• A study from Norway shows that the older a woman stops menstruating permanently, the longer she lives. Women who go into menopause later than age 52 live longer than those who go into menopause earlier.

• For unknown reasons, having a first period at a young age and going through menopause at a late age seem to put women at a slightly higher risk for developing endometrial cancer.

• Nulliparous (childless) women and women who went through menopause later in life had significantly less cognitive decline. These results suggest that greater lifetime exposure to endogenous estrogen may be associated with less age-related cognitive decline.

• Having a late menopause usually runs in families, but it can also happen if you are overweight.

• Unfortunately late menopause can raise new health concerns or still causes menopause symptoms, resulting from the body’s decreasing production of hormones. Osteoporosis and heart disease are the most serious potential health concerns of the late menopause years.

Kill me now.

Starting this week, TV ads starring longtime spokeswoman Halle Berry will introduce a line of Revlon makeup infused with minerals. Print ads launched in magazines last month featured Jessica Alba touting new Revlon foundation in a bottle that lets consumers’ customize their shade, and this month she is featured in lipstick ads.

The blitz marks the first major initiatives since the company’s Vital Radiance cosmetics line aimed at older women flopped 18 months ago, leading to the ouster of its chief executive, more than $70 million in losses, the dismissal of about 10% of its U.S. work force and a new strategy for Revlon.

It made me wonder if L’Oreal has got any game with its ads featuring Diane Keaton and her delicate but aging locks?

The Vital Radiance line failed largely because of marketing missteps. For example, it didn’t incorporate the well-known Revlon brand name, hired unrecognizable models as spokeswomen and cost more than consumers cared to spend. By contrast, the antiaging makeup lines by Procter & Gamble’s Cover Girl and L’Oréal’s namesake brand respectively feature celebrity spokeswomen Christie Brinkley and Diane Keaton.

Well, fine, but Revlon’s abandoning of the entire makeup line in favor of something with a more youthful appeal makes me wonder: Are women of a certain age not buying cosmetics? Or are they not buying cosmetics aimed at THEM? If I were a forty-something (and I am not) and had to choose between Ms. Berry and Ms. Keaton, well, I suppose there wouldn’t be a choice.

But what about us fifty-somethings? The ousted Revlon ads apparently featured attractive but genuinely older women, and they flopped. Are we kidding ourselves? Are we not interested in buying things touted by models who — GOOD GRACIOUS! — are as old as we are? I know the women I see at Chico’s generally are NOT the same age or size as the youngish models featured in their ads and catalogs, but they do aim their clothing at women of a certain age. Is this denial on our part?

Will we EVER get a chance to feel comfortable in the skin we’re in? If we don’t, I’m afraid it will be our fault.

Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious… To modern Westerners, our definition of cleanliness seems inevitable, universal and timeless. It is none of these things, being a complicated cultural creation and a constant work in progress.

She quotes, for example, a well-known excerpt from a letter to the Empress Josephine from a war-weary Napoleon: “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.” (He clearly wanted her as she was, a cultural preference that somehow has not survived the ages —except among the French.)

For most women of a certain age, body odor has been a life-long hang-up. I have vivid — and largely painful — memories of seventh-grade gym classes complicated by the lack of any kind of effective deodorant. It wasn’t that we didn’t use them. They just didn’t work. “The biggest complaint I get about seventh-grade girls,” our gym teacher said, wagging her finger at us, “is that they STINK!” I added it to my growing list of personal failures, and lived largely in shame until the advent of better-working antiperspirants in the Seventies.

And there were other sources of shame. I also remember spending hours in my father’s pharmacy wrapping boxes of sanitary napkins in plain white paper so that the women (and the occasional brave man) who bought them wouldn’t be, um, embarrassed at purchasing such an intimate product. Ashenberg felt my pain:

For me, the epitome of feminine daintiness was the model who posed on the cover of a Kotex pamphlet about menstruation, titled: You’re a Young Lady Now. This paragon, a blue-eyed blonde wearing a pageboy hairdo and a pale blue shirtwaist dress, had clearly never had a single extraneous hair on her body and smelled permanently of baby powder. I knew I could never live up to her immaculate blondness, but much of my world was telling me I had to try.

Being “dirty” and “guilty” are so embedded in the modern psyche that they have almost merged. The unfortunate Gov. Elliott Spitzer is only the latest public figure to have revealed a dark and dirty side to his carefully scrubbed public image.

The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence, is built into our language… We talk about dirty jokes and laundering money. When we step too close to something morally unsavoury at a business meeting or a party, we say: “I wanted to take a shower.” Pontius Pilate washed his hands after condemning Jesus to death, and Lady Macbeth claims, unconvincingly: “A little water clears us of this deed,” after persuading her husband to kill Duncan.

