The Menopause Generation : Once upon a time, there was the Pepsi Generation. Then came the Me Generation. Now get ready for the next baby-boomer obsession.

Earlier this year, the makers of Gyne-Moistrin couldn’t persuade TV networks to allow a new ad for vaginal moisturizer for menopausal women on the air. Finally, the company was allowed to broadcast a commercial that was deemed tasteful enough, portraying a wilting flower. Once water was gently added, the flower revived.

“The flower represents a female,” says Lewis Nolan, vice president of communications for Schering-Plough Corp., the company that developed Gyne-Moistrin. “And the water, well, uh. . . .”

After groping for further explanation Nolan offers a company memo titled, “How to Handle a Sensitive Subject,” which explains how a “lifelike” mechanical flower was created with stem bending and petal movement: “The now famous flower would make a rather extravagant present as it was produced at a considerable cost!” the memo says.

This is just the beginning.

In the next decade, as baby boomers go charging into middle age, American business will be in the position of hawking products for what have long been unspeakable symptoms of the unmentionable process: menopause.

After all, every time boomers hit a new stage in life, it’s as if they are Adam and Eve discovering the world for the first time. And with each new stage come new industries feeding the need for information, products and self-efficacy: As adolescents, they acted like they invented sex; as wild-and-crazy singles, they begat single-portion frozen dinners; as new parents, they demanded postpartum exercise classes and limousine-quality strollers.

And now the group that survived the Generation Gap, the Sexual Revolution and the Me Decade is peering off the edge of its own future and confronting the Menopause Miasma.

In just two years, the oldest baby boomers turn 50, about the average age of menopause--which marks the end of a woman’s menstruation and her fertility. And although 1.3 million women are already reaching menopause each year, that number will double by 2010. That same year, 60 million women will be at or through the so-called change of life.

If baby boomers approach menopause the way they have every other stage of life, the full story of such things as vaginal dryness will not only be accepted television talk, but common dinner-party patter the way the baby’s bowel movements are today. (Surely, the menopausal equivalent of the BMW and Aprica stroller is under development in some industrial park in New Jersey or California.) And as researchers, fueled by federal dollars, explain away the mysteries of menopause, industry will be watching.

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Indeed, business is readying for the onslaught.

Already, products and services that target menopausal women are gaining force in society--and marketers are cashing in with menopause clinics, exercise classes, newsletters, books, self-help groups, videos, special diets, holistic remedies, even shampoo for that post-menopausal hair. More important, attitudes about The Change are also changing.

When Judith Langer, a trend watcher in New York, conducts focus groups, she says she’s surprised how freely younger women bring up concerns about menopause. In contrast to their mothers, who could barely broach such intimate matters, the boomers--women and some men alike--natter on about sex and menopause as if it were politics or kids.

“They talk about hot flashes and how that affects what they wear,” Langer says. “They talk about what worries them about their changing sexuality. They talk about everything .”

Langer expects to see a further explosion of exercise classes for menopausal women since studies have shown that steady workouts can combat osteoporosis, the bone deterioration that often follows menopause.

What concerns Langer is that business, in its eagerness to make money, might create more problems for women to worry about by developing unneeded products. “Are they alleviating anxiety or adding to it?” she wonders.

Dr. Wulf Utian, a nationally known menopause expert from Cleveland, says he is barraged by marketers trying to get his endorsement. Somebody recently tried to persuade Utian, founder of the North American Menopause Society, to endorse “cooling blankets” (as in heating blankets) for pre-menopausal women suffering from night sweats. He declined.

But as far as Utian is concerned, worse than the people trying to make a dollar off menopause are the media trying to exaggerate the traumas. He was asked by a television producer to be on a show dedicated to menopause and to bring along three young-looking women who could tell how they went “crazy” because of it.

He refused, explaining that people who portray menopausal women that way--or for that matter try to mislead baby boomers about any health issue--are themselves crazy. (Plus, several studies have shown that menopause doesn’t cause depression, never mind drive people to insanity.)

“Just like women questioned childbirth methods in the mid-’70s,” Utian says, “by the ‘80s they began saying, ‘I want to know what menopause is all about. What is happening to my body? What should I be doing about it?’ ”

Utian has seen interest in menopause grow exponentially from 1989, when the North American Menopause Society--mostly a professional organization--had its first convention with 259 people in New York. The convention held in San Diego last September drew 1,000.

