Clodagh Finn: The ‘We Do Not Care' club is striking a powerful chord with menopausal women

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

Melani Sanders, the American influencer and founder of the We Do Not Care club, made me want to coin a new phrase after spending a few joyous hours in her perimenopausal company courtesy of Instagram.
'Whoop-scrolling' perhaps, because that is what I did when I binge-watched her list the myriad nonsenses that burrow their way in the heads of so many women. Her message, blunt and beautiful, is this: There is no need to put yourself under pressure trying to please everybody. Indeed, anybody.
And for women on the verge of menopause or already in it, nothing is mandatory but survival.
Unpainted toenails. We do not care. Separating laundry. We do not care. Bikini line. We do not care. Cellulite in short shorts. We do not care. 'Legs is legs.' And a favourite, hoovering behind things. 'We do not care how long it's been since we pulled out the stove and refrigerator to clean behind them. We do not use behind them. If we can't see it, we ain't cleaning it.'
Can you flaw the logic in that?
Melani Sanders, a 45-year-old mother of three living in West Palm Beach, Florida, was already well-known on social media, but she was catapulted into the stratosphere in May when one of her posts struck a deep chord with women of a certain age everywhere.
One bone-tired day, after shopping, she caught sight of herself in the car mirror. Instead of self-flagellating for the untamed hair and the too-small sports bra she saw reflected back at her, she took out her phone and recorded a video of herself saying this: 'We about to start a perimenopause and menopause club, OK? And it's gonna be called the 'We Do Not Care' club… let me tell you what that means,' she said, explaining how it did not matter a jot that she had left the house wearing a poorly fitting bra or that she hadn't used hair product.
She finished with this glorious exhortation: 'Let's all talk about what we don't care about today.'
She unleashed a tsunami. Here are a few sample waves: 'We do not care that we defrosted food to make for dinner tonight. Now that tonight is here, we are tired and will be ordering.'
'We do not care if we snore. We are asleep.'
'We do not care if our 20 something rolls their eyes when we ask them to fix our phones, we taught you how to use that bathroom.'
'We do not care that we grunt when we stand up and say 'oof' when we sit down. This is the sound of caring leaving our bodies.'
Whoop-scroll for yourself and see if you agree with the 2.5m people, at last count, now following Melani Sanders on Instagram and TikTok, adding their voices to an ever-lengthening list of things that simply do not matter when you are faced with the symptoms of menopause.
Here are two recent examples that made me laugh in recognition: 'We do not care if the underwire is hanging out of our bra. Any support is better than none/ We do not care if we wear leggings every day. Jeans hurt our stomach.'
What is clear in all of it, though, is that far from not caring, Melani Sanders and her followers care deeply about carving out a collective space where they can be filter-less and real.
While the We Do Not Care club is hilarious, it is also deadly serious. It shows what can happen when one straight-talking woman gives a voice to the many who have, for so long, felt silenced in a world that hid, and much worse, minimised the impact of menopause.
Now, by stark but welcome contrast, it seems to be the topic of the moment.
There is good and bad in that. The upside is that women such as Sanders can deadpan on social media and build a global community in weeks. Can an Irish branch of the We Do Not Care club be far behind? Though, the joyous confluence of humour and community has probably already worked its silent magic here because the beauty of it all is that you can cheer — and whoop — from the sidelines.
The downside, however, is that whenever an issue is highlighted, the moneymakers and the brand-pushers spot an opportunity and swoop in.
It is hardly surprising, then, to see that Melani has already been offered a series of commercial partnerships. More power to her if she can monetise her message which, for now at least, remains undiluted.
Money and medicine, though, are a more problematic mix. We have been far too quick to medicalise what is essentially a natural phase in a woman's life. That is not to say drugs and therapies are unwelcome. Bring on anything that helps, but all research — and we need much more of it focused on women's health — must be informed by the experiences of those it is purporting to help.
If the We Do Not Care club's moment in the viral sun tells us anything, it is that women are far more interested in their health than they are in trying to conform to the manufactured idea of beauty.
Sanders is particularly good at calling out the latter. She's spit-out-your-tea funny on opting out of the battle to keep body hair under control. I was going to write the word 'unwanted' before body hair in that sentence, but that just shows how deep the conditioning goes. That, however, is very recent. The ancient Egyptians and the Romans may well have plucked and depilated, but the idea that under-arm and leg hair are unsightly is a mere century old.
A vintage advert for the Milady Decolletée Gillette razor.
We can pin the blame for that particular insecurity on the fashion industry, which shortened skirts and sleeves in the early 1900s, and razor company Gillette which developed the Milady Decolletée in 1915 to shame women into thinking those previously unexposed parts of the body could only be presented to the world if they were smooth and hairless.
For the three centuries before that, nobody was offended by leg or underarm hair. Alas, that simple fact was drowned out in the early 20th century by ads asking women, 'Can you bare it?' over sketches of the latest fashions.
'To wear these charming new sleeves, arm-pits must be smooth as your cheek, sweet as your breath,' one ad for Neet depilatory and deodorant products proclaimed.
Gillette, meanwhile, presented the lie that good grooming meant keeping 'the underarm smooth and white', and it boldly vaunted its shiny new razor as the solution to the 'embarrassing personal problem' of underarm hair.
Thus began 110 years of body angst, fuelled by the fashion and beauty industries, the razor industry and generations of women — including myself — who, deep down, knew that we were being peddled nonsense but conformed anyway.
How liberating, then, to see the rise of the We Do Not Care club. Imagine what harm we could reverse, what freedom we could win, what future we might fashion, if we all allowed ourselves to join it.