The Numbers Game

Age has long been like a board game: Hit 40, and you can no longer pass Go. But all of that is now changing, says Maya Singer.

All of a sudden, I couldn't stop crying. For some reason, around the turn of the year, I was waking up in tears. Then, the rest of the day, any little thing would set me off: train delays; a remix of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" playing at the gym; showering, weirdly. To say this was uncharacteristic would be an understatement. I am pathologically level-always quick to steady myself. Until now. I was a black hole, future dimming, my weeping the weeping of a collapsing star. What the hell was going on? "Maybe," a friend offered, gently, as I wept to her over martinis, "this is perimenopause." Well. I should have known. I mean, really, I should have: The good thing, I guess, about living in a technocapitalist surveillance society is that the algorithm is hip to your hormonal shifts, perhaps even before you are.

Since I'd entered my mid-40s, I'd been fed an increasing diet of ads for products claiming to treat hot flashes, "meno belly," hair loss, vaginal dryness, low libido, insomnia, joint pain, brain fog, etc. I'd thumbed past these like so much spam, but clearly a message had been drummed into my brain: Something terrifying is about to happen to you. No wonder I was crying: The great change was soon upon me. Everything sexy and exhilarating in my life had already happened. The rest would be a rotation of cozy caftans and battling for a good night's sleep.

Fashion to the rescue. Many of the fall collections now in stores pay tribute to the older woman-though not, perhaps, in the way you'd expect. They join a wider recent cultural reckoning with outdated clichés around women and aging see Miranda July's best-selling All Fours, this summer's hottest read, a coming-of-age novel about a perimenopausal woman's sexual wanderlust, and the just-released Cannes sensation The Substance, which won the festival's screenplay award, wherein Demi Moore goes to truly grotesque lengths to restore her youth.