Across the country, organizers who run menopause clinics and seminars out of hospitals report a similar hunger for information.

“Not long ago, I spoke about menopause at a Detroit hospital and we expected a handful of women,” says Sally Rynne, president of Women’s Healthcare Consultants in Evanston, Ill. “It was standing room only--600 women showed up.”

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What women want is answers about how to deal with symptoms, which start, on the average, five years before they have their last menstrual cycle. As their ovaries produce fewer reproductive hormones, some women--and this is not necessarily the majority--begin having irregular periods.

Some have hot flashes, cold sweats, insomnia, mood swings, short-term memory loss and migraine headaches for a few weeks to as long as several years. Other problems, such as vaginal atrophy--drying and thinning of vaginal walls--incontinence, raised cholesterol levels and accelerated bone loss, also plague women indefinitely.

As much as women are desperate to share their concerns about these signs, they are most consumed by one question: to take hormones or not to take hormones.

The big marketing machine of the pharmaceutical companies has been working hard for years, trying to persuade doctors to prescribe and women to take hormones.

Sally Rynne, for one, falls into the “not” column.

Rynne--who set up one of the first women’s clinics in a U.S. hospital a decade ago--insists that the research simply has not been done to give women complete information about the long-term effects of hormone replacement therapy. She believes that before women start the therapy, they should at least read the physicians’ guidelines.

“I have said if I ever want to be a stand-up comedian, I would take those guidelines and go on the road,” adds Rynne, 58. “It’s laughable because for every reason perhaps women should be taking hormones, there are reasons on the other side that they shouldn’t be.”

While medical professionals seem increasingly positive about hormone replacement therapy, enough women like Rynne are suspicious so that fewer than 20% of menopausal women in the United States are taking hormones.

Although taking hormones can increase the risk of endometrial cancer, blood clots and vaginal bleeding--and may increase the risk of breast cancer--experts point out that they also can reduce premature death from heart problems as well as other problems, such as osteoporosis, associated with aging.

Luckily for baby boomers, the research on menopause is finally under way and within 10 years there should be some more answers.

A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health began a massive 14-year study of 160,000 post-menopausal women, focusing on a wide range of health concerns that should tell women more about themselves in the last third of life. The nationwide study will look at the effects of estrogen, nutrition and exercise on osteoporosis, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

At the same time, the NIH’s National Institute on Aging has launched two ambitious national studies following women who don’t take hormones and studying their bodily changes leading up to menopause.

“I shouldn’t be getting phone calls from women saying, ‘I have a tingling in my feet. Is it menopause?’ ” says Dr. Sherry Sherman, who is overseeing the National Institute on Aging study.

“When there’s a change, a lot of disease gets blamed on it,” she adds. “We’re going to compare post- and pre-menopausal women to see how much (disease) is due to age and how much to estrogen deficiency associated with menopause. We want to know: When a woman gets a hot flash, is it because she is showing a sign of aging or deficiency?”

If the NIH research goes far enough, scientists may even come up with a test that allows women to predict when they will reach menopause.

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There are also studies under way at medical schools and research labs around the country testing new medications--from variations of hormone replacement therapies to drugs that help with bone and heart disease.

Meantime, pharmaceutical companies are in a race to refine the delivery system of existing hormones, so that through the pill or patch, women can have an easier time taking them.

Warner-Lambert is filing a proposal with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a patch the size of the quarter that delivers estrogen for a week as opposed to the relatively huge bandage product that delivers estrogen/progestin for 3 1/2 days, says Ron Nordmann, a drug industry analyst for Paine Webber in New York.

“The gold standard is a 52-year-old product called Premarin, which is a collection of 10 different estrogens extracted from urine of pregnant mares,” says Nordmann. “But with the baby boom coming down the line, a lot of companies are getting in this business and the hot new area will be alternate routes of delivery, like the tiny elegant patch.”

The hormone market is already at about $1.2 billion annually in worldwide sales, and analysts estimate that sales will reach $5 billion over the next five years.

For those who want to go the natural route, there’s a panoply of roots and berries: Health food stores report a surge in interest among middle-aged women in holistic remedies for menopausal symptoms, including ginseng, soybeans, Mexican yams, calcium, diuretics and such items as motherwort, chaste tree, garden sage, dandelion leaves, primrose oil, nettles, Crone candy, slippery elm and flax oil. Supporters claim each item has the properties of tranquilizers, lubricants or hormones.

