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Coming soon to a dinner table, bedroom, or workplace near you: It’s Modern Menopause, costarring the Male Climacteric. Dust off those rusting love beads. Squeeze into those old patched jeans, if you dare, and hang on for an aftershock from the sexual revolution: graying baby boomers talking about The Change of Life.

It’s all in the numbers. Prime time for menopause is ages 45 to 54, according to the National Women’s Health Network in Washington. As the last century rolls into this one and the postwar baby boom bulge reaches the zenith of middle age, there will be 19 million women - 14 percent of the population - in peak menopause years.

Men watch their hair turn gray in middle age. Skin and muscles go slack. Unchecked, their girths grow. Sex turns the tables; it’s the woman’s turn to practice patience for a man slower to arouse.

This change for men is so gradual, so seldom talked about, it lacks a proper name, so women lend their word: male menopause, male climacteric.

Menopause, by contrast, announces itself. A woman runs out of eggs. Her menstrual periods cease.

A topic once confined to women’s magazines and polite discussion about hormone replacement therapy (or HRT), menopause is inspiring books, stimulating workshops and an international newsletter, and provoking unprecedented frank conversation, woman-to-woman and woman-to-man.

In 1989, the North American Menopause Society was founded by health professionals to promote the study of the climacteric in women and men.

Women are having the unique experience of creating menopause as they do it. A modern woman’s menopause is something she is needing to create for herself.

She’s starting pretty much from scratch. Until recently, menopause stayed hidden. Myths filled the void: A woman passing midlife supposedly went insane, dried up into a cranky nuisance, or hankered insatiably for sex.

Which mother facing her own imminent demise would want to tell her daughter about that place marked by brittle bones, humped spines, wrinkles, fading memory, painful sex, weariness, hot flushes and flashes, moods dancing to estrogen’s wild and crazy swan song? Forget it.

Hysterectomy, a common practice, also left the subject moot for many, as did the invention of hormone therapy.

Then came the dawn of Modern Menopause. Credit the women’s movement. Credit the talk-talk-talk until you can’t stand it anymore generation. Credit the mellowed but still rebellious heart of the counterculture yelling three decades later: We’re puzzled as hell no one told us about this and we’re not going to take it anymore.

This is the generation of women that demanded changes. … Uppity women trying to take control of a new stage in life. Menopause is a fact of life, so let’s get it out in the open and even celebrate it.