“The menopausal woman,” writes feminist author Germaine Greer, “is the prisoner of a stereotype and will not be rescued from it until she has begun to tell her own story.” 

The Body Is Not a Thing is a film about menopause. It explores the power of culture on our bodily experience and how crafting new narratives can heal and free us. Our guides are a diverse chorus of women in the thick of this transition, questioning the stories they’ve inherited about what it means to be an aging woman and finding tools to shape alternate visions in unlikely places. 

The film will feature women offering intimate, honest glimpses into what life in perimenopause and menopause is like — about the brain fog, hot flashes and interrupted sleep, about what one woman calls ‘puberty 2.0’ and another describes as a kind of ungendering. About painful sex and doctors dismissing their symptoms. About the culture of shame and self-loathing that casts a shadow over their lives, the grief and rage.

Archival footage and animation will explore how menopause has been ridiculed in popular culture and was, for centuries, depicted as a disease among scientists and doctors. We hear about wild treatments, from applying leeches to the anus to drinking the bone marrow of recently killed animals. 

We set out to find a new model of what menopause could be and meet women who are rewriting the narrative, including a gynecologist who has been called the menopause whisperer and a professor who calls menopause an evolutionary gift. We’ll witness stories of reinvention, of women who ask: what if our post-reproductive years could be our most fruitful?

What emerges is an untangling of the threads of menopause and misogyny and a new understanding of this rite-of-passage.