The Riot That Returned

In the early nineties a generation of women built a musical grammar out of refusing to be polite about their own bodies — scrawling words on their skin, screaming about appetite and abuse and rage into microphones everyone had assumed belonged to men. Loud was the design spec. Silence was the enemy the movement existed to kill.

Three decades on, some of those same women — and plenty who were simply young while those women were loud — are turning up to something called Menopunkapalooza: a menopause festival, mosh pit and hot flushes included. And the culture has a ready-made frame for this: how charming. The punks got old. Isn't that sweet.

Sit with why it reads as sweet, though. Sweet is what we call a threat once we've decided it can't hurt us anymore.

The reason a menopause punk festival lands as novel — novel enough to be a headline — is that we spent decades quietly agreeing not to look at the bodies it's about. Menopause isn't a fringe event. Half the species moves through it. And it remains one of the last genuinely unspeakable subjects in mainstream health discourse — not because it's rare or minor, but because it happens to people the culture has already trained itself to stop seeing. Women don't age out of relevance. They get aged out, actively, by a gaze that loses interest and then calls its own disinterest nature.

So watch the machinery. The riot grrrls refused silence about young women's bodies. The exact same refusal, pointed thirty years down the timeline, hits the exact same wall. It isn't a different fight. It's the same fight following its own logic to the place the culture hoped it wouldn't go. The taboo just relocated, the way taboos do, to whichever body we've most recently decided not to discuss.

Which is where the uncomfortable questions live, and I'm not going to resolve them for you. Take the one a skeptic reaches for first: are these actually the riot grrrls, or just women the same age borrowing a scene they mostly watched? And it barely matters — which is the point. The grammar was generational. You didn't have to be onstage in 1992 to have learned, young, that noise was a thing a woman was allowed to make about her own body. The wall those women hit is the wall this entire cohort is walking into now, on schedule, together.

Then the harder question, the one the leather jacket is built to keep you from asking: is this refusal, or refusal for sale? The menopause economy is a real and fast-growing market, and nothing gets absorbed by the wellness industry quicker than a rebellion with a good aesthetic. A branded festival is at least as plausibly a product — the movement's own noise packaged and sold back to the women who invented it — as it is a grassroots build.

So which is it: genuine continuation, nostalgia in costume, or commodity wearing both jackets? Yes. Some of this is a woman in her fifties channeling a real, unmet need — decent information, a room full of people who won't flinch when she names the symptom — through the one idiom that taught her noise works. Some of it is the comfort of dressing up in a younger self's rebellion because the aesthetic is safer than the reckoning. And some of it is someone at the back selling tickets to both. The festival holds all three, the same way you do. The person who once screamed to be heard and the person who now just wants the culture to stop pretending she evaporated are not two people. They're one body, thirty years apart, running the same refusal because the wall never moved.

That's the part worth sitting with. Punk was never actually about being young. It was about being unwilling to disappear on command. The people who understood that the first time don't stop understanding it — they just arrive at the next thing the world would rather they endure in silence, and they do the only thing they ever knew how to do about silence.

They make it loud.

The circle widens by force, or it doesn't widen. The least-heard voices in health don't get amplified because the discourse graciously turns to face them — and they don't wait for a wellness brand to certify them as a market, either. Maybe someone is selling the stage. It changes less than you'd think about what happens once the women who've spent thirty years refusing to be quiet are standing on it. The festival might be a product. The refusal underneath it was never a style, so it was never really for sale. They build their own noise, plug in, and refuse to leave.