And, if the television commercials and menopause sites are to be believed, those of us of a certain age now face the spectre of increasing body odor, and I’m not talkin’ just feet. Not only will our lined faces, expanding girth and grey hair be objects of offense, but no one will want to take a deep breath around us. It is even suggested that we end up smelling like MEN. Is there no end to our affront to society?

Better get the ice floes ready.

Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don’t like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism.
They feel that women have moved past that men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary’s campaign has lately revived with a vengeance.
And they don’t like Gloria Steinem and other old-school feminists trying to impose gender discipline and a call to order on the sisters.

Senator Clinton is unapologetic:

“For those of us that are part of ‘a woman need not apply’ generation that goes back to the time I went out to get my first job following college and a year of graduate work, this is an extraordinarily critical race,” the senator said.

“Many shoulder-pad feminists are growing more fierce in charging that women who let Obama leapfrog over Hillary are traitors,” Dowd adds. This would seem to be more evidence of a gender gap in the women’s movement. Are younger women more attracted by Obama’s youth and charisma? Are older women seeing in Hillary’s campaign a fulfillment of all their own “deferred dreams?”

I graduated from college several years after the Clintons did, but I remember how thrilled I was to finally have someone from my generation in the White House. (Imagine my disappointment when I discovered, through what he did, what he really thought of women.) And how about the promise of a woman in the White House? I’m standing back and waiting for the dust to settle, trying not to get my hopes up.

“There is no question that there are a million more funny women than there used to be,” says Nora Ephron, the writer and film director. “But everything has more women. There are more women in a whole bunch of places, and this is one of them.” Ephron knows exactly why female comedians are currently much more successful than they used to be. “Here’s the answer to any question: cable,” she says. “There are so many hours to fill, and they ran out of men, so then there were women.”

Ah, Nora. Don’t miss I Feel Bad About My Neck, her collection of essays on aging. And for those of us of a certain age, there’s always Mrs. Hughes. Oh, and the ageless Rita Rudner, who claims that men are afraid of eyelash curlers. “I keep one under my pillow instead of a gun,” she says. And this: “My husband are trying to decide whether to get a puppy or have a baby. We’re trying to decide if we want to ruin our carpets or ruin our lives.”

The fare on the new PG-13 Wowowow is in some ways no different than that of other women-focused community Web sites like iVillage: horoscopes and posts about love and marriage, health and fashion. Wowowow also has political commentary, but what is particularly distinctive are the conversations, …which read like deeper and more intimate versions of the “hot topics” segment of the television gabfest “The View.”

“It was very loose and fun and intimate,” [Candace] Bergen said of participating in the discussions, which the women have practiced while the site is in beta mode. The cozy tone of the exchanges, the participants say, reflects their decades-long overlapping friendships, stretching back to the 1960s and ’70s when many were among the first women pioneering their media and entertainment fields

Candace Bergen? Oh, yeah, and Peggy Noonan, Joan Juliet Buck (one of my favorite Vogue writers), Lily Tomlin, Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners), Whoopi Goldberg and site founders Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells and Joni Evans, all media titans (or titanias) and all of a certain age. Nice cast.

Wowowow’s chief appeal may be the glimpse it promises into the personal lives and beliefs of a group of businesswomen who broke through glass ceilings… “IVillage has always puzzled me,” said Ms. Buck, a contributing editor to Vogue and a consulting editor to Wowowow. “I love the idea but it’s like Macy’s or something.”

Gee, I ASPIRE to shop at Macy’s. I hope they’re not too lofty for the rest of toiling away at home, in classrooms or middle-management.

Statistics show there is a market for such a site. A comScore Media Metrix study of the growth in visitors among the top 100 United States Internet properties found that women’s community sites were, along with political sites, the top gaining Internet category last year.

Well, that’s certainly some vindication for my earlier lament over the dearth of sites. I know I’ll be logging in on Saturday.

I’ll admit it. I envy the mommybloggers. Twenty years ago — barely married, relocated and jobless, holed up in a Victorian three-flat in Chicago with two very small boys and no one to talk to — I would have found those sites a lifeline, a very Godsend. But, despite the obvious fact that theirs are among the most powerful and prolific voices on the Web, the Mommys don’t speak to or for me. I have different issues now, and I’d like to talk about them and hear others talk as well.

It’s not like I’m a neophyte. I may not choose to have a Facebook or a MySpace site, but back in the day I would almost daily log onto alt.fashion (”What are YOU wearing today?”) and alt.depression (with its multiple threads) to check in and join in the conversation. Does anyone else remember this? Am I such a dinosaur? It was just the ’90s! I know you’re out there!

If you are a woman of a certain age (doesn’t that sound better than middle-aged?) and know of blogs that talk comprehensively about this wonderful, frustrating stage of life, please let me know. I even have a name for it: More than Menopause: Welcome to Midlife.

We need to talk.