting with each other (along with guides on skateboarding and fixing your bike).

To understand crones, Le Guin says, we must understand menopause. And when it comes to menopause, Le Guin writes, “the change is not trivial.” But she also claims, right off the bat in this essay, that many women simply pass through this stage without heeding the call to own the powerful transformation menopause offers. “I begin to wonder,” she writes, “how many women are brave enough to carry it out whole-heartedly.”

I couldn’t help but think of my recent writing on libido, and the popularity of hormonal menopause treatments today, when Le Guin says that many women who pass through menopause “give up their reproductive capacity with more or less of a struggle, and when it’s gone they think that’s all there is to it.” Such women may be relieved that their reproductive capacity and period days are over, chalking up that struggle, and perhaps the struggle of aging more generally, simply to “hormones.”

Libido is a myth

But to reduce menopause to a purely hormonal process, Le Guin says, is “to evade the real challenge, and to lose, not only the capacity to ovulate, but the opportunity to become a crone.”

What does that transformation look like?

Loss of fertility does not mean loss of desire and fulfillment. But it does entail a change, a change involving matters even more important — if I may venture a heresy — than sex.

The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Not many will help her with that birth. Certainly no male obstetrician will time her contractions, inject her with sedatives, stand ready with forceps, and neatly stitch up the torn membranes. It’s hard even to find an old-fashioned midwife, these days. That pregnancy is long, that labor is hard. Only one is harder, and that’s the final one, the one which men also must suffer and perform. [yes, she means death!]

Le Guin also believes the crone is a cultural threat, especially to men, because the crone, unlike the virgin, cannot be defeated by—well, let me just let Le Guin say it:

Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin’s virginity: fucking. Men are afraid of crones, so afraid of them that their cure for virginity fails them; they know it won’t work. Faced with the fulfilled Crone, all but the bravest men wilt and retreat, crestfallen and cockadroop.

Here’s the PDF!

Space Crone

16MB ∙ PDF file

Download

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Ursula Le Guin. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Dan Tuffs/Getty Images. Source: Slate.

All you crones out there, tell us about your experiences of menopause, and let’s also discuss this very interesting comparison between childbirth and crone-birth— a little gender essentialist, eh? And/or is there something more to it?

Also curious to hear your thoughts on the cultural life of menopause today— how it moves on your social media feeds, the ads that target you, the books you’re reading on the subject, your conversations with friends, and how the current stories we tell about menopause compare to what Le Guin is saying.

A reminder that we’ll have a live discussion of this essay (and menopause, peri, aging, “cockadroop” etc etc!) on Monday June 30 at 4pm PT/7pm ET on Zoom. Link will go out via email before the event.

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