A nurse on Long Island has started a holistic health center where middle-aged women are evaluated from an “Oriental point of view” for their various signs of menopause and middle age.

The media are on alert as to the politically correct way to refer to a hot flash or vaginal dryness: They are to be described as signs rather than symptoms since menopause is considered by some experts a natural outgrowth of aging--and not a disease.

And therein lies the conflict still to be resolved by baby boomers: In a society that venerates youth and beauty, is menopause a catastrophe to be greeted with drugs and dread, or should women face the storm of change with relief and look forward to carefree years without fear of childbearing?

Naturally, the usual suspects are weighing in.

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Gail Sheehy in “The Silent Passage: Menopause” and Germaine Greer in “The Change” have begun trying to shape attitudes in typically opposite ways.

For Sheehy, menopause is a crisis worthy of lots of new drugs and new anxieties about appearance and libido; for Greer, this is yet another transition to be accepted even beatified with lots of gardening and soul-searching.

Their voices are just the ones on the bestseller list. Others abound, with publishers churning out books on the subject monthly, even though “Books In Print” already lists 50 titles about menopause.

“I’ve been showered with menopause proposals,” says Elizabeth Rappaport, a senior editor at Times Books-Random House who specializes in health issues. “They’re either all about estrogen replacement therapy or all about herbs--soon to be followed by the first-person stories.”

The demand for books may be because there seems to be little information available from the expert sources. In fact, studies show that only one-third of women are getting information and education about menopause from their doctors. The rest are getting what they need from friends and in every possible form of the media.

Just like Hollywood told baby boomers something about their stage of life in such movies as “Fatal Attraction” (the crazed single woman) and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” (the new parents), future movie scripts will no doubt reflect the facts of middle age.

David Freeman, a Hollywood author and screenwriter, says boomers always like to poke around their own demographic bulge for material.

“The boomer screenwriters will have the Menopausal Detective in ‘Night Sweats,’ ” predicts Freeman with a laugh. “The ad line will be ‘She’s got hot lead and hot flashes. . . .’ ”

Freeman also predicts that TV will embrace the subject without inhibition: “If they’re starting to talk about masturbation in sitcoms, menopause can’t be far behind.”

So in 10 years, expect to see either Sharon Stone, then 45, retrieving an ice pick from under the bed to relieve night sweats or Debra Winger, then 48, using that lusty voice to quietly--with dignity and humor and private reflection--sail into middle age.

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Caroline Miller, editor of Lear’s magazine, says it is harder to predict what attitude the vast majority of women will take on, especially since menopause presents a conflict between a desire to stay young and the desire for good health--both prized by the boomers. Will they take hormones and have breast implants despite any potential risks to their health?

“This is a generation of women who have very high expectations for looking good well into their 60s and staying sexually active,” Miller says. “But when looking good and being healthy are in conflict, it will be interesting to see what wins out.”

Lear’s recently ran an article about what the beauty industry is doing to target menopausal women. It discussed various products aimed at assuaging the loss of skin elasticity and glow.

Perhaps the one world, though, that seems most resistant to women’s aging--and the weight gain that sometimes accompanies the menopausal years--is the fashion industry.

“The designers are doing baby-doll dresses and schoolgirl stuff,” Miller says. “Maybe the message is: ‘Give us Hillary and we’ll give you a baby doll. Ha. Ha’ They’re not listening to the public.”

Liz Dolan, of Nike’s Women’s Sports and Fitness division, says her company is.

“Recently, at an all-day brainstorming session, we talked about aging consumers and how we should talk to them,” Dolan says. “We don’t try to market too much to an age group, but in a way we do because of who we portray in our ads and you’ll notice in our new ad campaign we had women walking well beyond 18-35.”

Companies such as Schering-Plough, which cooked up the first over-the-counter medicine for yeast infections as well as Gyne-Moistrin for vaginal dryness, have only just begun developing other products for older women. Only last year Schering-Plough set up a special research and development health unit for women.

“We formed teams of marketing people working with scientific people to identify areas of opportunities,” says Nolan, the communications vice president. “We saw the numbers and soon you’ll see the products. Just wait.”