By Amanda Cassidy
06th Feb 2023
06th Feb 2023
For years, we've had Apps or online communities for every life stage. There's even a digital community dedicated to help women navigate peri, post and during menopause.
I’d have been lost without online communities. Not so much for dating (I was already married by the time Tinder arrived on the scene) but for pregnancy, the early baby years, school dilemmas.
WhatsApp advice, forums, FB groups, Instagram, other mummy blogs, it’s been a useful world of story sharing that has brought a synergy to some tough times.
But we still don’t go to certain places – even in these communities. Pureeing vegetables, yes. Vaginal dryness… not so much.
Connection
In 2017, Michelle Kennedy, formerly involved with Bumble and other dating apps was inspired to create Peanut, a social media platform navigating the digital netherworld.
But although certain areas of our shared experiences innovated, there was one area that was lacking – the complexities of what happens to women’s minds and bodies as we age.
In 2020, Peanut debuted a new product, Peanut Menopause, after many women on the other branches of the site sought discussions on menopause.
Puberty’s evil sister
‘I needed someone other than my husband to talk about my girly stuff’
Speaking to The NewYorker, Kennedy says these question just kept coming up. ‘Women were experiencing menopausal symptoms, memory loss, vaginal dryness, mood swings, hair loss, irregular periods – and they wanted to discuss it.
Strange there was no such forum, considering half the population experience it. “Puberty’s evil older sister’ is how one woman described it on the new Peanut App.
There’s hope now that topics like hormone replacement therapy will become more widespread as the online community embrace What Comes Next.
Support
Like Tinder, you can match with women going through the same things — connect with that which you have in common. “Someone other than my husband to talk about my girly stuff” as one one woman put it.
After someone suggested carrying a fan for hot flushes, she was encouraged by those that said ‘yes, girl. We’ve gone through that’.
This will be the reality for most of us. And it creeps up.
The point may not be Peanut, or its scope, or how Irish women might respond to a similar App. it’s that informing women is figuratively and literally only half the battle. If this is to work, men need more information about how to support their partners, their sisters, their mothers.
I don’t suppose there’s an app for that?
This article was originally published in September 2021.
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