‘Why Are We Discarded When Those Years Are Over?’ Halle Berry on Sex, Stigma and Menopause Misdiagnosis
'It takes being bold [and] talking about it,' Berry said during a panel discussion
Actress Halle Berry made history as the first, and still only, Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress in 2022. Today, she’s breaking down more barriers—this time surrounding women’s health in midlife. Recently, Halle Berry opened up about her journey with menopause and how vaginal dryness affected her ability to be intimate. Read on to see why she advocated herself and what has helped her overcome her most bothersome menopause symptoms.
Halle Berry talks vaginal dryness during menopause
While society is increasingly having conversations about women’s health, menopause wasn’t widely discussed for many years. The result? Many women were left knowing little about it, let alone recognizing when they were experiencing it themselves.
Berry has long spoken openly about her experience with menopause, but on June 9 she took it a step further. Speaking at the Joylux and Playground Bare It All event panel, Berry opened up about how menopause has impacted her sex life.
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Berry appears to have first confirmed her relationship with her partner Van Hunt in a 2020 Instagram post. During the panel, Berry shared that she began experiencing vaginal dryness near the time she met Hunt and had concerns about how it would impact her intimate relationship, according to People.
“I was really afraid at that time that I would never enjoy that part of my femininity again and that I had lost that,” Berry said during the panel. “I finally found my person, and now the worst joke in the world happened to me.”
During the panel discussion, which included Christina Aguilera, the cofounder of Playground, and women’s health expert Tamsen Fadal, Berry said she wanted to break the stigma surrounding women’s health and menopause.
“It takes being bold, talking about it, being loud about it, not being afraid to talk about it, not feeling shame, giving other women permission to talk about it,” Berry explained.
How Berry’s menopause experience inspired Respin
Rather than accepting vaginal dryness as a symptom she had to live with, Berry took action.
“That sent me down a rabbit hole of doing my own reconnaissance and trying to figure out, well, if my doctor didn’t recognize this as a symptom of menopause and nobody ever talked to me about menopause, I can only imagine that there are other women out there, probably millions of women, that know nothing whose doctors know equally nothing,” Berry said.
Berry’s search for answers led her to Sarah de la Torre, MD, FACOG, DipABLM, Executive Team Member of JoyLux, and Colette Courtion, founder and CEO of JoyLux. JoyLux, is a women’s wellness platform with products that support intimate health.
“They serviced my very first needs when I realized that I was in menopause, they helped me get my intimacy back and my sex life back,” Berry said at the panel. Berry’s wellness platform, Respin, which supports women in menopause, partnered with JoyLux to create an intimacy line called Let’s Spin.
“It’s for anybody who wants to reclaim their intimacy and have fun again, spinning never felt so good,” Berry says in a video on the JoyLux website. (Learn more about how Berry is reinventing sex after menopause here.)
How menopause affected Halle Berry
Menopause symptoms aside, just getting a diagnosis wasn’t easy for Berry.
“I had no idea that I was in menopause at this time of my life,” Berry said at the panel. “I was 54 years old, no doctor that I had had even mentioned the fact that I would enter into menopause. So I had this unrealistic idea that maybe I would—okay, don’t laugh—but maybe I would just skip it.”
In fact in her Masterclass episode The Magic of Menopause, Berry recalls being a version of herself that she didn’t recognize. There were times when she needed to pause filming a scene because she was experiencing brain fog and lost her place, sweating profusely, feeling exhausted and not getting enough sleep. She was anxious, felt alone and didn’t have the information or the words to express the changes happening in her body.
“When I found out that there was this thing called perimenopause and that all of these symptoms were part of this time of life, and I got assurance that this is just this sort of passing through moment, I had great relief,” she says.
Berry’s symptoms were misdiagnosed as herpes
Many of us are familiar with hot flashes and irregular periods. But the lack of open discussion about other symptoms of menopause is startling. The Monster’s Ball star revealed that she was once misdiagnosed with herpes by a doctor she respects and trusts.
Berry had dry eyes, dry mouth and vaginal dryness, but herpes wasn’t the culprit. Instead, her symptoms were actually due to a drop in estrogen production that occurs during perimenopause and menopause.
“I was 54 years old when this was explained to me,” she says. “I’ve since learned that should have been explained to me when I was 40, that this is a possibility.”
Menopause can cause vision changes
Berry also said she went to see her doctor because she was having trouble with her vision and seeing white flashes. The doctor told her it was due to her glands drying up, but when she asked why that was happening, he wouldn’t give her a straight answer.
She asked if it was one of the side effects of being in menopause. Not only did he say yes, she recalls, but he also thanked her for saying it for him because he didn’t think it was something she would want to hear.
“He doesn’t think he has permission to say the word,” Berry remembers thinking. “That’s how stigmatized it is. And in that moment, I realized if our health care professionals are too afraid to say it, how are they going to provide us with optimum health care?”
How Halle Berry is breaking the stigma around menopause
Today, Berry is at the forefront of progressing women’s health in midlife. She has been involved in advocating for The Advancing Menopause Care and Women’s Midlife Health Act, which “would strengthen and expand federal research on menopause and midlife women’s health, increasing public awareness and education efforts and empowering our healthcare workforce.”
In May 2024, the actress went to Washington to speak with female senators and the House of Representatives to support a standalone bill that will allocate new money to menopause and women in midlife.
“ We make up half the population, and every woman goes through this time if she’s blessed enough to live long enough,” Berry said. “We are in many ways the cornerstone of our society. We birth children, right? We give our bodies to procreation so that we all can be here—men included. Why are we discarded when those years are over? Not okay. And that’s why I went on my journey, because I knew that I had to.”
Berry says that for so long, women have been valued based on the way society views them. But now, she noted in her Masterclass episode, it’s time for us to decide our own worth and who we are in the “second act of our life.”
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