6 - From age of despair to window of opportunity? Reframing women’s sexuality in later life in the Middle East and North Africa

Summary

Naming and reclaiming

In Arabic, the common term for female menopause is sinn al ya’s, ‘age of despair’. Although there are more precise clinical terms in Arabic (inqata‛ al tamth, ‘cessation of menstruation’, for example), it is despair that dominates popular and medical discourse across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Language speaks volumes as to how societies view sexual acts and sexual beings. And so ‘age of despair’ says it all: a dim and distant shelf to which cultures, uncomfortable with female sexuality in general and ignorant of older women's sexuality in particular, consign women past their reproductive (and, by extension, sexual) best- before date.

Similarly, while Arabic has a wide array of words to denote homosexuality, from the Qur’anic (liwat, ‘sodomy’) to global human rights terminology (al- mithliyya al- jinsiyya, ‘sexual sameness’), the expression most commonly used and most readily understood for a male who engages in same- sex relations is shadh, ‘deviant’ (Amer, 2012). This term, however, has met its match in LGBTQ activists across MENA who have spent more than a decade trying to shift usage to the more neutral and apposite mithliyy (Abdelmoez, 2021; Semerene, 2019.

It is a measure of political and economic transitions in MENA since the Arab Spring that efforts to reclaim ‘menopause’ in Arabic are now led, not by civil society (which has seen its room to manoeuvre shrink dramatically in many countries over the past decade), but rather by the private sector. In 2021, TENA, a global manufacturer of incontinence products, launched its #DespairNoMore social media campaign in an attempt to shift attitudes towards menopause – and presumably, its own products as well (TENA, 2021a). According to a survey of 600 Saudi Arabian women aged 40 and above conducted by YouGov and TENA, while almost a fifth of post- menopausal respondents were so embarrassed by their reproductive transition that they kept silent about their experiences, more than 80 per cent of participants wanted to see the term ‘age of despair’ updated to more accurately reflect their active lives (TENA, 2021b).

Central to the campaign was a call for women across the region to submit their ideas for better terminology. UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) formally endorsed the winning entry, sinn al- tajdīd or ‘age of renewal’, as the new- and- improved Arabic term for menopause with a high- profile launch at EXPO 2022 (UNFPA, 2022).