“A 50-year-old man is the sum of all his experiences. A 50 year old woman is the end of everything she has been. » Based on this premise, television host Maïtena Biraben and producer Alexandra Crucq decided to launch this Thursday, May 2, 2024, a new media, Ladies aimed at women over 45 (but not only).
The first has been a presenter on the small screen for almost thirty years (Kindergartens on France 5 since 2001, The Morning on Canal+ from 2008 to 2012 then The Big Journal), the second is a producer, firstly with TV personalities (Thierry Ardisson for Paris LastMickaël Youn on M6), then games of TF1 (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire ?, The weakest link ).
Lifting the taboo of age and menopause
Together, the two women are now tackling digital. Through short videos posted online on the media’s site and social networks, they intend to lift the taboo on a little-told period of life, around and after menopause, which nevertheless concerns more than nine million women in France. “Menopause is a very important time in life, explains Maïtena Biraben. It switches from “reproducible” to “more reproducible”. So all of a sudden you no longer have a function for society, since the one you have had since you were born when you were female is to reproduce. »
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Stunned to see that women after 45 or 50 years are not told “only in the negative, in the loss of something”the fifty-something is determined to take the opposite view of women’s magazines, whose vision of women she judges “completely reduced”. “They only talk about beauty and health, she adds. While we are a body, a spirit, we are a political, economic being. They work, women of those ages. They earn money, they have jobs, they take care of their parents, they see their children leave, they manage a household… They don’t spend their time buying beauty creams and seeing how they can prevent aging. »
From real estate to sexuality, “Ladies” addresses all themes
Economy, savings, real estate, sexuality, health, history, news… All themes are covered, told by women and for women, without taboo, without judgment, in total freedom. Freedom is also essential for the two founders, who now consider this stage of life as a liberation. Maïtena Biraben details her experience in an autobiographical story, The invisible woman (ed. Grasset), published in parallel on May 2. She reveals her questions, her doubts, expresses her anger at being assigned a status that is too often disastrous but which she embraces with happiness.
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“When you relieve yourself of a certain number of duties, expectations, demands, hopes… you are of extraordinary lightness, she elaborates. We are much freer and lighter at 50 than at 20. We are built. We know what we don’t like, we know what we accept and what we no longer accept. It truly is a magnificent age. »
Twenty years later Kindergartenswhich made it possible to open the debate on the realities of parenthood, Ladies is a way for Maïtena Biraben to once again oppose social constructions. “Women are permanently assigned either to happiness or to decline. And I say to all the women who are about to go through this or who are going through it and who are not feeling well, who are sad, who are worried: girls, there is something other than what you are told. tell. The story people tell about you at that age is truncated and sometimes even misleading. »
