Guys Gave Us Menopause, Says Study. We're Not Mad, Just Hurt.

Next time you wake up in a sea of sweat—either from a hot flash or a dream about the hot flash (and chin hairs and memory lapses and a particularly disturbing dryness) you’re sure to suffer through eventually—don’t curse your womanhood. Curse men. And not just for the fun of it.

You’d actually be justified in blaming them completely, according to a new scientific hypothesis that puts the onus of menopause squarely on men’s collective preference for younger ladies.

In the study, “Mate Choice and the Origin of Menopause,” published Thursday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, researchers posit that, over many thousands of years, a lack of reproduction among older women has led to menopause, now an accidental result of evolution and natural selection.

“It’s a very simple theory. What it does is it demystifies menopause. ... It becomes a simple age-related disease, if you can call it that,” researcher Rama Singh told CTV News in Canada. “That’s just like all the mutations that affect our aging—white hair, weak muscles, this and that. These are mutations which affect fertility.”

Finally, a solid reason to be angry with men like Rupert Murdoch, Hugh Hefner, Paul McCartney and George Clooney!

The new theory, though, is not without its detractors, including proponents of the widely believed “grandmother theory,” which says women evolved to become infertile at a certain point in order to help raise and ensure the survival of grandkids. But Singh doesn’t buy that.

"How do you evolve infertility? It is contrary to the whole notion of natural selection. Natural selection selects for fertility, for reproduction, not for stopping it,” he told CTV. "This theory says if women were reproducing all along, and there were no preference against older women, women would be reproducing like men are, for their whole lives."

Which would be an entirely different nightmare.