Rena Dourou, president of the parliamentary group of Greece's SYRIZA party, has written a personal social media post about going through menopause, describing her own experience as mild while calling attention to the prejudices she says still follow women as they age.
Dourou said she had recently come to realise how fortunate she is. She wrote that she is experiencing menopause with relatively mild symptoms and has not needed a fan even to this day, and that she has a partner who understands what the transition means.
A book that changed her Sunday reading
Dourou said August had been a hard month, marked by images of destruction, losses, damage to places, people and the natural environment, and a weight that stayed with everyone, including some personal losses of her own. She said her usual Sunday book had been set aside because there are moments when it is simply not possible to move straight on to the next page.
She said that when the habit did return, she picked up a book she would not have imagined reading a few years earlier. Recalling her time as a student of the political theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, and of the academic Menelaos Givalos, she said she would not have believed anyone who told her she would one day hold a book by the American actress Brooke Shields without the slightest embarrassment.
The book was Shields's "Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old," translated into Greek by Antzi Kounadi and published by Bell editions. Dourou said she opened it out of curiosity and quickly began underlining passages.
Quotes that stood out to her
She cited a line from the book stating that women become invisible as they age because society teaches them that their worth is tied to youth, beauty and their ability to meet others' expectations. She said she found the passage easy to believe, noting that she has not had children, has not tried to look younger than her age, and has spent nearly her entire adult life in an environment where a woman's appearance, age, tone of voice and confidence are often discussed more than her ideas.
She also quoted the book's observation that women are taught from a young age to treat their bodies as a permanent project under correction, and its remark that a confident man is seen as a leader while a confident woman is often labelled difficult or arrogant. Dourou said women in public life learn early that there is a standard that shifts only for them: raising your voice makes you aggressive, staying quiet means you lack grit.
Gender bias in medicine
The passage that made her stop reading altogether, she wrote, was one describing repeated studies that have found gender bias in medicine, meaning women's pain is not taken seriously and, as a result, goes untreated. Dourou said this may be one of the oldest prejudices against women, tracing from an era when their pain was attributed to "hysteria" to today, when scientific studies still show it is undervalued.
She also cited the book's finding that only one in five obstetrician-gynaecologists has been trained in menopause, even though half the population will experience it at some point in their lives.
A call to speak openly
Dourou said she has decided to talk about menopause whenever she can, publicly and privately, adding that she is glad more women with public visibility, including actresses, singers and journalists, have lately begun doing the same, because their voices help open a conversation that stayed on the margins for decades.
She said the real goal is for no woman to have to stay silent, particularly those without public visibility, those facing financial difficulty, or those without a supportive environment to help them claim the care and understanding they deserve. She named her friend Olga Petsoglou as someone who knows everything about menopause and never leaves a question unanswered.
In a postscript, Dourou said she hoped that one day such basic facts would become part of public discussion without needing a famous woman to lead the way. She added that the photograph accompanying her post was taken in front of a painting by the artist Phaedra Kazantzaki depicting a street market, and said she has followed the young creator's work since Kazantzaki was a child. In a final aside, Dourou joked about what she expects to hear from friends, and from people she called "friends," over becoming known as the "menopausal president."
