Menopause for both Men and Women

Menopause for Males and Females

A very funny yet quite profound comedian named Elayne Boosler once observed that, 'When women are depressed, they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.'" Within that single line from her comedy routine Elayne succinctly captures the behavioral differences that are exhibited by men and women when they encounter menopause.

Of course, it is at the heart of comedy to oversimplify situations and to exaggerate differences, but she is able, nonetheless, to grasp in just a few words a cultural truth. Men and women both experience, to some degree, a hormonal change in their lives that reaches into all facets of their beings. For one gender the transformation is relatively short but is very intense, while for the other it is much more gradual.

We are far more familiar with the accumulated data concerning the menopause that a woman experiences because the condition has been medically recognized and observed (and therefore treated) far longer than male menopause. Since a woman has a monthly period, she is often alerted to oncoming menopause by a change in the frequency and duration of her monthly cycle.

Most often she has been told since her youth that when she reaches an age where child-bearing is no longer a possibility, she will notice that her periods are gradually diminishing. There will be other changes taking place in her body that are related to her estrogen level, and she may experience some depressions during this time. Her vaginal lubricant excretions may begin to diminish, and she may notice other physical changes.

Generally these changes will take place over a few years.On several levels, men share some of the symptoms of menopause with women. There are men who experience the sometimes deep depression and loss of self-esteem that women go through during this time.

They can find themselves dealing with the anxiety that can affect a woman, and they will often become short-tempered, moody, and irritable.However, there are also some very distinct differences. When we consider that a woman has a finite supply of eggs, we can conclude that many of her symptoms are triggered by the lack of eggs which helps to “turn down” the level of estrogen produced by her body.

But with a man we’re dealing with a different hormone, testosterone, and it does not get turned down in the same way as estrogen in a woman. Instead, around the time a male reaches his thirtieth birthday his testosterone level begins to gradually drop, roughly around one percent per year.

Consequently, when he’s in his mid-fifties he has reached a point where his testosterone production has dropped by twenty five percent. So, while a woman will experience her changes to approximately coincide with the depletion of her eggs, a man will (probably unbeknownst to him) actually begin the early stages of his male menopause while he is in his early thirties and not notice a huge difference until several years have gone by.

Then at that point, according to Elayne Boosler, he’ll invade a country while his wife goes shopping.